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Sunday, 30 March 2008
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How to build an accelerometer
- Take your kitchen scales.
- Strap something moderatesly heavy to the tray with a rubber band.
- Zero the scales (this balances the acceleration due to the force of gravity with the acceleration due to the force of the coiled spring).
- Done!
Try holding your new accelerometer in front of you and moving it up and down. It will give a positive reading when accelerated in the direction of the platform, and negative when decelerated (accelerated away form the platform). It will probably work best for vertical acceleration as scales are not designed to run smoothly when lying on their side.
Your kitchen scales can also be used as a seismograph:
- Remove everything from the tray.
- Zero the scales.
- Place the scales on an object that enhances vibrations, such as the oven or refrigerator.
- Stomp around the kitchen with heavy boots on.
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Sunday, 9 March 2008
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Subverting the fairy tale
Some friends and I watched Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast last week. It was rather beautiful, although overlaid with hideously aggressive orchestral music. The ending was curious.
Apparently, Cocteau felt that the fairy tale could have gone somewhere new by having the Beauty fall in love with the Beast. But that's not what happened. At the moment when the Beauty experiences some affection for the dying Beast, the Beauty is rewarded for her compassion with a transformed prince, the standard prize in fairy tales, and they all lived happily ever after in the prince's castle. Cocteau didn't like this ending, so he rebelled against it by making the prince as cheesy as possible, and by making the Beauty look less than thrilled.
We all found the ending rather flat, but that was Cocteau's intention.
My aim would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that I summed up in that last sentence of all fairy tales: "And they had many children."
I was therefore obliged to deceive both the public and Beauty herself. Slyly, and with much effort, I persuaded my cameraman Alekan to shoot Jean Marais, as the Prince, in as sacharine a style as possible. The trick worked. When the picture was released, letters poured in from matrons, teen-age girls and children, complaining to me and Marais about the transformation. They mourned the disappearance of the Beast — the same Beast who terrified them so at the time when Madame Leprince de Beaumont wrote the tale.
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