Four Neat Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. YouTuber Steve Mould answers the question Can water solve a maze? by constructing a pair of (differently-complex) acrylic mazes at two different scales and pouring water into them. This he does after being presented with a computer-simulated answer to the question.

The video is enough fun to watch that I don't think this spoiler will hurt: Not only is the answer yes, but the water does so with different algorithms depending on whether surface tension alone is enough to help the water "decide" which way to go at a branch point.

Reconsidering the computer algorithm, Mould concludes that the simulation failed to account for air.

2. Our family took a trip with my in-laws to the British Isles a few weeks ago. Right off the bat, the regulatory state stepped in to sideline my father-in-law from driving: At his age, the car rental company would need notes from his physician and insurance company attesting to his fitness as a driver.

This suprised him when he was picking up his car and me when I walked over to offer my services as a second driver.

And so it came to pass that I acquired the skill of driving on the left-hand side of the road a bit more abruptly than I expected to.

Naturally, I wondered why one third of the world drives on the left and found this explanation:

In the past, almost everybody traveled on the left side of the road because that was the most sensible option for feudal, violent societies. Since most people are right-handed, swordsmen preferred to keep to the left in order to have their right arm nearer to an opponent and their scabbard further from him. Moreover, it reduced the chance of the scabbard (worn on the left) hitting other people.

Furthermore, a right-handed person finds it easier to mount a horse from the left side of the horse...

In the late 1700s, however, teamsters in France and the United States began hauling farm products in big wagons pulled by several pairs of horses. These wagons had no driver’s seat; instead the driver sat on the left rear horse, so he could keep his right arm free to lash the team. Since he was sitting on the left, he naturally wanted everybody to pass on the left so he could look down and make sure he kept clear of the oncoming wagon’s wheels. Therefore he kept to the right side of the road. [bold added]

So how did my week of "feudal driving" in Ireland go?

It was nerve-wracking for the first day, interesting the rest of the time, and sore for a couple of weeks after that.

What was nerve-wracking and then interesting was seeing just how important the various automations from the subconscious are to driving: You're suddenly missing lots of them at first.

You're having to think about things you've long ago automatized, and lots of intuitions are wrong. Oddly, it was centering my car that I was worst at: I had a tendency on the first day to be way too close to the left side of the road. (This wasn't helped by having to pass fast traffic on narrow streets and country lanes!)

A complicating factor was the horrible manual transmission on this particular model of car, which was otherwise excellent. I drove stick shift by choice and almost exclusively until about a decade ago, yet it still was a nightmare.

In and of itself, shifting was surprisingly easy. The pedal order left-to right was still clutch-brake-gas and shifting left-handed made perfect sense from the get-go. But there were six gears and they were badly separated, so I kept hitting third instead of first or fifth (and rarely, even one of those instead of third).

So, on top of being mentally overloaded by having to adjust to mirror-image driving, I had to worry too much about shifting -- and came to dread traffic circles. (I joked that the N in N-routes stood for "necklace of traffic circles.")

But I was comfortable (except for shifting) by the end.

And, a couple of weeks later, the pain that had developed in my left shoulder from all the shifting and re-shifting had finally subsided.

3. Recently, I learned of a rare phenomenon known in German as a Pfeilstorch ("arrow stork"):

The first and most famous Pfeilstorch was a white stork found in 1822 near the German village of Klütz, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. It was carrying a 75-centimetre (30 in) spear from central Africa in its neck. The specimen was stuffed and can be seen today in the zoological collection of the University of Rostock. It is therefore referred to as the Rostocker Pfeilstorch. [notes and links omitted]

This bird helped scientists understand that migration accounted for the seasonal appearance and disappearance of certain species of bird, because it proved that birds fly very long distances.

4. I'll close with a bit of nostalgia that anyone else who has earned a PhD in a science might get a good chuckle from. The browser-based PhD Simulator game is both a very simple and surprisingly realistic-feeling imitation of the experience!

My advice: (1) Study for your quals early. (2) Parallelize getting and publishing "major results" as those are the only thing you can hang your hat on aside from finished papers. (3) Don't forget to rest ("slack off") periodically.

An interesting wrinkle is the "conference paper." Having one accepted won't count towards the three papers you need to win, but you often get a "new idea" or two if you attend the conferences. And if your submission for a conference paper gets rejected, it becomes a usable "preliminary result" again.

I think of "work on a conference paper" as a way to "park" a "preliminary result" if you have trouble developing it or more urgently need to do other (multi-step) things when you have one. This is because if you don't do anything with a "new idea" or a "preliminary result", various game events can wipe them out.

-- CAV