Author: admin

There is a substantial Ukrainian community in NYC. Over the years I have gotten to know quite a few first and second generation Ukrainian Americans.

They are a diverse group, with very different opinions on many topics. There is literally only one thing about which they invariably agree.

Their one point of universal agreement? They all hate Russia. Not the Russian people, but the government.

The hatred is passionate and visceral, and I have been told that it goes back for generations. From what I know, I can’t imagine the people from this culture ever acquiescing to this particular invasion.

Like everybody else I know, I have been glued to the news. What is happening today is so horrible and tragic. I did not think things like this invasion would actually happen in this day and age. I had naively thought that the world had moved past this.

Around seven or eight years ago I was trying all sorts of things to enhance the look of my Chalktalk interactive drawing program. One thing that was really important to me was line quality.

I wanted to be able to render beautiful 3D lines, which tapered and had rounded ends, as though you were drawing with a high quality magical paintbrush in 3D. But I also wanted it to run very fast.

So I wrote a special shader just for drawing those sorts of lines. My first test was just to see if I could render two curved tapered lines in space, as seen from different points of view.

Once I got that working, I tried ramping things up a bit. I generated a more ambitious test, with lots of squiggly tapered 3D lines.

When that seemed to work ok, I really went for it. I modified the program to generate 1000 tangled up squiggly lines in 3D.

To my surprise, it still looked great, and it still ran really fast. Hardware accelerated shaders are really amazing, aren’t they?

Today I found myself working on three different projects. For one of them, today was the publication deadline.

On first blush, this seems problematic. How can you divide your attention among three different things and still get anything done?

But in practice it turned out to work really well. Whenever I would get stuck on one project, I could switch to another one. And usually when I returned to the first project, I found that I was unstuck.

I realize that I do this a lot. The occasional change in context turns out to be just what I need to avoid hitting roadblocks.

It still seems slightly unintuitive to me that working on multiple projects in parallel can actually be more productive than focusing on one. But hey, it works.

Some years ago I was having a conversation at a conference with an artist. The topic got around to the classic computer game of Asteroids.

I was talking about how cool it was that when your ship goes off to the right of the screen, it always come back again from the left. And when it goes off the top of the screen, it comes back in on the bottom. So you never need to hit a wall.

“Basically,” I said, “the game is played on the surface of a torus.”

“No,” he said, “that means it’s on the surface of a sphere.”

I needed a way to convince him. So I came up with the following explanation. “Imagine,” I said, “that one person playing is traveling in an endless loop horizontally [the blue line in the image on the left], and another person is traveling in an endless loop vertically [the red line in the image on the left]. Those two people will meet in only one place.

“But if it were on a sphere, they would meet at two places: In both the front and the back of the sphere [like in the image in the middle]. But since they only meet in one place as they loop around, it’s just like a torus [like in the image on the right].”

He thought about it for a moment, and then said “Yes, I see it now. You’re right, it’s on a torus.” Which made me very happy, because the entire conversation had been just words — no pictures necessary.

Later that day I relayed this conversation to Vi Hart, who was also at the conference. She just looked at me for a moment, and then said “You know, that’s the definition of a torus.”

That was good to know.

I am very happy to see that today’s date is a palindrome. The digits read the same forward and backwards. This leads to a number of interesting questions.

An easy question is, when is the next date that is a palindrome?

How much more challenging question is, what percentage of all dates are palindromes?

In the last few days, I was working on a software project and I gradually realized that the tools that I was using were not up to the task. So I made myself a new set of tools, and then progress was very rapid.

But then I realized that the new tools that I had just made were probably more valuable than the original project itself.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere.

Like many people, I am a big fan of Peter Steiner’s classic 1993 New Yorker cartoon. “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

It packs a lot of meaning about everything that is weird and crazy about being on-line into one very clever and totally on-point joke. The joke works because the disconnect between your “real life” identity and your internet identity is a knife that cuts in so many directions.

On the one hand the internet levels the playing field, allowing people to get in the game, regardless of appearance, ethnicity, age, wealth or other relatively superficial signifiers of social status. On the other hand, that same cloak of anonymity allows some really terrible stuff to happen.

I thought of it today because our lab is submitting our work to a conference, and the conference allows only one person to be the official submitter. Yet since we are all working on the submission together, we need to share a single username and password.

Our solution is to create a make-believe user — our lab. This imaginary “lab” person is going to submit the work, and presumably will also have the option to attend the conference. Which is less crazy than it used to be, now that conferences can be attended on-line.

So the thought that has been going through my head all day is: “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a lab.”

One of the weird things about elevators is that you sometimes get to witness tiny snippets of people’s lives. And often those snippets are out of context.

Today I was riding up an elevator and a man and a woman were talking behind me. The woman said “He has a persistent sneezing problem.”

My mind started racing at the thought of such a thing. I tried to imagine what it might be like to find yourself constantly sneezing, wherever you go. Particularly in these pandemic times, that would be a very unfortunate affliction indeed. Poor guy. How on earth does he get through the day?

The conversation continued. The man asked “What are you doing about it?”

The woman replied “We asked the vet, and the vet said he would be ok.”

Some years ago a colleague asked me whether I could create a 3D character that was also a musical note. The idea was that the character would walk up and down a virtual piano keyboard, playing music.

I came up with a 3D creation that I feel conveys both “character” and “musical note”. You can check it out here.