I went to see a movie yesterday, and discovered something neat while watching the pre-movie slideshow. They have these trivia questions about actors where they give clues next to a pixelized mosaic picture of the actor's face, and with each clue the mosaic gets a little less coarse and more recognizable as a human face. Hopefully you know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, it so happens that I am rather nearsighted, just like almost everyone else in this industry. I found that an unrecognizable jumble of coloured squares, when viewed without my glasses, looks just like a human face. My brain started filling in all sorts of features (hairstyles, noses, ears) that, I swear, could not possibly have been represented with squares as big as they were using. And subsequent finer pixelizations showed that my brain was almost never wrong.

I flipped back and forth, glasses and no glasses, about ten times per picture, and was amazed how much more detail I could "see" without them. Crazy.

So today I tried to reproduce this effect using GIMP. I took a picture of my face and pixelized it until it was completely unrecognizable. Without glasses, *poink* there I am. Excellent. Glasses on, I tried various ways of blurring the image. Results were disappointing. It looked more recognizable than without the blurring, certainly, but I wasn't getting the same amazing interpolation my brain is apparently capable of.

Why? I don't know. Magic, I guess.

rue Ste-Catherine

Oh, and the movie was excellent.
(Posted on January 9, 2005 18:33)

Yesterday I had occasion to play with a bunch of A/V equipment in preparation for the televising of an upcoming event. We encountered plenty of random technical problems, but we were able to solve them all, and it was generally fun.

It got me thinking about complexity. We have ethernet cables that fail after a relatively short distance if the little wires inside aren't twisted enough. Plug it in and, assuming your software is set up right, seven or eight layers of protocol later it does wonderful magical things. Look at a SCSI cable or a USB cable -- I often forget to think about just how many layers of complexity are piled on there to make data move around.

Comparatively, there's just something so primal about plugging in an audio cable, hearing pops and buzzing, and then knowing exactly which knob to turn when a squeal of feedback erupts.
(Posted on January 10, 2005 18:25)

(Posted on January 16, 2005 21:32)

Context: I am wearing frictionless socks. NITI's office has Ikea wood-ish floors.

I am hyper. Hyper people sometimes run. Running people sometimes turn. Turning people with frictionless socks sometimes look briefly like cartoon animals (whappita-whappita) before losing it and smashing their faces on smooth Ikea flooring. People smashing their faces on the floor sometimes dislodge computers and furniture, but fortunately don't seem to break any bones.

Witnesses tell me that the entire sequence was hilarious. I am inclined to believe them.
(Posted on January 21, 2005 17:27)

For years I have saved the September 1996 issue of Air Canada's in-flight magazine, because apenwarr and I, for reasons that have long since become irrelevant, are pictured in it.

This issue featured several articles about the high-tech world at the time, and I now find it highly amusing. There are short articles about Michael Cowpland and James Gosling, back when Corel and Java respectively both held promise. Remember that?

"Many executives are still a little skeptical about the Internet. They believe their companies should be on-line, but they are not sure why." Remember that?

"The word 'travel' appears in more than one million World Wide Web sites, which is daunting enough to discourage even the most intrepid cybernaut from searching for information." Remember that? Google gives me 322 million such sites now, in a relatively non-daunting manner.

"Will e-mail make people more or less literate? More, I believe, but I don't know for sure." Jury's still out, I think.

"Even if Explorer is better than Netscape and the PR more obnoxious than Windows 95's, smart money has it that people will stick to what they know: Netscape." That was back when Netscape had 80% of the browser market share.

Miscellanea

I will be in Toronto next Friday and Saturday, and then in Waterloo until the following Tuesday. Anyone who wants to meet up is encouraged to give me a shout.

Tonight is the first meeting of the NDG Dining Gastronauts.

Good luck in all your post-monkey endeavours, Luis!
(Posted on January 29, 2005 22:57)