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]”.<\/p>\n
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<\/i> of an image.<\/p>\n
I really liked that. So when I went up to the counter to return my coffee cup, I said “I like your shirt”.<\/p>\n
Whereupon he looked at my shirt, and said “I like your shirt too, but I’m not smart enough to understand it.”<\/p>\n
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<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n So I wasn’t actually wearing a computer graphic image — I was wearing the idea<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n 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.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading “[image]”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15059"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15079,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15059\/revisions\/15079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}