Autostereograms

Want a headache? Read about autostereograms.

To be able to see these images, your eyes have to pretend they're looking far away but focus on a closer object. If you are looking at the image normally, your eyes are focused and converge at the distance the image is from you. To see the autostereogram's 3D image, your eyes are focued at the correct distance, but are converged at a different distance (infinity), making the image hit your eyes at the "wrong" angle. Each eye is looking at a different part of the picture, which is why the edges never look right. Your brain sticks everything together, thinking that you're seeing a 3D image but in reality you're just looking at it all wrong.

In a simple "wallpaper" type of autostereogram, they take a repeating pattern or two to trick your brain into making you perceive them as being on a different plane than the background.

The tiger is repeated every 120 pixels, the shark every 130 pixels, and the person riding the tiger every 140 pixels. So, when your eyes go all crazy, the tiger seems closest, the shark is farther away, then the person riding the tiger is on the background plane.
Then if you mess with size and spacing and such, you can do all sorts of crazy things. For example here is a bunch of tigers at different depths. This image shows you how the spacing of the pattern affects the depth you perceive.

So of course no one wants to sit down and make these, so they made a computer program that builds these images for you. This program takes a grayscale image of the image you will see in 3D and a random dot pattern, then figures out how to adjust each reiteration of the pattern to make you see the 3D image.

And of course, someone figured out how to go too far with this.

Similar Power Metal Drum Intros

Listen to the first 5 seconds of "Sword's Song" by Battlelore:


Then listen to the first 5 seconds of "Blank File" by Sonata Arctica:


"Sword's Song" came on randomly on my iPod today and I thought it was "Blank File". Lame.

(FYI, "Blank File" by Sonata Arctica was released in 1999; "Sword's Song" by Battlelore was released in 2003.)

Mail Goggles

Mail Goggles is a Google Labs feature for Gmail that makes you solve math problems before sending an email late at night on a weekend. It's set up so you don't drunkenly email people you probably shouldn't be talking to anyway. More often than not, I end up sending real emails on purpose on weekends, so Mail Goggles doesn'r help much.

Plus, it turns out that I can still do math when I'm pretty drunk.

(No, there's embarrassing story to go along with the above statement.)

Fox News's Response to the Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear

Fox & Friends on Fox News, which some people unfortunately think is a source of news, responded to the rally with a well-researched, well-thought out response to the message of the Rally to Restore Sanity.

Just kidding. They missed the point entirely and attacked Jon Stewart.



If you can't stomach the video, here are some of the extremely moronic things they said:

• They claim Stewart attacks the right, then "attempts" to work the crowd into getting out to vote. But then they show a clip of him defending Tea Partiers and Juan Williams and not talking about voting at all. (In reality, the rally attacked all the stupid news networks, even NPR.)
• They pretended not to know Colbert's name.
• They claim he and Colbert are not news men, they're comedians. Reading the news every night on a news show makes you a newsman, goddamnit! Using their logic, it's good to know that Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are just DJs and not news men/political commentators.
• They justify the large crowd by pointing out that Oprah and the Huffington Post bussed people in. I'm sure that's where they all came from. No way people could actually be fed up with the idiocy of 24-hour news networks.
• They belittle the message and diminish it by (again) saying they're comedians. They also comment that he looks sharp in his suit, "just like a real newsman." So, to be a newsman at Fox, you need a suit and to not be a comedian.
• Then they have a conservative comedian talk about the horrors he and Fox News went through while being at the rally, claiming there was more animosity there than any Tea Partiers would have (nevermind openly hating immigrants and homosexuals). This guy then missed the point of the rally (news networks don't help anyone anywhere ever).
• They said they were surprised there wasn't more violence.
• At the bottom of the screen it says "Thousands attend DC rally yesterday." No, it was over 200,000. That should say "Hundreds of the thousands attend DC rally yesterday."
• They speculated that people only came for the bands.
• Then they show Ozzy doing "Crazy Train" but of course they chose the one part where his singing is the worst.
• Then they briefly show the duel between "Peace Train" and "Crazy Train" ... but completely left out the "Love Train" compromise.
• Then they claim that Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) -- who sang "Peace Train" -- was involved in a Fatwa against Salman Rushdie, nevermind the fact that he never supported it. You see what they did there? They had a Muslim! Muslims are bad! Let's all ignore the part of the rally where they warned against treating all Muslims like terrorists. Furthermore, they acted like he just changed his name. He changed his name OVER 30 YEARS AGO.

Damnit, now I'm all pissed off. Time to vote.

Xmas Creep in Garfield

First, I will acknowledge that I'm perhaps one of the few people left who actually still reads Garfield.

Anyway the strip on Halloween ends with Xmas Creep! That's horrible! There are two places mentioning Xmas in October* is okay: craft stores and my house. In craft stores, you're selling things to people who need months to complete a project so it's fine to start those early. As for my house, I have Death Metal Xmas albums to make. To get it done on time, it's best to start in August. (I didn't start until October this year, so I'm already behind.)

Those are the two exceptions. Now let's not talk about Xmas again until December? Okay? Okay.

*This post is in November, so it's okay.