Ransen's Blog

I'm working on version 11 of Gliftex (a Windows pattern and image maker) , and sometimes, after all the thinking and geometry and programming nice experimental images pop up: This image, and the ones which follow, all look a bit like colorful mosaics... It makes the sines and cosines and intersections and tangents and for loops and matrices and vectors all seem worth while!  One last surprise:

In an earlier blog entry I mentioned how I was making a medal like object in software using two different sorts of geometry. I faffed around with a complex one, then settled on a simple one, but that simple one had consequencies. Consequencies I could have forseen if had more than three neurons in my brain. The work was for PhotoToMesh V5 , released last week... ...It creates bas relief files for 3D printers. There is a smoothing setting in the program, explained here , which makes the bas reliefs which the program creates less ragged. When I finally settled on the "correct" medal geometry I'd forgotten about the smoothing. It works by taking the topologically (not neccessarily geometrically) nearest 3d point to the 3d point under consideration, and averages them. With rectangular meshes topologically and geometrically are practically the same thing. With the medal mesh geometry which I'd decided on, they're not. This is because there are fewer distinc...

I guess they had a 200x, 40Euro, USB microscope (I keep saying that because I find it amazing value). No insects were killed, all found dead or later released. Something that crash landed on a leaf:   Two things found floating in my cat's drinking water: A dead moth found on the stairs, what a lovely curly nose/mouth it's got! ...and what lovely wing textures too... A creepy crawlie found struggling in a puddle of water. This is really Men In Black: Lovely legs and antenna! I released him afterwards. Probably having a drink at a bar on Venus right now.

My family have accused me of turning the bathroom into an operating theatre, because I changed a light bulb. The light in the bathroom contains two bulbs, and for years they have been normal incandescent light bulbs (the type with the coil which glows). One of the pair burned out and I thought I'd so some energy saving so I put in one of those replacement neon lamps, coiled around itself to make it fit in the same space as a normal incandescent lamp. I noticed it had a bluish tinge, but thought nothing of it. There was a small revolution, it was decided by the rest of the family that the neon light made the bathroom look like an operating theatre or mortuary. Every single time that light was switched on I got a "this is a horrible terrible light" comment. Every single time! Eventually I gave in and bought a warm white LED lamp. But why was the neon bulb so badly recieved? I have a spectrometer I use for work, so I decided to look at the sp...

I lived in Japan for a total of four years, in the 1980s. I learned 600 kanji, (Japanese ideograms) in those four years. Only 600. That meant I would not have been able to graduate from high school. High school graduates must know the 2000 standard kanji to graduate. And now I can remember maybe 100 and can write maybe 25. But foreign students of Japanese who live in Japan learn some kanji very quickly, like "exit", and "entrance", "restaurant", etc. And some kanji combinations ("phrase" is not the right word) stick in your mind too. This all came back to me on the Milano metro a few days ago when I saw a bloke with some badly copied kanji tatoos... …I looked and looked and was sure that I knew what they meant. I took a surreptitious photo (blurred and shakey as a consequence) so I could look it up when I got back home. But I didn't have to, the meaning of the mysterious kanji just popped back...

- What do we want?! - Hearing aids! - When do we want them?! - Hearing aids!

The other day I noticed the dandelions on our lawn were ready to have their seeds blown away by the wind. Aha! Another target for my 40 Euro USB microscope! Look what nature has made...no words needed: