Stats for nerds
4recommend
4mentions
4people
2008–2020years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- "Light and Color in the Outdoors" by Marcel Minnaert. The book goes into the physics of a lot of outdoor phenomena; you will be amazed at the things you never noticed or thought about before reading it.
"The History and Social Influence of the Potato" is a pretty good time.
"Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen" may sound way too niche, but it's fascinating as a study of transportation in a drug economy. Qat is a perishable leaf (like salad) and the politics of the entire region depend on who can more reliably deliver it to gunmen.
- > That's not dismissive -- no one has ever made any program that outputs a string of images indistinguishable from a real camcorder. It's just that hard.
> Note the important distinction: no one, anywhere, has ever created a real-time video simulation indistinguishable from the output of a real camcorder
You redefined what you're talking about: clarifying that it has to be real-time. What if someone generated 2 images within 1/24th of a second? Would that would count as a 33.367ms long video?
To learn more about how the eye interprets the structure of light, I recommend skimming Minnaert's Light and Color in the Outdoors (won't cover motion).
- If you're into this sort of thing, I highly, highly recommend M. G. J. Minnaert's Light and Color in the Outdoors: http://www.amazon.com/Light-Color-Outdoors/dp/0387979352
The harvest moon is one of his favorite illusions, and there just tons of little nuggets like this. It reads like an optical Wittgenstein: a series of short, numbered observations about the way light and vision work that you'd never have thought of, but once you read, you can't stop noticing.
E.g.: you can always predict exactly where a rainbow will be, you can tell leaded glass at a glance, wire meshes only cast vertical shadows, the green flash is very real, sunsets look exactly like sunrises, you can navigate by a polarized lens, hills look steeper from above for the same reason that steeples look shorter than the shadows they cast on a cloud (related to the harvest moon), and the line of the sun on the ocean always points right to you. Have you ever noticed atmospheric perspective, or how drastically colors change with distance? You will after reading this book.
Minnaert makes some interesting claims about the harvest moon in particular. For example, lie on your back and look at the sky for a while: the flattened dome effect tends to wash out rather quickly, and the moon looks roughly the same size in any direction. He also claims that binocular vision is closely related to the perceptual flattening of the celestial dome, and one-eyed people do not perceive the harvest moon. I'm not sure if he's totally correct, but it's interesting to think about, isn't it?
It changed the way I look at the world. I believe scientific consensus has moved on in certain areas in the years since it was originally composed, but Minnaert's careful thought has aged superbly. Definitely worth it.
- Did any of you catch the Minnaert recommendation, for "Light and Color In The Outdoors", the author's notion of a strong work about the connection between programming and art? I bought a used copy for Erin, and it was pretty awesome. Did any of you read it? What did you think?
