Month: June 2016

It's the question that every movie fan asks in summer: why are there so many remakes and sequels and reboots? It turns out that science may have an answer. Unfortunately, if you're hoping for more original stories, the prognosis is not good.

Two network theorists in the Netherlands, Folgert Karsdorp and Antal van den Bosch, just published a study on story networks in Royal Society Open Science. Story networks, they write, are "streams of retellings in which retellers modify and adapt retellings in a gradual and accumulative way." There is also a basic structure that seems to underly how these networks function. To explore retellings, the researchers looked at more than 200 versions of the Little Red Riding Hood story, which had been retold over the past two centuries. They measured the stories' similarity to one another with the amusingly named "bag-of-words" technique, which reveals how many words two texts have in common. Then they created a network diagram showing relatedness between stories over time. Earlier stories became what the researchers called "pre-texts" that inspired later retellings.

A network diagram showing the relatedness of two sets of "retold" texts. At left, a set of chain letters, and at right, the Little Red Riding Hood retellings. Note that some pre-texts (earlier stories) spawn huge numbers of retellings. (credit: Royal Society Open Science)

Translated into movie terms, you can think of Bram Stoker's original Dracula novel from 1897 as a pre-text, and all of the subsequent movies and TV series as retellings.  A story network grows out of Dracula as people retell the story, then retell the retellings, modifying it as they go. What the researchers found was that retellers rarely went back to the earliest pre-texts but instead preferred to retell more recent versions. In the case of the Dracula story, that would explain why a terrifying, barely human monster in the late nineteenth century is commonly represented today as an ultra-hot guy with sexual magnetism who occasionally goes fangy. As the story got retold throughout the twentieth century, you can see Dracula getting more and more handsome with each retelling, until we expect that Dracula is a suave and charming man with a tragic past. As retellers gravitated toward the most recent retelling, certain aspects of the story were magnified (such as Dracula's hotness) while others were forgotten (for example, we have yet to see a single Dracula retelling that deals with a forgotten aspect of the novel, which is that Dracula's love interest, Mina, is a geek who uses all the latest Victorian recording technology to do research on vampires).

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

Your smartphone isn't the only thing that companies are obsessed with making thinner. Focus has turned to laptops as well, with the belief that making thin-as-paper and light-as-air notebooks will draw in more of the forever-on-the-go working professionals. Thinness also lends itself to design challenges that both excite and loom over OEMs—on one hand, thin laptops should be inherently sexy, but on the other hand, it can be a challenge to make a truly powerful, performance-driven pancake notebook.

Enter HP's new Spectre 13 laptop. The company bills it as the thinnest notebook in the world, and its sleek, metallic-accented design complements that title. However, unlike Apple's newest MacBook, HP managed to fit full Core i5 and i7 processors into the Spectre, in addition to three USB Type-C ports and a 4-cell battery. While it doesn't come cheap with a starting price of $1,169, it does do its best to offer more power and a fresh design compared to the likes of the MacBook and Dell's XPS 13.

Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima's team checks over his 2016 Tajima Rimac E-Runner Concept_One at the start line before heading out for a practice run. (credit: Elle Cayabyab Gitlin)

Even as a young man in Japan, Nobuhiro "Monster" Tajima knew he wanted to compete in the annual Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. The race is the second oldest in the United States—2016 marks its 100th anniversary—and this track provides a rare challenge to driver and car in motorsport. Its 12.4 miles (19.9km) have more corners than the Nürburgring. The course rises 4,750 feet (1,440m) from the start line to the summit, finishing at 14,100 feet (4,300m). And forget mental images of mountain roads as nothing but switchbacks; there are plenty of straights and fast corners with nothing but a sharp drop off to one side.

And it's truly a hill climb. Racers set off one after another, and they only get one run. In fact, the first time they're able to drive the full 12.4 miles flat-out is during Sunday's race—practice and qualifying take place on shorter stretches of the route. For most of the race's history, the road to the top of the mountain was dirt. Paving started in 1998 following concerns about erosion, and the race has run on tarmac exclusively since 2012.

The unique setup means both car and driver must call upon different skills to set the fastest time of the day. Perfectly balanced drifts have given way to maximizing corner speed, and the tires are racing slicks with no tread blocks. But there's still that huge climb in altitude, almost 3 miles (4.3km) up to where there's much less air to push down on wings or feed engines and radiators. On top of all that, the weather can give you four different seasons between the starting line and the summit, bringing with it all the associated consequences for track temperature and grip.