Burton MacKenzie

When I think back to Science Fiction television shows with great musical introductions, these are the ones that immediately play in my brain. Apparently I'm big on guitar riffs.

Space 1999

I loved watching Space 1999. It rarely failed to entertain me or keep me on the edge of my seat. One commenter on IMDB described the storylines as "No 'Space as the last frontier' rhetoric, here. Space is cold and mistakes are lethal. That increases the realism even if 1999 is well past. Action progresses like a slowly unfolding bad dream." That's a great simile, and accurate.



Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf is a British SciFi comedy. It's a slightly darker comedy, but the novels are even darker. Both are hilarious.




Dr. Who

This theme is forever burnt into my brain. It has a uniquely distinctive sound. There's an interesting history on how the original theme was made, the first fully electronically made theme at the time. The synthesizer-like tones sound so pure it reminds me of a theramin mixed with a glass harmonica. It isn't quite as upbeat as the first two, but I love to hear it.



Do you have a favourite scifi TV theme? Link to it in the comments!

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com

As much as I love guerrilla installation art, I have long despised most graffiti. Perhaps it's a fine line to draw, but install art I appreciate is more trivially removable. Most of the graffiti around here is merely lame name tagging; it is rare to find art. When art is created, the taggers are soon on hand to wipe their shit on it.

Today I found some graffiti that is more on the artistic side. It's no Banksy, but it's better than tags. Seriously, this is the best the painted graffiti gets around here.

Counting the feathers (?) counter-clockwise, the star is above feather #26. There is a local group that does install art (and sometimes graffiti) called the 26ers, but this is most likely a coincidence. Notice the brighter white paint that enters the painting from the left. It's from some lame tagger who can't bear to not have their name pissed on something. Not cool, tagger. Not cool.

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com

p.s. This one was found a stone's throw away from the site of another small piece, long since removed.

The Golden Ratio is a number that appears all over in nature and design. It is occasionally an optimal point in natural growth (amongst other things), and nature always tends toward the optimal.

I've been doing some research into its incarnations lately. A website I found had some good info, but it also had a lot of crap pseudo-science, so everything on the website was suspect. One claim it made was that dimensions of credit cards were really close to the golden ratio. To be fair, the website doesn't try and draw some cosmic significance from this, but given what I've read on the rest of the site I feel that some kind of significance is implied. (although I'm not sure what)

I figured it is possible that there is some sort of manufacturing material ratios that are optimal for using the golden ratio, but I didn't know for sure. What's good about this type of urban legend is that it is easily measurable, thus easy to verify or disprove. And if you know me, you know that when I don't know something, it really sticks in my craw. Of course, I had to examine the problem.


The standard dimensions of a credit card are 85.60 × 53.98 mm (a x b, as in the image above), as defined in the specification ISO/IEC 7810. The ratio of these dimensions (a/b) is 1.586, which is 2.0% lower than the golden ratio at 1.618, but that's not necessarily a problem.

I think credit cards are manufactured by punching them out of plastic rolls or sheets [1], but I've only seen them in post-punched stacks. Before punching, they would have a fixed border around them which becomes a waste/recycled product after the cards are punched out. If there were some manufacturing advantage to using the golden ratio, it would be the card+border dimensions of uncut material that should be the golden ratio, not those of the punched out card.

If the dimensions of the card are a x b, and each dimension has a fixed pre-punch border of w/2, then the pre-punched card area would be (a + w) x (b + w). In the ideal case where the ratio of the two dimensions is the golden ratio,

Rearranging to find what the added border must be to get the golden ratio, given the size of the cutout,


As well as using the official dimensions, I used a micrometer to measure the dimensions of a Visa, Mastercard, Bank Debit Card, and my work ID card which has a similar looking size. The following table captures the added border, w (as per the equation, above), so the uncut dimensions of each card reflect the golden ratio. The borders based on actual measurements has an accuracy of +- 0.02mm. As expected, every card was slightly smaller than the spec.

(Note: This giant extra space wasn't here in the preview. I'll try and fix this soon)

Card measured	Needed border, w
Specification	-2.82mm
Visa	-2.69mm
Mastercard	-2.57mm
Bank	-2.71mm
Work	-2.69mm

What these negative values means is that in order for the dimensions of a credit card to be the golden ratio, each dimension would have to shrink by 2.8 millimetres (approximately). This is a reduction of 3% or 5% for each dimension, depending on which one it is. It is clear that credit cards are not manufactured to accurately represent the golden ratio.

However, even though the dimensions do not accurately represent the golden ratio, it's still believable that it was a conscious consideration in the design. The golden ratio is often a numerically optimal point in design, but frequently, operating near the optimal point is just as reasonable, given other design tradeoffs. In this case the tradeoffs may be the dimensions of the raw materials or other manufacturing issues.

There are other reasonable explanations why credit card dimensions are close to the golden ratio. There may be a legacy size issue, such that when credit cards were conceived they had to fit inside slots in wallets originally made to hold business cards (although business cards have a different standard size). Further, the size could be most simply explained in that we humans tend to perceive dimensions that are based on the golden ratio as esthetically pleasing. Simply put, a card size may have been chosen that looked pleasing, and we found it pleasing because it was close to the golden ratio.

Also, if you're a secret math nerd you can measure your own credit cards and use the equation I gave for w to determine how much you must trim from each side to make the ratio of your credit card dimensions a golden one. [2] With the limits of scissors, you could probably even just use the number that was generated by the spec, trimming as close as you can cut to 2.82 mm. [3]

I declare that the urban legend of credit card dimensions being related to the golden ratio as "plausible", whether it is intentional or not. Mine are now intentional.

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com

[1] If you know better, please let me know. I could find no references to their physical manufacture online.

[2] Don't forget to divide by 2 if you're trimming opposing sides, as in that equation each side has a border of w/2, giving a total of w for that dimension (a or b).

[3] If instead you choose to trim each of the four sides, use half this value, or 1.41 mm. For those who don't immediately recognize this number, it is the square root of two. Don't freak out. It's only true to three digits, and the specification gives us four, so it's just a one-in-a-thousand coincidence. Unless the finitely valued almost-√2 is really some other irrationally reminiscent, but finitely represented, distance away from something else notable. Maybe I've just started a new urban legend. ;-)

In the Star Trek universe, we keep meeting half-human half-alien beings but we never think about what it would have taken to produce them. There are a plethora of mixed-species characters, such as Mr. Spock, one of those most beloved of the original characters (a Vulcan/Human mix), Deanna Troi (Betazoid/Human) and B'Elanna Torres (Klingon/Human).

Intelligent life in the Star Trek universe evolved separately on their home planets from primordial ooze. [1] Even if all the aliens evolved from the same ooze as us [2], the genetic differences between us and any other space-faring species would be so large that we'd have a better chance of conceiving a child with an oak tree (they're genetically closer). [3] The Chicken Lady is more probable than Mr. Spock.

Ok, this is all science fiction. We don't have faster than light travel either, and it doesn't detract from the story. What does it matter? Fiction is fiction. Made up. Not real.

What I find interesting about this isn't the content of Star Trek itself, but the public acceptance of the underlying assumptions to this; something the public at large would normally not accept in a different context. In this case the underlying assumption that generations of people have accepted without further thought is that inter-species sexual play is acceptable. If it's OK for people to have sex with a hot bodied vulcan (see image below), a totally unrelated species, where do we draw the line? Is it OK for people to have sex with more closely related species like oak trees, elephants, or octopuses? Where is the line of bestiality?


We generally don't accept that it's OK for people to have sex with any old living thing they want. The difference between all these aliens and any living thing is that the aliens ostensibly have intelligence and can consent to the activities [4]. If that is our metric, then hamster sex is definitely out. That doesn't solve all the problems, though. There are plenty of similar enough intelligent and consenting cases right here on Earth.

Dogs are somewhat intelligent, and have been known to be sexual partners of humans [5]. To clear debate about consent, it is easy to find videos where male dogs willingly and eagerly insert themselves into human females. Have you ever had a dog hump your leg? It's worse than that. This specific canine-sapient sex a good example where the animal has given "consent" by acting of their own volition, and human-level intelligence is not required for it. Most of us think this is wrong.

Dolphins are believed to be reasonably intelligent, and in fact have bigger brains than humans and arguably similar cognition. Unfortunately, I've also found a website where a man describes his allegedly consensual dolphin sex. If this hasn't already crossed the intelligent/consent line for when nonhuman-human sex is OK, then we're perilously close to it. I'm still disgusted.

If we're prepared to accept Star Trek alien sex, we should also be prepared to accept tentacle sex. I'm of the belief that aberrant sexual relations between consenting adults is just fine. As long as you're an adult and everybody consents, knock yourself out. I can't say that I like the idea of my neighbor having a sexual relationship with something that lives in his pond and has thirteen eyes, but if I don't want to be a hypocrite I must support xenophilia. Otherwise, how would I get to do that hot vulcan?

Burton MacKenZie www.burtonmackenzie.com

[1] Well, almost. There are other immortal omniscient beings like Q. Who knows where they're supposed to come from.

[2] As we all did in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase".

[3] Internet rule 34 says that some people are already arborphilics. I suppose the webpage about it says it, too.

[4] We're not talking about a legal definition of consent, here. Animals have no ability to give consent under the law. I am talking about a definition where a bunch of people would say "yeah, the animal clearly wanted to do that".

[5] I'm not going to give you any links to this - google it yourself, but caveat emptor. Things can't be unseen. I'm doing you a favour by not providing a link.