Reflecting on POVs

Alternative Closeup Vistas

(click through to Flickr for magnified view options)

One might imagine I’m some kind of super-nerd when it comes to POV-Ray, which I take credit for compiling on my Raspberry Pi long ago, and for getting to run well on a Mac, whereas its most-developed-for platform was Windows.

However when it comes to scene description language, used internally to that ray-tracer, I don’t consider myself an uber-master by a long shot. I might have benefitted from some patient teachers but having these tools at home made self-study an easy prospect to realize.

So it sort of came to me recently, that I’ve been too rigid in how I place the camera. I’ve been struggling with showing BRYG the way we want to: Blue to my left, Red to my right, Yellow behind those two, in the middle, but in the distance, and Green up above, at the apex, the eye in the sky so to speak. Like the BRY triangle on the ground is the base, the tripod, and they come together at a center (I make it Orange for origin) to support a mast, a flagpole pointing up, to the green orb glowing at the apex.

To be more specific, I was using rotation parameters over simply taking control of initial positioning. Rotating the camera involves orbiting around the origin on a great circle defined by the existing radius. But why mess with that so exclusively, just look from a different angle and rotate from there.

Why worry about all this stuff and what does it have to do with POV-Ray?  Well, put on a computer game developer hat and you will see right away that some in-common orientation makes sense if a team plans to play by some set of rules, usually necessary for a real game. Call them conventions. Call them axioms. Call them definitions. The terminology varies.

Again, my “insight” was I can render my scene with the camera looking at the origin from any location, and I have control over that location by means of XYZ coordinates, in the world coordinate system that comes with POV-Ray, the one native to its arena (or vista if you prefer). 

I’ll call my insight a “duh moment” as even putting it into words makes it sound so obvious, so how could it possibly be a breakthrough? Some breakthroughs are like that: you see the obvious (unobvious to you, hitherto).

But that’s just an example of how below the bell, to the left of the peak I mean, I am, when it comes to my POV-Ray (Persistence of Vision is what POV means, but also Point of View in the art world) skill set. I’m not confessing some great weakness. My French sucks even worse than my Arabic, which is saying something. I’m not a master of every skill set I’ve acquired. That’s really par for the course, nothing to exude shame over.

I’ve also played around with spawning a process from Python and running POV-Ray within that. However most of my experiments were of a different sort. Since the pipeline begins in Pylandia, and outputs in POV-Ray scene description language, why not output in something else? 

VRML was a first realized prospect, but browsers moved away from VRML (remember VRML? Virtual Reality Markup Language). 

What else? Why Visual Python of course, an API to 3D World mere mortals (like me) could master. I swapped out POV-Ray output for real time control of OpenGL (3D rendering). In Python that might mean talking to a different module. I did my original Hypertoons by this means.

The computer game I imagine we were working on (there’s a Made in Mexico angle) features a POV (point of view) that starts out looking at what I’ll call the TV Tower. 

A tetrahedron defines it. In some versions, three taut cables tether it tightly in its vertical state, pillar vertical, no matter high winds. In other versions, it looks more like a camera tripod with legs Red, Blue and Yellow. Yellow is in the back from our home position angle, staring at said tripod, and looking up the mast it supports, to the Green ball, which might be programmed. They all could be programmed. 

The lights at the corners could maybe exchange information (flora, fauna…) through the six edges defining the home base tetrahedron (HBT or HB4). This could be the premise of many a game.

Games conventionally come in levels and the game of “levels” comes in categories. 

Most commonly, the pyramid, narrowing towards the top and usually presented as 2D-flat, so we don’t have to worry whether its a half-octahedron or true 4eyes (a shoptalk) in this picture (3D-sculpture talk would take us there, is what we use here in QuadCraft). 

Alternatively: concentric circles, with “more inward” levels usually the more desirable direction. Percolating to a surface and breaking free, escaping, in any direction, is less commonly the story-driver meme, but “uncommon” is no put-down. Bell curves are what they are.

As readers here know, I think it’s low-IQ to think in terms of “races” in the first place, so asking how the races rank IQ-wise kind of puts one in a subculture, simply from asking. My subculture wouldn’t pose the question using obsolete eugenics concepts. We’re not kooks.

Pride: An Investigation

Let’s investigate the word “pride” (brief seance to conjure Wittgenstein’s ghost) and how it works in our language. Starting at the level of moral judgment (considered low), the word “stinks” in the sense of giving off a negative vibe. 

“Pride goeth before the fall” as the saying goes. Pride is close to (adjacent to) “vanity”, one of the original seven sins (mnemonic).

However “pride” is also adjacent to “esteem” which is in turn close to “self respect”. To be proud of oneself may be a sign of mental health according to many codifications. Certainly self pride in the sense of self respect has got to be better than self loathing. 

Then come the parades: like gay pride, like black pride, like whatever pride. Wholesome pride in one’s group, be that family, town or country, is “a thing” (as we say, in this day and age).

In other words, we’re not saddled with either a negative or positive spin, when in comes to how pride plays out, in the sea (some say swamp) of “morality”.

At a higher level, the religious teaching is about “giving glory to god (or God)” which entails giving credit to a higher power for one’s sense of selfhood, of whatever dimensions. Selfhood rests in a more comprehensive Self in this model, and the conscious self in the moment, the now-moment I, is largely unaware of its larger context, almost by definition.

Ultimately, in “giving glory to God” one is admitting it’s really the other way around: whatever we feel prideful of, is owing to that greater Self of which we’re largely unaware, and blissfully so. We go with the flow. That’s Taoist in essence.

The action toward regaining, restoring or rehabilitating a lost preferred state is likewise a heading away from a state of lost pride, deteriorated performance. Over a long arc of someone’s career, this may be called a comeback. However comebacks may be from one moment to the next, in some balancing act.

Equilibrium marks a state of no pausing, through which we overshoot time and again.

Pride in one’s work, in one’s craft, in one’s performance, is nothing to sneeze at or cut down out of reflex, when it arises in oneself, or in another. Opening windows to what’s glorious to behold, is innately beneficial. Why mock what would be easier to simply respect?  Insincere mockery is merely a callow form of cynicism.

Synergetic Arcana

In the backroom faculty lounge area, where Synergetics folks hang out, Syn-U folks for example, we're yakking about our lesson plans, curriculum segments, syllabus readings. I've been hammering out new ways to connect to BASKET from Quadrays, such as via this term "vane". The "vane" comes from windmill terminology; wind-driven surfaces, like propellor blades.

In this namespace, a vane is an isosceles triangle; six of them appear in our home base tetrahedron (HBT), our D-edged unit volume. Each is comprised by two caltrop spokes of length sqrt(6)/4 and an opposite edge of D. The Synergetics A module has a half-vane face, a right triangle. We have our segue.

As we start seeing more implementations of Quadrays, in alignment with our QuadCraft Project, how they're calibrated vs-a-vs XYZ becomes a topic, as do volume computations. My computer language encoded framework is one possible solution, already field-tested. 

I'm continuing to propagate it, by just using it.

just use it

Another isosceles triangle we want to promote, in the sense of analyze, is somewhat similarly shaped in having a wide angle, 108 degrees versus ~109.47 degrees. The two sides may be set to unit this time, or use the letter D, to remind of both IVM ball diameter, and of cube face diagonal (our volume 3). The opposite edge length is now phi.

The Hidden Room (movie review)

This was 2 of 2 of the two “The” movies I picked out at MMU: The Glass Key and The Hidden Room.

Jealousy and triangles are the stuff of novels and real life melodrama more generally, so I’m hardly making a deep point if I point out the relevance of triangles to Noirs as a genre. It’s just noirs are adjacent to murder mysteries, or more colloquially “who done its” although who committed the murder is not always the point.

As omniscient viewer-voyeurs, the Hollywood norm, we knew all along that the Brit guy was holding the American guy in a hidden room because the latter had been cavorting with his flirtatious wife, who liked to flirt with guys and who thinks her hubby is a jerk. 

The jerk (he is a jerk) decides to seek revenge and devises this plot to off the next dandy boyfriend type to come along, and he happens to be this unlucky American dude, with a wrong-side-of-the-tracks (other side of Atlantic) accent and everything (crude manners).

I like how the movie starts out with the older gentleman set, boomers by today’s standards, although that’s all wrong, sitting around smoking and drinking and carrying on about relative values of currencies, the way older male grownups tends to yak when running in packs (clubs) like this. 

Humans often like to segregate by gender; males like their pyramid hierarchies (called soldiering). These were the old United Kingdom imperialists watching their empire go on in but fragments, in breakup mode.

One could argue the beginning of the end was the American Revolution itself, but this isn’t a history movie, it’s a detective movie, a noir.

The other main hero, aside from the captured American (which American puts up a good front even though his would-be murderer is hellbent) is the Scotland Yard detective, the quintessential “mind like a steel trap” dude, the Columbo of this story, a British Peter Falk. 

Our culprit boomer feels hounded from their first meeting, which of course clues our detective to the man’s guilt: his sense of smell (the odor of fear) leads him by the nose to the hidden holding chamber, just in time to frustrate the murderer’s objective.  

Another monkey wrench: his Breaking Bad style bathtub had been drained of its body-dissolving acids, meticulously transported from another secret room back at headquarters — a dog trick, literally. This story is clever in that way, by getting a cute dog into the action.

So the jerk culprit boomer doesn’t even get the satisfaction of killing his victim and yet he’s caught with murderous intent, and, plot twist, even though we think that means the American gets the girl (the flirtatious wife), all he really wants is her dog (and vice versa), whom he’s bonded with in captivity, and she’s gracious enough to let that happen. 

Another triangle is solved.

Two Frame Animation

2-frame GIF: IVM ball coming and going

Spyder IDE; Python source for GIF

Believing in Universe (School of Tomorrow)

LOL 1900s

For Pythonistas

 

BACKGROUND READING ON SYNERGEO

Drifting Apart

The Roaring 20s

Like many in my senior cohort, kicked back in a McMansion maybe, in Beverly Hills, what I like to do with my time is check out the long arc of history as seen through the filmmaker's lense. That includes, but is not limited to, the Hollywood movie makers. They didn't used to have so much competition as they have today. 

Likewise I believe my Lazy-boy chair peers are glad for the Criterion Collection, which in the rabbinical tradition glosses the films with lots of behind the scenes peeks, along with scholarly commentary, to provide more context. Context matters.

I grabbed The Roaring 20s off the Noir shelf at MMU, along with I. The Jury which I needed to swap for a regular DVD version as I don't have a 4K player yet. The film was well timed given I've been thinking retrospectively about my Uncle Bill Lightfoot, who was born the year The Great Gatsby was published. Bill lived through a pretty long arc.

The theme of the evolving roles for good guys and bad guys, star heroes and villains, with supporting characters, is especially pronounced when the film is self consciously doing a "great sweep of history" angle. 

They were all good guys in WW1, sharing the same foxhole. But in returning to civilian life, they'd gravitate to different scenarios based on luck and character. Bogart plays an especially villainous dude. Cagney is the more likable, but too full of himself to realize how clueless he is with respect to women.

I learned a lot listening to the followup analysis, including from the director himself from the 1970s. I'll be weaving what I've learned into my own internalized tapestry of world history; something we should all be working on. If you need an excuse to pay people (so they don't starve or turn to criminal activities), pay them to improve their internalized world models. 

Don't let them turn out like those RAND Corporation or Brookings people: pathetic when it comes to understanding how the world moves on (the original title for this film).