Daily photo

iTrip

  • September 21, 2005
I can listen to my "tunes" in the car now. It's missing some treble and it took me a while to come up with the frequency, but otherwise it's cool. I changed the frequency several times on the way to work today, and 94.5 was still working when I reached campus. We'll see if it holds up when I return to the 'burbs later.

So, last night I made a Popup Imagemagnifying glass in my modeling program. It's just a squished sphere, but once I set it to be processed by the raytracer, the renderer handles light as it should and it magically magnifies things like any squished sphere would in the real world. However, I had to crank up some of the values for approximating the shape of the sphere (otherwise, when it's approximated down to a polyhedron, the minor "angles" that end up being non-spherical are greatly amplified by the raytracer, making the magnified image very inaccurate). Once I did that to a degree that produced a good result, it took about a minute to render a 640x480 frame where the magnifier covers about 200x150 pixels. This lead me to the realization that ... wow, real life is so fast. I mean, I can whip out a real magnifying glass right now and the raytracing happens in real time, with infinite accuracy, and I get a perfectly magnified image underneath. There's some major computing going on in the universe all the time.

Comments

  • jennifer
  • September 21, 2005
  • 10:28 pm
see, i think it's weird when you refer to there being "computing" in nature, because... to me there's no "processing", no "thinking" in the traditional senses of the words... i'm not sure what i'm trying to get at here. to me it just seems like the universe is effortless, and "major computing" makes it sound like it's not. :)
  • Ethan
  • September 21, 2005
  • 10:40 pm
Actually, scientists look at things like black holes as gigantic computers. If you can bring math into the world by representing values as physical entities, then you can "use" the power of nature's "calculations" to find the results of math problems by converting the resulting physical entities back into numbers.
  • Matt
  • September 22, 2005
  • 4:03 pm
I wish I had a clue what anyone was talking about. Hi, I like English.
  • Anonymous
  • December 20, 2005
  • 10:09 pm
lanch
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