was blind, but now i see (<-- a pun)

what we see:

what we learn we see:

i am flabbergasted at how mislead i was in elementary school. intrigued by ars technica's article on the recent question into whether magenta is a real color, i began to investigate this chromaticity diagram further (oddly enough aspell doesn't even know that chromaticity is a real word)

when we were young we were told that the three primary colors are red, yellow, and blue, and that with these three powerful colors we can make any color in the world! this was enough for a young person. when i was a little older (5th or 6th grade?) i was let in on the secret of additive vs. subtractive colors, and that additive colors (red/green/blue) applied to light, and subtractive colors (good ol' red/yellow/blue) applied to things like paint and crayons. i didnt care about the physics or where these came from. apparently these are more psychological primary colors (read: we dont care about how this works). arent sensation and perception amazing?

in later years i would go on to learn about rods and cones in the eyes and how they pick up wavelengths of the elctromagnetic spectrum that we perceive as colors. i know about what wavelength applies to which color and what comes before and after on the EM spectrum. but i still assumed that every color of light could be made with RGB and every color of reflective objects could be made with RYB.

this graph above got me very interested in this shroud that seemed to be over our eyes. it is a plot of all the colors the average person can see. the triangle chunk taken out of it is the subset of visible colors that can be represented using the RGB model. maybe we dont care. apparently the colors outside the triangle are inefficient to reproduce electrically, and they are very similar to colors that are inside the triangle, but still. we dont see a triangle of colors, we see a tongue! i couldnt believe that humans simplify visible colors into linear combinations of these three without there being an awareness that other visible colors exist outside this subset. our tvs and computer screens cannot reproduce these ignored colors. also worth noting is that the red-yellow-blue model is old and deprecated, and now we "know better" that the best choices as the three primary subtractive colors are yellow, cyan, and magenta (all this time i have been confused into thinking that cyan and magenta were primary additive colors, not subtractive...)

the answer to ars's article is that magenta is a combination of other colors, and not a true monochromatic color. but most of what we see in the real world is not a perfect monochromatic color either, and our accepted scheme for representing color cannot realize any monochromatic colors anyway.

shutoff begins tonight

television stations can now begin shutting off their analog broadcasts today. in the twin cities, only one plans to do this: channel 23 (the CW) will end analog at 11:59pm, with other stations to follow later this week

DTV transition update

as mentioned before, no television station would like to continue broadcasting longer than they have to, but of the 491 full power stations that have expressed wishes to shut down analog broadcasting on feb 17th (instead of waiting til june 12th), the FCC has only okayed 368. for the other 123 stations, the FCC wants them to jump through several hoops if they want to turn off early, stating that it is the best interest of public safety. [via]

jimmy john's, erbert's & gerbert's, and milio's founders are all cousins!

i had heard stories - urban legends, almost - about the founders of erbert's and gerbert's being brothers (named erbert and gerbert, coincidentally) that eventually had disagreements about how sandwiches should be made so gerbert branched off, changed his name to jimmy john, and made his own sandwich franchise.

seems there is a hint of truth in this: jimmy john's came first, in 1983, founded in a garage by jimmy john liautaud. he helped his cousin, kevin schippers, set up erbert's & gerbert's in 1988 (jim was in illinois and kevin in wisconsin, so they were competing yet). little did i know, milio's founder was another cousin, mike liautaud, who also got help from jimmy john setting up a sandwich shop in 1989!

excerpt of an interview with the milio's guy:

"We all get along. We’re not going out to eat every Friday, but we’re fine... I try to keep that competition out of the family, and at family events." [franchisetimes]

all three are sandwich options on the university of minnesota campus! [mndaily]

in my opinion, jimmy john's is by far the best. now i just wish i could recreate his #5 at home...

autohotkey script for MappedUp behind a proxy

very cool new screensaver/active desktop/rss reader MappedUp is definately my new screensaver. you choose your rss feeds and it sticks them on a world map. a sample is seen below:



however, if you are behind a proxy server that requires a username and password, the feeds do not work until you enter your credentials (it uses the same interface as IE). to solve this problem, i wrote a simple autohotkey script that will simple click "okay" when the screensaver comes on:

#Persistent
settimer,check,5000 ;checks every 5 seconds to see if screensaver is active

check:
result:=DllCall("user32.dll\SystemParametersInfo","uint",0x0072, "uint", 0, "uint*",screen_saver_active, "uint", 0 )
if(screen_saver_active) ;if screensaver is active...
{
SetTitleMatchMode, 2
ifwinexist, Connect to ;and proxy window is active
MouseClick, left, 184, 320 ;click the okay button (enter does not work)
}
return

feel free to use/modify this however you want :)

i always wonder the same thing!

this is usually only a problem when the smileys are not converted

review: prince caspian

imdb rating 7.1/10
release date: 16 May 2008 (USA)
plot: he Pevensie siblings return to Narnia, where they are enlisted to once again help ward off an evil king and restore the rightful heir to the land's throne, Prince Caspian.

supposedly this strays from the source material quite a bit (i am ashame to say i have never read the book) but i found this movie to be less cutesy than the first (surprisingly frightening for a PG) but more enjoyable. plus peter dinklage was great

review: campbell's tomato soup offerings

now that i have tried all three of these, i have to warn against the first and sing praises for the last. the classic tomato is just alright when its hot. its a little thin, maybe a little too plain and tomato-y, and there are definately better soups out there. the creamy tomato solves the thinness issue, but it is still just plain tomato and so it still tastes more healthy than delicious. enter the creamy tomato parmesan bisque. i believe this to be the best soup i have ever had. it doesnt come in can form, or in the bigger microwaveable bowls, just the small soup at hand, but it is so worth it. if you get a chance, try this soup

google deleting streetview incidents

newsblog valleywag posted a story about a girl flashing the a google streetview camera. now this particular point of the street is listed as "under high demand"/'unavailable", showing instead a black screen.


this same thing has happened with other incidents caught on film, with highlights posted here

is it because they use baidu?

google suggest can produce some interesting results :-P [via]

a glaring misunderstanding by majority of media sources

i got the news story today in several of my usual news feeds that the senate has approved the DTV transition delay this time around so broadcasters can broadcast until june 12th (instead of feb 17th). however, every single news story i read on this topic (i read 7, since they were all neglecting a fact i had known) is completely ignoring what i think is the biggest part of this bill, that broadcasters MIGHT be broadcasting until june, but they do not have to. the bill allows for broadcasters to turn off analog broadcasts on feb 17th, like planned, if that is more convenient for them, yet 8 out of the nine articles i read come close to ignoring this fact.

take House Approves DTV Delay Until June (PCWORLD), which writes on about the delaying being "in an effort to prevent millions of residents from losing their TV signals," and "Many U.S. residents aren't ready for the transition, Democrats argued" only to mention at the very end, almost as a footnote, that "The bill also allows broadcasters to switch to digital broadcasts before June 12."

CNET News does the same thing with a note tagged on the end stating, "The bill allows television stations to switch from analog to digital signals before the June 12 deadline if they are ready to do so." and with feb 17th only 13 days away, what broadcatser was not prepared? every congressma who spoke about this bill talked about how consumers were not ready, but it was only consumers (and the converter box coupon fund) who were ill prepared.

eWeek and Reuters news service fail to mention this stipulation at all.

the worst offender of this oversight, however, is the san francisco chronicle, which opens with, "Television viewers who rely on sets with antennas to pick up their broadcast signals have about four extra months to get ready for the nation's switch to digital TV." furhter down the same page, they say, "The delay does not mean every station will continue to broadcast in analog. Broadcasters will be permitted to shut off their analog transmission before June 12. That creates a potential uneven transition for analog viewers, who might still lose some channels, depending on what local stations decide to do." this appears to perfectly contradict their opening statement.

i got nothing on PCMAG. they have a solid article :)

UPDATE: even the whitehouse blog got this wrong! section 4a of the bill congress passed explains what will happen but everyone seems to be ignoring this fact...