Today, at a very hip coffee shop in Vancouver, our barista was a young man with a porkpie hat and a beard longer than the beard on the lead singer of ZZ Top. He also had a very cool t-shirt — black, with a printed white message that just said “[image]”.
It was the epitome of hipness. The shirt was sort of saying “Sure, there could be an image here, but that wouldn’t be cool enough. So instead I am a shirt that simply refers to the idea of an image.
I really liked that. So when I went up to the counter to return my coffee cup, I said “I like your shirt”.
Whereupon he looked at my shirt, and said “I like your shirt too, but I’m not smart enough to understand it.”
That’s when I realized that I was wearing the cultural equivalent, in my world, of the same t-shirt. Mine was also black, and printed on it in white was the Rendering equation.
This is a wonderful mathematical integral, formulated in 1986 by Jim Kajiya, that describes the fundamental laws of how things are illuminated in computer graphics. I cannot begin to count how many technical papers in the field have been built upon this formula.
So I wasn’t actually wearing a computer graphic image — I was wearing the idea of a computer graphic image. Which means, I guess, that I am, in my way, just as much of a hipster as that barista. Only without the beard and porkpie hat.
I was happy for the compliment. “Thanks!” I said, nodding toward the word on his shirt. “One of these is a way to make one of those.”