Misheard lyrics

Another song that pops up in my head every now and then has the refrain ”Soft lights like in Chinatown”, which I think is quite evocative and romantic. However, I haven’t been able to find any reference to it on YouTube or elsewhere, but now, apparently because it is trending on TikTok for whatever reason, I found it, and the actual lyrics are the rather more nonsensical “It’s so fly-day fly-day Chinatown”.

Advertising

Some advertising burns itself into my brain, while I remain totally ignorant of who is trying to sell what. One example is these two hilariously clueless gentlemen, whom I probably resemble more than I want to recognise.

Respect

I’ve been very put off by this old interview of Paul Simon by Dick Cavett where Simon plays a still-unfinished version of “Still Crazy After All These Years” and launches into a discussion of how the tune might continue, and Cavett goes “I don’t understand any of this, so I’ll just make unfunny wisecracks.” So, it was such a joyful experience to find this video where Askold Buk talks with Hank Marvin for over an hour about how the sound of The Shadows actually is created. I had no idea there were so many parameters to playing an electric guitar.

I maded a film

Reading Devaney’s An Introduction to Chaotic Dynamical Systems, Second Edition I found the description of a solenoid (§2.5) quite interesting: It starts out as a torus, but then you repeatedly lengthen it, shrinking the radius, and fold it back on itself, much like you fold a hair tie, but with the difference that the volume is not retained, so that each folded form fits inside the previous one. I thought that it would be nice to make a recursive function to draw a solenoid to arbitrary depth, and then to make a raytraced animation of the solenoid developing. As it were, I couldn’t quite work out the proper recursive step, so the idea has been languishing for a while (like a couple of years or so).

A few weeks ago I decided that I would get a grip on myself and work out the proper function, since it was obviously simple, if nothing else so to make sure I’m not entirely senile. After a couple of nights of scratching sketches on paper I finally managed to work out the proper order of things and started to transfer data to POVRay, my preferred raytracer. And of course, since I fully subscribe to the idea that glass balls are an important feature of raytracing, I would make the solenoid out of virtual glass. It would also spin, so as to bring out the shape better (on the assumption that viewers would not have access to a stereo viewer).

I soon realised that it was inconvenient to run a C program to generate the coordinates of the object and transfer to a POVRay input file by cut-and-paste every time I wanted to tinker with anything. Happily it is possible to program directly in the POVRay scene description language, so I reimplemented the function and could then work more or less interactively in POVRay. Delaney proposes shrinking the radius of the tube by a factor 10 for each folding, but in my opinion that makes it disappear from view too fast, so I used a factor 3 instead.

My original idea was that I’d render each level and fade it out while fading in the next level, but it turned out to be rather complicated as the surface+interior computational model of POVRay doesn’t really have a concept of fading, to achieve this a large number of (non-linear) parameters have to be adjusted in synchrony. I pondered this a bit, but decided that while I might eventually work out how to do the transforms it was probably easier to instead do the fading on the resulting images, rather than the 3D models, so generated images with only a single object in each and then composited them using ImageMagick and a couple of awk scripts.

This looked OK, but I still wasn’t quite happy with the results, there should be more movement in the animation. In the end I rewrote the solenoid code a bit, so that there would be an animated transition where the next level double-coil shrinks and separates out of the previous level. On a whim I added a background texture and was happily surprised by how much this made the glassiness of the tube pop out and made its structure more distinctive. The full length video took almost a week to render, the later parts requiring about an hour per frame, as the object becomes more complex. For no particular reason I rendered the animation at PAL resolution, notionally at 25 frames/second, but that made the motion a bit too fast in my opinion, so I pulled the output framerate down to 10 fps when generating the video (with ffmpeg) from the individual frames rendered by POVRay. That could then be uploaded to YouTube:

If anyone wants the code to play around with, just ask in the comments.

Albatross

As you may remember, I tried to convince The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain to cover Albatross, and while it seems they so far haven’t taken me up on it, Pražského ukulele bandu have:

Everything is on YouTube

When I made my first visit to the US, this ad came on on the TV and again and again over the following days. The horrific scenario of pre-prepared junk food with soulless activity cards burnt “My Mom’s one busy lady” into my mind, enough for me to look for it on YouTube. What’s possibly worse is that I actually found it – in multiple versions. Other people must also have tried to exorcise the jitters by rewatching the scene.

The Only-Begotten Children

I’m not the only one to have Only-Begotten Children, but so does Prince Philip, as witnessed by the Reverend Hubert Rumtumtibumbum (starts at 5:00):

At sea

My Mid-atlantic English sometimes plays tricks on me. I have been looking all around YouTube in the hope of finding this clip, but I was using “shopping cart” as the search term, rather than “shopping trolley”. I probably only found it now because someone at Google extended their thesaurus.

Terrorist

Clearly the authorities look in the completely wrong direction. (I guess this is also an example of the male gaze.)

Still hurts a bit

Earworm

The voices in my head compel me: everybody else must also have this buzzing in their heads.

False memories?

Continuing the Uruguayan theme, this is «Stefanie» by Alfredo Zitarrosa. For some reason I associate this piece with Lasse Berghagen. Has he actually made a version of this at some point or am I just imagining things?

More scary robots

Boston Dynamics, whom I've mentioned before, have created a pole-climbing robot:

Quest: A Long Ray's Journey into Light

There's nothing quite like ray tracing of glass spheres to scream out “Computer Graphics!” Unfortunately the YouTube version of this classic is rather fuzzy.



I did work on an Apollo one summer at Ericsson. I thoought it a bit weird at points, but it had a Logo implementation, so I played around with turtle graphics; a fairly natural way of doing graphics for me anyway as I at the time mostly worked on a pen plotter—graphics displays being very expensive and hard to come by.

…for the other ones

Whether you celebrate the return of the Sun to the Northern Hemisphere or not, peace and sublime moments of happiness to you all.

Because it's Christmas, or something

Found on Zooillogix, an elephant giving birth. Do not worry, it all ends well.

If the Japanese didn't exist, we'd have to invent them

The Algorithm March:

OK, it's an ad

…but it's still a seriously weird example of what you can do with digital post-processing.

Professor Balthazar home page

Since I was just writing about Eastern European animation of my childhood, of course I must present the history of Professor Balthazar.

In Soviet Russia, films watch you!

In my childhood, it was acceptable to show Eastern European films on television, and I tended to prefer Czech and Yugoslav animation to productions from, say, Hanna-Barbera. So, now The Only-Begotten Son and I found Russian Video from Russia, with over 500 video clips of Russian and Soviet origin. We spent the evening watching Aleksandr Nevskij, but with my low bandwidth and slow computer it wasn't the most enjoyable way of watching film. If others have wider broadband, let me know how good the videos at Viddler look.