Today Jake and I had a small photoshopping contest between the two of us. The original image is here:
Here are the two competing entries. I rolled randomly to determine which one to put on the top and which one to put on the bottom so there’s no bias there.
We are looking to gather votes from a few people to see who “won” the contest. But, really, everyone’s a winner! So, leave some comments with your preferences. Refer to the top one as A, and the bottom one as B.
Okay, so I was dicking around on ebaumsworld and I came across the following page:
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/peoplecount.html
I’m not spoiling anything when I say that there are 12 people in the first part of the animation, and 13 in the second. However, I have been staring at this for about 40 minutes now and I cannot figure out where the extra person comes from. I even loaded up this picture into an image editor and recreated everything by hand, and somehow an extra person comes out of nowhere and I have no idea why.
If anyone can explain this to me, I will give birth to their child.
I came up with the following theory today, and I want to give it a web presence before anyone else tries to invent the same theory.
Gucwa’s Law of Wikipedia states that every article on Wikipedia is 6 or fewer degrees of separation from the Wikipedia article on World War II. That is, starting at any given article on Wikipedia, you can get to the World War II article by following six or fewer links.
(In most test cases I’ve done, this can be accomplished in three or four. I don’t think I’ve seen any at all yet that required all six. Sometime in the future I might tighten Gucwa’s Law to five or four degrees of separation.)
I challenge anyone to disprove this law by finding an article that does not meet this requirement. Unfortunately, this “law” cannot really be proven, it can only be disproven. So, I am opening it up to the scrutiny of the public eye for testing.
In Star Wars Episodes 2 and 3, there is a sharp contrast made between Anakin and Amidala. For example, in Episode 2, during some cutesy conversation they’re having in a grassy field, Anakin says he’d prefer an “empire” so he could get things done, and this upsets Amidala, who is a supporter of democracy. You can see this schism forming throughout the two movies. Amidala is in the Senate, Anakin is a Jedi. Amidala prefers to consult with her allies, Anakin likes to charge ahead and bust some heads on his own. The fact that Amidala is portrayed as the champion of democracy hits its peak in Episode 3 when Palpatine tries to dissolve the Senate or something, and she says “So this is how democracy dies. With thunderous applause.”
I was thinking today, and I arrived at the following thought. Amidala is Queen Amidala. Her home planet isn’t even democratic. She only got to where she is due to birthright, and yet somehow she thinks she’s all about democracy. This is akin to the United Nations breaking up, and the dude from China just slowly shakes his head and says, “Poor democracy. Never even stood a chance.” If she’s all about the democratic process, seems like she should start on her own turf.
Update
So I did some research into this, and apparently she was elected to the position of Queen. So I guess now my problem is that George Lucas doesn’t know what the word Queen means.
So, I had my class today in Databases, but the subject matter is not important. What’s important is the projector that the professor used to teach the class. This is just an ordinary projector. It took video input from his laptop and shined it onto the whiteboard at the front of the class. I’m sure most of you have seen this kind of thing before. He was using Power Point to display various screens with white background and black text. The projector was bright enough that he was able to leave the ambient room lights on.
Then I realized the part of this that blew my mind. The black text being displayed was just the color of whiteboard it was being displayed on. That is, if a projector wants to display a black portion, it doesn’t shine any light at all on that portion. So, when I saw black text, I was reading the non-lit parts of the whiteboard surrounded by the lit parts. The text looked genuinely black.
Whoa.