Tenso

BECAUSE I keep forgetting what it's called, here's a post I can look for later. This morning I was trying to remember what it's called when someone takes an image, and you see a sequence of zooms, usually to a close-up of someone's face. Apparently, that's a Tenso.

The word “tenso” is Portuguese for “tense”. This is a meme that spread through Brazilian blogs and forums in 2009, and consists of an image edited to form a sequence that closes up the frame and emphasizes a “tense” face or situation.

(Thanks, KnowYourMeme!)

This post is what brought it up, and culminated in me making the following Tenso:

I don't get why Donald is so miserable about being in the water.

He's a duck.

Who served in the Navy.

(ILikeBumblebees, same Reddit thread)

(Also, it's frustrating how small Picasa limits linked images now)

The Great White Noise

So, The Passing is still not out for the PC, despite being April 22nd for over 7 hours now. I should be happy that it's going to be free for me, as the XBOX360 version costs cashy money (an edict by Microsoft, because they don't want XBOX customers getting accustomed to getting things for free. Really.), but the XBOX crowd already has theirs. I imagine it can't possibly be more than a few more hours away though, as VALVe employees are scheduled to play games with us commonfolk starting at 11am PDT. So here's another post to past the time.

Let's talk about Tumblr.

I like(d) Tumblr, and you can see a bit from my Tumblr feed there on the left (below the Shared Items). But what I REALLY like(d) about Tumblr is the Popular page.

Don't bother clicking that link, it doesn't go anywhere anymore.

What the Popular page USED TO be was a list of all the popular images/posts that week. Which ones got the most likes/reblogs. It was great, and there was usually tons of highly entertaining stuff I hadn't come across on there.

Well, apparently Tumblr didn't like being a popularity contest, so that feature was recently cut, and with it pretty much my sole reason to use Tumblr. It has been replaced with a way to recommend individual Tumblogs. Well, I don't CARE about Tumblogs. There are TOO MANY of those. I just want the best pictures and posts. I'm not going to follow each recommended Tumblog hoping to run across cool stuff. I don't have that kind of time.

See, the Internet, it's BIG. And it's just FILLED with stuff, most of which is complete crap. That's how things work. But some stuff is awesome, which is why sites like Digg and Reddit are so popular. They go through all that stuff and people pick out the things they like, and if enough people like it, it's highlighted for everyone else to see. That's also how Tumblr's Popular page worked.

But without that filter, without any method to highlight the cool from the crap, the Internet is just white noise.

RIP, Tumblr. I will truly miss you.

Blogger Rollovers

In my recent Magic and Not A Spiral posts, I used mouse rollovers to help illustrate the differences between two images. For anyone else who uses Blogger and wants to know how, here is a handy guide.

First, Blogger doesn't (easily) allow Javascript, so this will be pure CSS. Second, I wanted the rollover code in the post to be as small and repeatable as possible. So, I used Tables (gasp!).

There are two pieces of formatting code.

Piece Number One
This goes in Layout | Edit HTML, somewhere in the CSS layout. If you don't know what the CSS layout is, ....you probably shouldn't be playing around in the HTML. So, this guide is not for you. For everyone else, here's what to paste in:

table.rollover {
 border-width: 0px;
 border-spacing: 0px;
 border-style: none;
 background-repeat:no-repeat;}
table.rollover td {
 border-width: 0px;
 padding: 0px;
 border-style: none;}
table.rollover td img {
 padding:0px;
 border:0px none;
}
table.rollover:hover img {visibility:hidden;}

What this does is, when you create a table with the "rollover" class, it will hide any image inside the table, which will leave any background image visible. It also removes table and image borders, as my normal layout has those.

Piece Number Two
Now, whenever you want to include a rollover image, all you have to do is use:

<table class="rollover" style="background-image:url(rolloverimage)">
 <tr><td height="73"><img src="regularimage" /></td></tr>
</table>

Set "rolloverimage" to the url of the image you want displayed when the mouse is over, and "regularimage" to what you want shown normally. (I don't remember why I put height=73 in there, but it works for any size image [except maybe those with height less than 73?]).

Voilà, pure CSS rollovers usable on Blogger. And here are some examples in action, using Calvin re-enacted by seefresh's lovely wife.

Not A Spiral

Following up on this article, which was shared in Reader.

I wondered why it seemed to spiral in counter-clockwise. Dan suspected that it was the orientation of the corner diamonds, so I made a second image with the black and white squares reversed, which you can see below (mouse-over the original). Does it reverse the spiral for you?

Magic

Content-Aware Fill is making the rounds. Here is yet another example video: Show/Hide


Mwahaha


And stunningly, it turns out that the basic technology (texture synthesis) has been around FOR A DECADE. That's right, nerds in the know were running magic in GIMP ten years before Adobe posted their sneak peak at CS5. The upcoming Photoshop with this magic isn't yet available, but the GIMP version is right now (resynthesizer and heal selection), so I thought I'd run it through its paces. I couldn't find the original hi-res photos anywhere (0 results on TinEye), so I had to make-due with screencaps from the original video.

(rollover for originals)



In the first picture, everything except the sky was an easy Heal Selection. The sky didn't turn out right, and I ended up using clone-stamp to cover up the weirdness, and then Heal Selection over that.




For the desert, again I had to clone-stamp part of the scrub-brush over the road first, and then Heal Selection over that.




Finally, for the panorama (which was actually the first image I tried), I didn't use anything except Heal Selection, BUT I had to do the picture in steps (first one corner, then the next, etc).

So what did I find? Well, although the Resynthesizer tool 'works', it's not nearly as easy to use as what is shown in the CS5 preview video. And some of the results were a little wonky. But it's fairly quick and easy, and the output will usually pass a quick glance (but not intense scrutiny).

What you'd need to do this yourself:
GIMP itself
Updated Resynthesizer (compiled for windows, sorry)
The patched Heal Selection script
Other References:
Another guy Resynthesizing the photos
Another guy testing it out last October
Other handy GIMP tips/tools:
Tweaking GIMP to replace Photoshop (sorta)
The Liquid Rescale plugin
The do-everything G'MIC plugin, although its predecessor GREYCstoration has better examples
The FX Foundry is a good collection of scripts
(Gimp Guru used to have good tutorials, but then they switched to WordPress and lost all the graphics)

Dollhouse

So, the latest Joss Whedon project has come to a close with the recent Dollhouse finale. Most of the loose ends were tied up, but one thing really bothered me: It's 10 years later, right? Wherefore does everyone look pretty much exactly the same as before? I mean, even down to HAIRSTYLE?

People's looks change a lot in ten years. Here's a picture of me just five years ago:


Now, compare that to a picture I took of myself this morning:


And that's after only FIVE years! Throughout the finale I had to keep reminding myself that this was 10 years after the previous episode. Could have been so much better.

Anyway. All's well that ends.

Don't Stop

A small follow-up on my previous post, focusing on a subset.



Why is Fleetwood Mac so underrepresented?

Axial Tilt Is The Reason For The Season

Follow me on this one, it gets twisty.

So, Kris Straub (you know Kris, he makes Starslip) retweeted Brian Denham's "Only 364 shopping days until Christmas." tweet. I don't know Brian, but I glanced at his feed and saw that he had retweeted a Richard Dawkins post about "7 Reasons for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays".

Now, in that article, in reason #3 was the line "Axial tilt is the reason for the season!" I just love this line! A quick google search found a 2007 post on Bad Astronomy, and that points to a 2006 post by Lore Sjöberg (he who used to write Table of Malcontents for Wired), which is where the image on this page comes from. (Sidenote, I wonder if this product is affiliated, or a rip-off? It's clearly the same artwork.)

It's like... it's like all the people I follow on the Internet all know each other.

Anyway, the OLDEST post I could find for the line was way back in 2005, in the Pagan Prattle. I'm just hearing it now for the first time‽

Merry Christmas!

(via)

You guys! This is my favorite Warehouse comic.

Don't

I saw this image today, but I thought it could be better. It's not ordered by size, there's no correlation between order of the legend and order of the slices (important for those of us that are colorblind). Also, what do the sizes mean? Just random?

So I made my own, basing the sizes off of the number of hits on a Google Video search for each.

Mars Needs Moms!

A while back, I found this Berkeley Breathed book at Auntie's.



Disney is making a movie version of the book now, which if you know Berkeley and Disney, is incredible.

You can find a bit more of the story here (along with more history between Berkeley and Disney), but basically it's this:

Milo (the son) doesn't much care for the way his mom treats him (making him do chores and eat his vegetables), but when Martians kidnap her, well he has to do something, right? So he stows away on the alien ship to try and rescue her.

Now, for those of you in the bookstore with me at the time, you might remember my reaction to the book's ending. But if you really don't want it spoiled, I'll hide it. Show/Hide
...although it's not much of a spoiler, considering how much of it is on THE COVER!

Milo (on Mars) trips and falls and breaks the helmet of his spacesuit. The air escapes and he passes out, right as his mom finds him. Seriously, it's ALL ON THE COVER. Anyway, next page is double-spoilered. Show/Hide
Milo wakes up to find he is wearing an unbroken helmet.



Yeah. His mom took off her own helmet to save him. Milo finally understands the depth of his mother's love for him.

Overall, a pretty good book, if a bit abrupt at that one point. I'm curious how they plan to stretch this tiny story over a full-length movie though.

Semi-relatedly, here's an article Berkeley wrote about modern movies.

Starslip

I recently ran through the Starslip archives. Totally worth a read. Often funny, but sometimes very touching. I'll show you a taste with bits of the Jovia storyline.

Spoilers ahoy.

Memnon Vanderbeam is in love with Jovia, daughter of the King of Jupiter. He saved them from an assassination attempt.


Later, a critical flaw is discovered in Starslip technology.


Eventually the flaw catches up with them.


Memnon starts the ships computer processing a Starslip path back to a timeline where Jovia lives, a process that will take many years. In the meantime, the storyline moves along. But every once in a great while, you'll get episodes like this:


Much later, the ship's computer tells Memnon that they can use the partially-computed Jovia path to end a war. Jovia would still have died, but the war would be over (or avoided). This would mean starting the calculations over from the beginning. Memnon refuses.

But later, when Deep Time sets a bomb to go off that will eliminate the entire timeline...


Like I said, worth a read.

Primer

The recent XKCD has brought Primer back to the collective foreground.

I've seen many MANY people explaining the timeline in Primer, and with the exception of the 'birds nesting in the attic' (which I didn't catch when I watched it, because it was too far away from the Big-Reveal), they don't seem to add much to the conversation. The timeline didn't really seem complicated enough to need an explanation; it is internally consistent. The Big-Reveal follows the movie's logic. So, what's to explain, right?

So, is this an Internet joke? Like the 3-wolf-moon t-shirt reviews? It didn't occur to me until today, but is everyone just playing and I didn't get it? Like, if we all pretend that Primer is really complicated and unknowable, that makes it funnier? I kind-of get that.

Social Butterfly

This is a recent screenshot of my Gmail tab. Yes, that is five chat windows open at the bottom. I can't see enough of the screen to reply to the e-mails I'm getting.

SO, if you send me a chat and I don't respond right away, don't take it personally. There may be a line ahead of you.

Mental Floss

Recently ran across the Mental Floss shirts. Most shirt stores have a couple good ones (and because I couldn't think of anything else to post today*); here are some of my faves.

(in random order)

*and tomorrow is not looking too good either.

Things They Don't Tell You

(CLICK THE IMAGES TO PROCEED THROUGH THIS COMIC)

Ze Frank recently buzzed about this, and I thought it was interesting enough to pass along. For me, there were two pages in particular that I thought deserved a comment.

#1:

Aha! I'm normal, bitches!

#2:

Argh! No, no, no. Money is not evil.

It's the *LOVE* of money that is the root of all evil! This is an important distinction! Timothy 6:10, look it up!

Removed

Here's another reason (of many) that I like Google:

If they block some results, for any reason, they will TELL YOU.



Right there at the bottom of the page. Not in tiny text either. They practically bold it and surround it by flashing lights.

Yahoo didn't. Bing didn't. And I couldn't find any results that they were showing that Google wasn't (because maybe they weren't asked under the DMCA to remove any results), but Google also shows more results on the first page (15 vs 10@Yahoo vs 14@Bing).

Rainbows

Israel Kamakawiwo'Ole 'IZ' 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' Show/Hide


Driving home from work today, I saw a rainbow.



Actually, that's not true. I saw the place where a rainbow was. I couldn't see the rainbow itself.

I'm colorblind. Whereas a person with normal vision sees a spectrum like this:

I can basically see two colors: Blue and Not Blue

Or maybe I should say: Blue and I-Don't-Know.

(I'm guessing on that 2^nd spectrum. I ran it through a filter, but since I can't really see the colors...)

When people find out that I'm colorblind, it inevitably leads to the game: What Color Does This Look Like To You? To save time, let me just say: Unless it's BLUE, I DON'T KNOW.

Another game is What Color Is _______? Look, I know Grass is Green. I'm colorblind, not ignorant.

I don't really get upset by these things anymore. It's human nature to be curious. People who can see colors want to know what it's like to be colorblind, just as I'm curious what it's like to see colors.

In my mind, I picture it to be like music. The different colors join together like notes in a song. Two notes come together and make a new sound; likewise two colors come together and make something new. Three notes can get you a chord, three colors combine to make up what a normal person can perceive*. Each spot you see, each patch of color is its own instrument in the orchestra of life. The world is a visual symphony.

*Some women have two distinct red/green receptors in their eyes, giving them FOUR-color perception. I literally CANNOT imagine what this is like.

Now, of course I know it isn't really like that. I'm overselling it because it is unknown to me. But I have to wonder if you appreciate it. Or do you take it for granted?

You live in a world that, to me, would be like a dream, but you don't even know it.



Driving home from work today, I didn't see a rainbow.

But I really wished I did.

Pi

(via)

Statements like this bother me, because intuitively they seem correct, but are actually wrong. Just because something is infinite and non-repeating DOES NOT mean that all possibilities are expressed.

For example, consider the infinite sequence: 17, 34, 51, 68, 85, 102, 119, 136...

It increases by 17 each time. It's infinite, and it never repeats, but the number 2 is never going to exist in this set. Or 3, or 4, or 5, or 6, etc... 16/17 of all numbers will never be part of it. Infinity doesn't mean the same as everything.

UPDATE:
Well, now I had to make this:

(store)

Unseen Academicals

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork - not the old fashioned, grubby pushing and shoving, but the new, fast football with pointy hats for goalposts and balls that go going when you drop them. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else.

The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt, which worries him, too. As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever. Because the thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football.

Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel Unseen Academicalsis out now, and I've just finished reading it.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about it yet, as until three quarters of the way through it was my favorite Pratchett book to date, but it fell apart at the weak ending.

Still, before the ending there were a number of great and moving bits, some snippets of which I will share with you below.

Here the Patrician and the Archchancellor are talking about soccer:

'In my day we were all so... so relentlessly physical. But if I was to suggest so much as an egg and spoon race these days they'd use the spoon to eat the egg.'

'Alas, I did not know your day was over, Mustrum,' said Lord Vetinari, with a smile.

Here the mysterious Mr. Nutt talks to Trev (a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can) and Glenda (a maker of jolly good pies) about Trev's father, a soccer legend killed by the game:

'Your father loved you, did he not?'

'Wot?' Trev's face reddened.

'He loved you, took you to the football, shared a pie with you, taught you to cheer for the Dimmers? Did he hold you on his shoulders so that you could see more of the game?'

'Stop talkin' about my dad like that!'

Glenda took Trev's arm. 'It's okay, Trev, it's all right, it's not a nasty question, really it isn't!'

'But you hate him, because he became a mortal man, dying on the cobbles,' said Nutt, picking up another undribbled candle.

'That is nasty,' said Glenda. Nutt ignored her.

'He let you down, Mister Trev. He wasn't the small boy's god. It turned out that he was only a man. But he was not only a man. Everyone who has ever watched a game in this city has heard of Dave Likely. If he was a fool, then any man who has ever climbed a mountain or swum a torrent is a fool. If he was a fool then so was the man who first tried to tame fire. If he was a fool then so was the man who tried the first oyster, he was a fool, too–although I'm bound to remark that, given the division of labour in early hunter-gatherer cultures, he was probably a woman as well. Perhaps only a fool gets out of bed. But, after death, some fools shine like stars, and your father is such a one. After death, people forget the foolishness, but they do remember the shine. You could not have done anything. You could not have stopped him. If you could have stopped him he would not have been Dave Likely, a name that means football to thousands of people.'

Nutt negotiates with a dwarf:

'Her? The Dark Lady? She can kill people with a thought!'

'She is my friend,' said Nutt calmly, 'and I will help you.'

Nutt has a mantra about Being Worthy, leading to this discussion with Trev:

'It is a skill. It can be learned.'

'An' that makes you worthy?'

'Yes.'

'An' who judges?'

'I do.'

(Not entirely unrelatedly, I read this passage in The Little Prince today:


"Then you shall judge yourself," the king answered. "that is the most difficult thing of all. It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom."

)

Some characters have undergone little changes (not sure how I feel about those yet), such as the teetotaler Patrician drinking a beer while telling this story:

The Patrician took a sip of his beer. 'I have told this to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect never will again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that's when I first learned about evil. It is built in to the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.'

Nutt tells Glenda an interesting thing about ships:

'The interesting thing about ships is that the captains of ships have to be very careful when two ships are close together at sea, particularly in calm conditions. They tend to collide.'

'Because of the wind blowing, and that?' said Glenda, thinking: In theory this is a romantic-novel situation and I am about to learn about ships. Iradne Comb-Buttworthy never puts a ship in her books. They probably don't have enough reticules.

'No,' said Nutt. 'In fact, to put it simply, each ship shields the other ship from lateral waves on one side, so by small increments outside forces bring them together without their realizing it.'

(this is a metaphor about relationships; it even puns 'ships)

Glenda cleared her throat again. 'This thing with the ships…Does it happen quite quickly?'

'It starts quite slowly, but it's quite quick towards the end,' said Nutt.

If I could put smart in water...

'Can't you wizards do something?'

'Yes,' said Ponder. 'We can do practically anything, but we can't change people's minds. We can't magic them sensible. Believe me, if it were possible to do that, we would have done it a long time ago. We can stop people fighting by magic and then what do we do? We have to go on using magic to stop them fighting. We have to go on using magic to stop them being stupid. And where does all that end? So we make certain that it doesn't begin. That's why the university is here. That's what we do.'

Ah, punnery:

'We shall have to change our tactics to suit, then,' said Nutt.

'Are you nu—insane?'

Another thing I found interesting was that Amazon paired it up with And Another Thing...(the 6^th Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book) penned this time by Artemis Fowl author Eoin Colfer. Of course, no one could ever replace DNA.