Offtopic: Update

If you read Breakfast Bytes regularly, you will have noticed that I do a monthly "update" post, usually on the last Friday of the month, grouping together updates to existing posts and stories that are too small to justify writing a full blog post. Tomorrow is another Cadence recharge day and Breakfast Bytes will not appear. And so, as is now traditional, I go offtopic the day before any break. This time I thought I'd combine the two concepts and do an update post to some of my earlier offtopic posts.

Optical Illusions

In my offtopic post What You See Isn't Always What You Get I wrote about optical illusions. Some of these came from the Best Illusion of the Year competition. Here are #1 and #2 from the most recent 2021 edition of the competition.

In this first one, the white queen appears in the reflection in the mirror....but doesn't seem to be on the board.

In this one, you are not sure what you are looking for until it all becomes clear.

Sudoku and Wordle

In the latest offtopic post just before Presidents' Day, Offtopic: Sudoku and Wordle, I wrote about, duh, Sudoku and Wordle. Well, Mark, one of the two guys profiled in that post under the part about their Sudoku channel on YouTube, now puts out a short video daily doing that day's Wordle called "Wordle in Under a Minute". I've not seen him fail yet. Here's his attack on the day's Wordle as I type this a few days ago.

Maps

In my post Offtopic: Geography I wrote about some surprising aspects of geography and maps. Here are a couple more that I came across since I wrote that piece.

America and Russia are 2.4 miles apart at their closest points. That is between Big Diomede (Russian) and Little Diomede (US), two islands in the Bering Strait. But despite being just a couple of miles apart in distance, they are 23 hours apart in time since the International Dateline and the timezone boundary runs between them. In winter the sea is frozen, so it is possible (but illegal) to walk between them.

Australia is "bigger" than the moon.

Things Nobody Said

In my post Offtopic "Beam Me Up, Scotty" and Other Things Nobody Said I took a look at "famous" things attributed to various people that it turns out they never said. Such as "Beam Me Up Scotty" that I put in the title but which doesn't appear anywhere in the original Star Trek series. There are actually hundreds of these. Sometimes, the actual "famous" quote is a good paraphrase of what was actually said, so it seems a bit petty to make a big deal of it.

Here's something a little bit different. You've probably never heard of Mary Schmich. She wrote for the Chicago Tribune. You've probably heard of famous author Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote Slaughterhouse Five and many other less famous books. He is also famous for writing and delivering a commencement address at MIT that starts:

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1997: Wear sunscreen

Someone forwarded a transcript to his wife, and she forwarded it to their children. That may be a rumor. But here's something that is not a rumor. He didn't write it or deliver it. Mary Schmich did. It was originally published as an article in the Chicago Tribune under the title Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young, although it is much better well-known as Wear Sunscreen. The whole story even has its own Wikipedia page, Wear Sunscreen, although most of the post is taken up with details of Baz Lurhmann's recording which used the words.

The original piece is still online on the Chicago Tribune website. You can read the whole thing there, but here are a few paragraphs:

Inside every adult lurks a graduation speaker dying to get out, some world-weary pundit eager to pontificate on life to young people who'd rather be Rollerblading. Most of us, alas, will never be invited to sow our words of wisdom among an audience of caps and gowns, but there's no reason we can't entertain ourselves by composing a Guide to Life for Graduates.

I encourage anyone over 26 to try this and thank you for indulging my attempt. Ladies and gentlemen of the class of '97:

Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.
...
Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.
...

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen.

But Kurt Vonnegut did like it! In an interview, he apparently said:

What I said to Mary Schmich on the telephone was that what she wrote was funny and wise and charming, so I would have been proud had the words been mine.

Miniatur Wunderland

In my post Offtopic: Miniatur Wunderland I wrote about the largest model railway in the world, in Hamburg, Germany. At the time, it was closed due to Covid and you could only enjoy it by video. Well, it is open again. You have to be vaccinated, or recovered, or tested (there is even a free test station very close to their entrance). Once again, here is the website for Miniatur Wunderland.

Here is their latest video, shrinking you down and embedding you amongst the trains and cars, with a virtual reality (VR) headset. it's in German but has English subtitles.

The blurb for the video sums it up:

In this very first update of our Yullbe Wunderland virtual reality experience, we show you exclusive pictures of the construction, the technology and the experience itself. We've been dreaming of being able to shrink ourselves into the Wunderland for many years and now the time has finally come: With the help of state-of-the-art tracking systems and "mind-expanding" glasses, it is possible to immerse yourself in the world of the Miniatur Wunderland and experience it up close. Two worlds of experience will be created on 750m² - the smaller "GO-Show" and the large "PRO-Show", which will feature 150 tracking cameras spread over 250m².

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