el trastero

i remember she had been been gone somewhere else for a few seconds. she was still sitting in front of me, but her eyes had relaxed and she remained in silence, as if she was holding a big secret. she was moving her lips in that special way that i’had never seen in anybody but her. that’s why i decided to talk to her, a year back, when we were nothing but strangers traveling in the same metro car. i had found her subtle facial movements and slightly smiley face magical. now i knew she did that when she was thinking, when she was diving in her own world. and this time she had been doing that for a few seconds.

i was dying to know where she was, what she was pondering, envisioning, or remembering. i wanted to know what was that that was making her smile.

- so, why do you have your own business? is that your dream?

she waited for three or four seconds, then her eyes focused on me again, and finally her consciousness joined us back too. she moved her hair behind her ear with her hand, a clear sign she was a little nervous, but at the same time she was radiating so much contagious energy that i could almost feel and touch it in the air.

- my dream? oh no, owning a business is not my dream. my dream is to go to the russian space station one day, as a tourist. i’ve been reading about it, and had a look already. it is expensive, but doable. that’s why i’m having my own business, so i can make money and one day afford going to the russian space station.

and that was, to me, the perfect answer.

as i was telling you, that’s one of those things that really saddens my heart. in fact, i sometimes think that things haven’t changed so much in the last 112 years, my friend. wherever i look, i still see far too many camels, and too many lions too. i can barely spot but a few children. look, i took this picture for you.

but despite the horrific realization of this self-injury men impose on themselves, i’m certain things will change for better one day. one of the amazing qualities of men is that they always surpass their own short-sighted expectations.

christianity – ruining everything that is worth and beautiful in this world.

(probably the same applies to the other two abrahamic religions)

leave us alone…

apetrecer – v. intr. Deseo o ganas de tentar a la mala suerte.

etimología – contracción de “me apetece un trece”

i sometimes challenge my intuition and try things which i know are doomed to fail, with the hope i’ll be wrong.

this morning i was thinking on Fractional Brownian Motion and other “fractal” noise constructions, where different octaves of perlin noise are additively combined with a 1/f power spectrum. the traditional construction takes a basic noise function, then it scales it down to half its amplitude and increases its frequency by two. then the process repeats. in music, increasing a note’s frequency by two effectively transposes that note to the next octave, hence the use of the term for multiplying frequencies by two in other contexts than music, like in our FBM case.

now, i was thinking, what if we constructed a fractals signal not by playing the same note (say, C) over different octaves, but if we were playing full chords. in that case we wouldn’t just be multiplying frequencies by two, but also by intermediate proportions. for example, what in music people call a major 3rd is basically a 4 semitone distance, or in other words, a 1.26 frequency multiplier (2^(4/12). an octave is a 12 semitone distance, indeed a 2 frequency multiplier.

so i constructed some fractal noise functions which contained not only pure octaves, but also intermediate frequencies in form of chords. i tried a C Major and a D Minor chords, two of the most common chords you can find. the results, as expected, are not any visually interesting, for the power spectrum hasn’t changed really. but it was worth giving it a try, just in case. you never know.

three octaves of different chords: left is C (traditional FBM), middle is C Major (C E G) and right is D Minor (D F A). bottom line of images is the derivative of the signal (the gradient, used in combination with some lighting)

what would you write if you had promised yourself to go to bed at 1:00 am (this time i’ll fucking do it, promise!), and therefore you had not more than one minute and a half left to conceive, develop and finalize one blog post. i’m sure you wouldn’t write much more than a self referencing post.

if “anymore” doesn’t spell “any anymore” anymore
if “always” has not always been “always” but “all ways”
if “another” is another way to express “an other”
if “somehow” somehow evolved from “some how”
if “already” already superseded “all ready”

then, it should be all right to use “alright”.

yes, i do welcome (well come?) evolution of language

for most of us changing can be cha(lle)nging

“alegrigüenza” – que produce alegría, y vergüencita al mismo tiempo

“faculties”, plural of fac·ul·ty (noun),
1. an inherent mental or physical power.
2. an aptitude or talent for doing something.

that’s a generic word. in the right context, one might want to use this one instead:

“fuckulties”, plural of fuck·ul·ty (noun)

i leave the completion of the definition to the reader.

ps – during pure random chatting with a friend – actually the joke originally came up in spanglish

one might think that in the field of computer graphics, which is terribly popular to the point of massification and crammification (does that word exist?), there’s little to be discovered or even invented in the foundation ideas of the field, in the basic concepts. how could it be differently in a field where (hundreds of?) thousands of people all around the planet, from phd scientist to industry professionals and gifted teenagers, have been playing with it and have been building new concepts on top of that foundation for around 40 years now? well, perhaps surprisingly for some of those people, the basics of computer graphics are still to be explored, and one doesn’t have to dig too far or examine things too closely to start finding hidden gems.

anyway, this sunday i found two such little gems, around the idea of voronoi patterns. i know, i know, these are used by thousands of people every day around the world, but, well, seems nobody dared to explore them too much?

ths first gem is a way to (finally, boys) get correct and perfect cell edge widths and correct internal isolines to voronoi patterns: http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/voronoilines/voronoilines.htm

the second gem is a simple trick to avoid the annoying C1 discontinuity, which had traditionally limited the use of these patterns in high quality rendering applications (due to aliasing): http://www.iquilezles.org/www/articles/smoothvoronoi/smoothvoronoi.htm

* fact: the US population is the most heavily armed society in the world.
* fact: still, countries like Honduras, Colombia or Brazil have a 10 times higher rate of firearm homicides per capita than the US
* fact: of course, the US wouldn’t like to compare themselves with Honduras, Colombia or Brazil, but with Japan, Norway or the UK
* fact: the firearm homicide rate per capita in the US is 300 times bigger than the Japanese, 60 times the Norwegian and 50 times the English
* fact: correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation. but often, it does

i’m not going to discuss on the topic of the problem not being the guns but the people, cause in either case, there’s something fucked up – why should a modern society need to be armed anyway? no other first world society is, they simply don’t need it. and that’s just a fact too!

you might think i complain too much about this place, but remember you can get disappointed only by those things you love

and don’t be just demagogic with the issue of mental illness being the real problem here. important as it is (granted), it’s a pretty orthogonal problem. and in the meanwhile, until it is addressed, i think it wouldn’t hurt taking some guns out of circulation. please picture a mentally ill person in crisis with a knife, and a mentally ill person in crisis with a gun. then let me know who you think can do more damage.

men are born with hair in their heads and no beard. when they grow old, some develop beard and loose their hair in their head. it would be great if those men could turn their heads upside down…

…and start counting again, like a sandwatch

it’s late night and i’m tired. i’m in a night bus in the middle of nowhere in a 6 hours trip to an airport. i don’t see the outside but i know it’s raining heavily, cold, about to get snowing. thanks to the spotlight that’s illuminating my seat i can also see and get distracted analyzing the funny patterns in the upholstery in the seat in front of me. this tiny space in between these two seats, which i have made mine this night despite many owned it before me, is all i’ll have for the coming 6 hours. that, and the noise of the rain to the other side of the cold window.

i’ve never been able to sleep in a seat, no matter how expensive or comfy. i need horizontality. so in these cases i either switch my brain off to 5% of consciousness, which i find really easy to do, or go the completely opposite way and start thinking heavy or doing some mental homework. despite tonight i’m too tired for this second option, and despite the former seems pretty appealing, i decide to give a try to something new. or, well, something old – i put my headphones and connect to the local radio stations.

gosh, it seems i have to look way, way back in my memories in order to find when it was the last time i did this. i think i can track my relationship with the radio down to when i was 23 and i would listen to it while studying (mostly by osmosis) the electric field propagation equations for waveguides. yes, i think the last time i listened to the radio was about ten years ago. i used to do it as a way to make my last-minute-and-therefore-desperately-long-studying nights easier to make through. i remember being awake till 4 and 5 am studying, writing equations, looking at pictures, and trying to build an intuition around then. in the darkness of those winter nights, freezing cold outside, most of the times raining and a few rare times snowing, with the only company of my little spotlight lamp, in that rented apartment that others owned before me but that was mine now, i would switch the radio on and listen to some weird late night radio cast.

tonight i caught a program on literature. they read fragments of new books with delightful stories, do clever analysis of their styles and content, and they tell the context of the writing and the author all with pretty words, beautiful sentences, constructions, structures and ideas, in mellow yet assertive voice. i quickly start feeling the sweet tickles and the pleasure of my brain being massaged by all these wonders. suddenly, the perspective of 6 hour in this tiny space under the spotlight with the sound of the rain to the other side of the cold window doesn’t feel any bad at all.

for one hand, i had been a long time that, when face to face, i had stopped pretending all i cared about her were her big eyes. it had been a long time, indeed, that i felt comfortable enough to sporadically but naturally rests my sigh in the gracious features of her visage, despite i could tell she was seeing me do it, despite she knew that i could tell she was seeing me do it. i had gotten used to being explored by her as well in a similar fashion. it was a non spoken yet mutually granted license. perhaps nothing more than that. perhaps too, that’s why it felt so comfortable.

for the other, it had been a long time we could talk about pretty much any topic. free from conventions, prejudices or established assumptions, it had become easy to think far and big together, and therefore, see big and far. also, often, we could go the other way around and talk small, intimate and personal, with equal lack of conventions, prejudices or established assumptions. all topics welcome, all issues accepted, but never anything demanded, owed or expected. that’s probably why it felt so comfortable too.

somebody found a wedding video in the free-shelf, next to all that stuff people donate when they don’t need it anymore (polite way of saying getting rid of).

the first reaction of the people here was to naively assume it had been “forgotten” or involuntarily left there. the second comment was the following joke: “good thing it wasn’t the honeymoon video!”

these two reactions feel way too artificial to me. so much, that i can’t help but conclude i’m hitting another cultural difference yet again.

my people would assume that the video had been put there obviously on purpose, with a very clear intention and tragic poetic meaning. nobody wouldn’t have done that naive comment of “somebody forgot it there” for it would actually have being taken as a cruel acknowledgment of the fact that somebody had decided to publicly state that his/her marriage was worth nothing. instead, people would have directly jumped to the second comment, which should have been a little bit more spicy: “oh yeah, probably it’s the honeymoon video!!! who has it right now?? please share”

it’s all so different here. and this (i believe pretty much artificially self-imposed) lack of spice and annoying extreme political correctness in (and only in) public spaces is killing me.

we . are . the . robots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ

some years ago i discovered that for a long time i had misunderstood how the greek though of mathematics. what today we think of “squaring a number” wasn’t an abstract operation to them. it wasn’t even an operation for them, but a figure, a shape. a square, more precisely. they didn’t really have the concept of “multiplication” but of “area”, they didn’t think of square roots but in terms of “sides of a square” and they didn’t even add numbers really. numbers were not just quantities for them, but content, like length, area or volume. lacking a symbolic language to describe operations, they couldn’t really do algebra. instead, problems that today we reduce to a single line of compact mathematical expression, would require long paragraphs of text and a few drawings. the disadvantage was clearly the lack of a mechanical methodology to problem solving. the advantage, however, the need of a very visual understanding of the mathematics. it’s not a coincidence that geometry was, until the times of Newton, the only “true” mathematics.

---

this morning i was getting out of my long hot water shower. as usual during my showers in the mathroom i had been distracted with stupid stuff. today i was computing how much 17² is (the reason has to do with raytracing, micropolygons and the way shading is done by Pixar’s Renderman). i had tried a couple of times to do the long multiplication in my head, you know, the way they teach you at school: multiplying 17 by 7, remembering that quantity, then adding 170 to it, etc. the problem is that at those times in the morning my brain is more parasympathetic than conscious and, basically, it can only respond to basic stimulus, so i miserably failed to perform my computation.





so i gave up on it, closed the water and shifted the curtains in order to leave the bath. i started drying my right foot before stepping outside, while my eyes posed on the tiles in the floor outside the bath. and then, withing the same tiles that i had been seen daily for the last two years, i saw a figure that i had not seen before there, but that i had seen somewhere else. in a trice, i remembered Euclid’s Elements books on geometry, 2400 years old now, and the square made of four different rectangles.

eureka! suddenly, i performed this computation 17²: 256 + 32 + 1 = 289. piece of cake!

the big square tile became of side 16 (area 256, as any coder knows), the small squared tile became of size 1, and the two lateral rectangular tiles were therefore of size 16 each, which all together made an imaginary square of side 17 and size 256 + 32 + 1 = 289. and yes indeed, 17 times 17 is 289. no long multiplications performed nor injured.

this is how the greek though of maths really. i’m not sure they knew how to multiply two numbers or how to square one, or if they were interested in that really. i do know that, by lacking a symbolic language, what we usually write as

(a+b)² = a² + 2ab + b²

they did actually write with these literal words instead:

“if a straight line be cut at random, the square on the whole is equal to the squares on the segments and twice the rectangle contained by the segments”

which means that a line (a+b) cut in segments a and b, extrudes into a square of size equal to the square obtained by extruding a, plus the square resulting from extruding b, plus the two rectangles resulting extruding a by b and b by a.

which reminds me that i believe i love words more than they love me

but i know not all loves are symmetric, and, sometimes, i’m fine with that

sometimes poetry happens spontaneously, casually, naturally.

and that’s the most beautiful poetry of all, the one that nobody writes, the one that instead makes itself available to us as a gift, not through words but shapes and colors.

i found this on the floor at lunch time while walking and chatting. in a fraction of a second a poem formed in my mind after these marks of leaves drying away, making room for this new fallen glowing intense yellow leaf.

still now the poem is vivid, clear and sharp in my mind and heart, but any attempt of mine to put it in words would miserably fail and render the poem impure. that’s why i think it’s best if i leave it as it is, as an image.

she proudly claimed “i’m the brightest star in the sky!!!”

to what Polaris answered, “you must be kidding me… are you Sirius“?

a couple of friends of mine turned 27 years old the same day, and i made this for them

which is pretty accurate (to 4 decimal digits), and comes with a square pie!

this is a well known fact among scientists, but it’s never bad to get reminded of it.

for example, a fact: counties with a major university tend to vote democrat. so yes, there’s a big correlation between higher education and progressive political tendencies.

now, does that imply that gaining education makes people vote progressive? no! perhaps the correlation simply highlights a common cause for both measurements – like people with more desire to know have also less fear to change (but knowing doesn’t imply wanting change). or, perhaps, the correlation highlights a simple statistical bias towards youth in the age of these counties with universities, which in turn might be the cause of the political tendency. or, perhaps, the correlation simply doesn’t explain anything at all, and it’s pure coincidence!

yet, since the major reason for our actions are causes, and since indeed many things in nature do have causes and identifying them has been terribly useful to as species, we humans are used to see causes in everything around us, even where there aren’t. we think in terms of causes (and action – reactions, which is a form of causation), we are hardwired it. there’s a reason children can obsessively ask “why?” to everything.

yet, in nature, in reality, correlation does not imply causation. good to remember

that’s what i am. every morning during breakfast

i already expressed many times my opinion on bizarre art being gratuitously thrown to the general public without further explanations or context.

people of course often dislike it, and they read it as awkwardness, craziness, masturbation and stupidity from the artist. and you know what, i think they are within their rights to do so. i don’t blame the public. if anybody, i blame the authors.

it’s not rare that weak artists feel addictively comfortable in the crying, complaining and shouting “I’m misunderstood” role. but maybe, these artists should remember than [a] the public is not stupid or uneducated, and [b] the public don’t actually need them, the world is doing pretty fine without their art, just saying.

so, because of [b], many artists decide to stay away from the mainstream world. which is okey. but if they wanted to earn the privilege of staying around and being admired by us, then they should stop complaining about uneducated audiences, misunderstanding and mee mee mee, and start doing an real effort instead. for example, en effort to explain to the world what they were actually trying to accomplish with their piece. what the context was, why they did it. for don’t these artists proudly and mechanically claim art is a form of expression? well, then, express yourself, do your fucking homework!!

in the meanwhile, don’t expect the (very educated) public to stop expressing their opinion too about their art..

i have one hour to spare. too short to jump into any of the big projects i’m working on, it’s not worth starting to work on something knowing i’ll have to stop by the time my brain is fully warm up and ready to actually be useful. so instead i go into yet another doodling session, with voronoi patterns again. this time i’ll spend half the time doing the formulas for the visuals, and the other half hour writing some weird ambient sound/music.

i just donated some money to the Wikipedia.

see, the last time in history that a serious attempt was made to gather and organize all the world’s knowledge into a place for public consultation that i know of, was the library of Alexandria 22 centuries ago (probably the chinesse had something too, much earlier, but what do i know about asian culture!)

just as in the ancient egyptian library, all of the world’s knowledge, no matter which culture it comes from, which philosophical or political tendency it’s biased towards, no matter which branch of science, music, arts or history, is added to the Wikipedia by the people, in a serious attempt to keep it accurate, impartial and up to date.

but the most important point here is that “the people” in the last sentence.

for in one hand it means that it’s the people who actually build it, as opposed to some moral or political authority. that is something good, and it has challenged the governments of both fundamentalist and also the so called liberal countries all around the world. lacking of a moral authority is a consequence of the adulthood of humanity, the no longer need of a paternal moral guidance. nietzsche would be still be disappointed by seeing were we still are in this regard, though, but the Wikipedia is perhaps one of those examples that makes me hold to some hope.

in the other hand, this encyclopedia is made by the people indeed, which also has a negative twist to it – the people tend to bias the knowledge both voluntary and involuntarily to their own particular believes and understanding of things. the wiki system has been criticized because of this, and therefore it has improved too. but of course, there’s no perfect solution (just like democracy is not the best solution for government, but it’s the best we have so far). the management of the honesty, accuracy and expertise of the people/authors that contribute to the Wikipedia is difficult, and will continue to be so for a long time. my take on this is that at some point humans must accept and learn to deal with their own human imperfect nature, and move forward with the only real tool of the trust in each other and faith on themselves.

anyway, in more practical terms, one cannot deny having learnt something from the Wikipedia, having being inspired to know more, or having just wandered in its pages simply for the pleasure of reading. so since this electronic encyclopedia happens to be free (not only as in authority independent, but as in “gratis” too), when i saw they were looking for donations and that helping it was just a couple of clicks away, well, i did it.

i still have a few unresolved feelings with it all, but in overall i’m happy to have done it. i think this is the way to go.

i’ve been less than 24 hours in my home country, and there have been quite a few idiosyncratic or cultural mini shocks that i have gone through already:

Good:		people dress elegant (not at Japanese levels, but still, pretty good)
Bad:		waitress and shop assistants are super impolite and can be very, very rude.
Good:		food is eaten with real forks, knives, glasses and plates, never with plastic cutlery (or your hands!), glasses or paper plates
Bad:		the cold rainy snowy weather. It’s so cold.
Good:		there’s no problem with topless in magazines or tv, or in real life in public spaced for the matter. The decision of appropriateness is left to the good judgement of the toplesser (morality is built from the people, not from the state)
Bad:		nobody talks english. I fear isolation from the world, as in inability to openly learn from and contribute to it
Good:		the shops, the noise, the umbrellas, the lights! These are real cities!
Bad:		the politics. Seems like this is a country of retards, lead by retards
Good:		no vegan fanatism – the choices in the airplane food were only “chicken or beef”. Fuck yeah!
Bad:		everything is so expensive
Good:		the language is so relaxed in grammar and content (no censorship!) – the humor is different
Bad:		people look all the same, to the point it gets really boring. Nobody dares be different

i always thought contemporary dance had gone really bizarre lately in europe (and i wandered how Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham or Jose Limon would like it if they were alive today). yet, i’ve never disliked it myself, although i have some reservations and opinions about how these sort of pieces should be executed, and also some thoughts about what to do about the gap they leave in the area of more choreographic (traditional – or modern as they call it here) dance. anyway, see this video from the very prestigious european channel “Arte”, as it’s a good example of what you might see if you go to a random theater in central europe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS1uDnIPTvo

i like cornflakes. i like strawberries. but i don’t like special-k.

or in other words, flavours don’t combine linearly nor form a vector space. they don’t even follow the triangle inequality!

while the whole world measures temperature in Celsius degrees, two countries (Belize and the USA, to be precise) still use Fahrenheit degrees. now, there’s one magic temperature at which both Anders Celsius’ and Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit’s followers do agree on their reports. and that’s -40 degrees, the point where both scales intersect.

this reminds me that agreement is a rare thing, and as with most rare things, invaluable. the world certainly needs more of it, in so many important matters (values, politics, rights, environment… do i need to mention them all?). and while perfect agreement is probably unhealthy, i sincerely think we could make a better place of this world by cooling some of our differences down a little bit.

like, to -40 degrees or something.

in exactly two weeks from now, i’ll decide to halt my late morning walk in downtown to take a picture of the christmas tree that they will have installed just a few days before in union square, right by the ice skating rink.

the day will be warm and sunny, challenging if not defeating my indissoluble cultural association of christmas with cold and snow. it’s incredible how culture shapes the way we understand things. but rather than feeling bad with regards to my confusion, i’ll rejoice myself in the magic feeling of awkwardness and shock. in order to never forget this delicious feeling, i’ll step down my bicycle, point to the tree and capture the moment in a picture.

in approximatelly two weeks minus ten hours from now, i’ll decide to halt my nightly walk in downtown to take a picture of the christmas tree in union square, today still to be installed.

the night will be warm and colorful. the people will walk in tshirt, looking at the windows, enjoying a coffee in the tables of the square, going to different venues, who knows. it will be a noisy cheerful night for sure, so i’ll be strolling through the square for i’ll have nothing as important to do that night as enjoying this. it will feel so good, so summery. in the rink, people will be ice skating in tshirts, some even in shorts (and i’ll chuckle to my own old saying that a short is never too short). then my gaze will find the chritmas tree, there behind the ice skaters, illuminating the less wintery and christmassy, yet most jubilant and… oh, christmassy night i’ve seen in a long time. suddenly, all the scene in front of my eyes becomes a christmas scene. despite all the missing ingredients and summery setup. the skates, the laughs, the celebration, the joy, even the pleasure of the warm air. and in spite of the fact that i have always known that other people could feel christmas in a different way to mine, i’ll feel it myself that way too for the first time in my life.

so, in exactly two weeks minus ten hours from now, i’ll run to the very same spot where i’ll took a morning picture of the xmas tree in the square, and i’ll shot at the square and the tree once again.

it will be the same tree, but it will all feel so different this time – and not because of the decorative lights.

human perception of light is not linear. somebody was putting it this way the other day: when you are in a room and switch one bulb on, the room gets illuminated, but if you switch a second bulb on the room doesn’t get twice as bright – instead, it only goes slightly brighter.

this is a well known fact to the professionals in the world of imaging – the perceived luminosity is not proportional to the energy invested in lighting. instead, it follows a power function of the form y = x^1/2.2. and indeed, tv studios, magazines, computer games and films do compensate their image processes for this non linearity.

this morning i thought again of that two bulb room example while seated in the train. i wandered, once you switch the first bulb on, how many extra bulbs do you need in order to actually make the room feel twice as bright?

the game went like this: the answer is 2 ^ 2.2, which is close enough to 2^2.25 as to be calculated as the double square root of the ninth power of two, 512. this is 4 times the double square root of 2, which i decided to make 1.2, making therefore my estimation 4.8, close to 5 (the real answer, calculator in hand, is 4.6)

so, you need 5 bulbs, or 4 extra bulbs on top of the first one you already had, to get your room twice as bright.

then, i couldn’t think of any other game so i started staring at the people in the car.

i guess i like thinking in twos because i’m a bit geek – bit as in computer bit