Tonight, I spent a little time on a logo. I'm always trying to make JF look better and this is an attempt. Using Kontour, KDE 3.0's Open Source/Free Software vector graphics program, I made these two drawings. Then I used GIMP to dress them up by using simple blur/sharpen filters. It worked pretty well. The one in the lower right is just a fun one that probably will not get further than a modest mention in this Making Of as the lesson of the day. Today's lesson is beauty. Many say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It depends who you ask. Usually I'm more a fan of that beauty is that which is _good_. However, we physicists have a very objective definition of beauty: lack of entropy and symmetry. Not just in our thermodynamics and electromagnetism do we look for low-entropy systems and symmetry. To find people of the opposite gender, we look for these two attributes. Let's define them. Entropy basically is the order of a system. Something chaotic is high entropy. How do we define order? By probability and usable energy. Noise is high entropy because it is highly disordered. If your TV screen is filled with a bunch of perfect diagonal lines through it, check the wires because it is not likely to be normal noise/entropy, but rather a simple loose connection to cause such a low entropy error. And then there is probability. The probability that you get four aces in poker is low, so getting four aces is a low entropy state: someone is likely fixing the deck. But getting a four, five, ten, jack, and queen is more likely than four aces since there are four fours, four fives, four tens, four jacks, and four queens while there are only four aces. Then we have symmetry. This is more often applied to beauty because a lot of living thing are symmetric, humans for one. There's azimuthal symmetry (EM students love that), radial symmetry, mirror symmetry, and a few others. Anything crooked is automatically less beautiful because it is not symmetric. Buck teeth and freckles can be a positive attribute if they are symmetric.
Izzy from yesterday's Making Of JF Page said that OpenGL's fog is not good enough. Then I showed him my old DirectX8.1 fog and he said that it was amazing. Well, here is OpenGL's fog. Hahaha. They're very similar. Yeah. Maybe he didn't understand how to make OpenGL do what he wants to do. It has a lot of options: mode, start, end, color, and density. The mode is the tricky one: linear, exp, or exp2. Fog = color*(end-start)*density/(distance - start) ^ mode or something like that. What that means is that when distance = start, there is fog = 0, no fog. When distance=end, fog = 1. Between the two, it goes linearally, exponentially, or exponentially squared. For my Pentium 4 1.7 GHz GeForce2 in Linux, with a medium number of vertexes (10,000 at 60 fps), none of the three increase the frame rates. But... I hear that other computers do linear better.
I'm listening to this good rap. It's about smack. It's called "Stay positive" by The Streets. It's a very negative song. I'm usually not keen about rap, but ever since I started listening to KEXP 90.3 Seattle, I've been gaining an ear for it. KEXP has the only source of brick and mortar techno radio in Seattle that I know. They play good music and they are locally owned opposed to Clear Channel. They are part of Experience Music Project, "the Jimmy Hendrix Museum".
This pic is for Izzy of #opengl on irc.freenode.com.
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