Inigo Quilez   ::     ::  
1402 blog posts, written between 2008 and 2016. These are mostly short observations, funny thoughts and word playing. Some are embarrasingly corny, some more deep. I keep it here mostly a little time capsule for myself, organized by month:



<
June 2012
>
one of the differences...
2012-06-30
...is that science is not exclusive.

you don't need to embrace science to be allowed to buy a smart phone. similarly, you don't get denied service in a hospital just because you dare indicate evolution is something subject to debate.

sometimes i think, too bad the best are usually the humblest
so what
2012-06-27
when you arrive to the office with the same outfit as the day before... perhaps, i'm just saying, it's simply because your laundry machine was broken and you run out of cloths. that can happen too, can't it!

the fact that people care about these things amuses me
i do listen to them
2012-06-25
usually people seem to perfectly know, without any doubt or room for discussion, what's right and wrong. both in general topics and for your personal matters as well. which i find very, very scary.

that's why when i am about to take a big decision, if everybody firmly agrees on something and knows what i should be doing, then i always do exactly the opposite. just in case. really.

so, it's not like i don't listen to them. quite the contrary!
when the towers tremble
2012-06-23
unless you lacked the intellectual ability and maturity to create and manage your own morality, i don't see how what other people decide to do with their lives can possibly offend you.


crazy colors
2012-06-21
no picture can capture the intensity and vivid saturation of the colors of the longest day of the year.


programming... is not a job
2012-06-20
more often than not "programming" is not a job. it is the means to do a job. a job is "making robust and fast websites" or "creating pretty images for a game" or "making an crossbrosser sound api" or "building a scalable content management system". but not programming. so when somebody tells me "i want to be a programmer", i think they are dangerously getting it wrong or even missing the point, or perhaps not... but just in case i usually ask them "what exactly do you want to program?".
i finally do have some "stuff"
2012-06-18
everything i value is non tangible. everything i'm passionate about cannot be touched. everything that inspires me has no weight. not surprisingly i own a lot that i can talk about, yet i own little i have to carry. my cousin used to tell me, back in our teenage, that i was "minimalistic". my mother always hassled in my birthday as i never felt any special desire for anything that could be packaged and enveloped with a ribbon. i always failed to feel that urge to own any of the stuff that seems to drive the fanboys of the different objectified product based tribes. so yeah, my life weights little. i don't do it on purpose, it's not a trend, it's not an attitude. it's a complete non conscious consequence of what i feel and understand my life i suppose.

however, today i have brought some "stuff" to my life ("stuff" as in Gorge Carlin's monologue). it's the only "stuff" i have been aroused by in a long, long time. it is a piano. i know. i always wanted one, i always dreamed of playing one. the reason i waited this long, or well, the reason i finally decided to take the step involves several people, and a few coincidences. as with so many other great things that happened to me.

so now, if anybody asks me, i can say that i do "have" some stuff.

funny americans
2012-06-16
if it was the 16th of June of 1949, and you were to say the date, you wouldn't be pronouncing the digits that make the date in the logical order {1, 6, 7, 1, 9, 4, 9}, but you'd actually be going through them in this order instead: {7, 6, 1, 9, 1, 4, 9}. say it loud, you'll see. i know, americans are crazy!
"losing" second "leters"
2012-06-15
when did Mondays loose their second "o", or welcomes their second "l"?
nothing like doing nothing
2012-06-13
of course by nothing i mean doing lots of things really, like stretching your back while you yawn, singing in bed looking at the ceiling after having sang already in the shower for a while, listening to the sounds of life coming through the open window and guessing and picturing in your mind what every single sounds you hear is, reading a bit, perhaps finally leaving your bed at 3 PM to switch the computer on in order to put some sound track to this fantastic day of nothingness, dancing a bit to it, laying back again in bed and staring at the plants.

i already expressed a few times in this very blog my pity for those who are not capable of this type of happiness, my compassion for those who _need_ to _get things done_ all the time or feel bad about waking up late and such. today, instead, i'm making an appeal to everybody to reconsider the value of time, and to claim it as something worth enjoying in itself. there is really nothing like doing nothing. promise.
note to self...
2012-06-11
...please, stop looking for your shoes in the refrigerator. already. seriously
playing with pebbles
2012-06-09
we'll never know if ancient men did manipulate and actually think of numbers through pebbles. but for some reason i found myself thinking that if a primitive mind ever did so, perhaps it would have made sense to it to arrange the pebbles in different shapes and structures, like, for example, rectangles.

of course many numbers can be arranged as a rectangle of pebbles. but some cannot. those are the prime numbers, numbers than you can count by putting one pebble after the other in a line, or a one dimensional arrangement, but not in a rectangle. so, perhaps, instead of primes we could call them 1 dimensional numbers. from all of the non-prime numbers, from those which can be arranged as rectangles, some would actually accept 3 dimensional arrangements into boxes as well... but not all would! so, there should be some numbers which we could call 2 dimensional numbers, which would look like prime numbers to beings of a three dimensional world which were unable to discern below the two dimensions of the plane. of course, in current terms, these are numbers which are the product of two primes. the numbers which cannot be arranged in 3 dimensions, but can in 2 (and therefore in 1), are:

4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 21, 22, 25, 26, 33, 34, 35...

the idea can be extended to 3-dimensional numbers, etc etc. in summary, we have:







0d numbers1
1d numbers (primes)2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, ...
2d numbers4, 6, 9, 10, 14, 15, 21, 22, 25, 26, 33, 34, 35, 38, 39, 46, 49, ...
3d numbers8, 12, 18, 20, 27, 28, 30, 42, 44, 45, 50, ...
4d numbers16, 24, 36, 40, ...
heros and pain
2012-06-07
random though during shower-time: under which conditions would i donate an organ? and i'm not talking about giving my old Casio PT-1 away, but a donating a real organ. it's one of those things i try to avoid thinking about, cause just even scratching the surface of a hypothetical story that would require such a heroic action from me seems such a painful one that simply its echo already hurts.


desMudarse
2012-06-05
si la ropa (sólo interior en castellano) es "muda", ¿por qué a ponerse en pelotas lo llamamos desnudarse en vez de desmudarse? y por otro lado, si desnudarse es despeloticarse, ¿nudarse no debería ser vestirse? y las playas nudistas, ¿no deberían ser de hecho playas desnudistas? a veces el lenguaje tiene poco sentido...
big small dreams
2012-06-03
i finally played a real piano. and not any piano, but a beautiful grand piano.

after months learning with a cheap plastic midi keyboard, getting to play on a beautiful real grand piano not only was a big experience in itself, but it was also an intense and vivid experience, flavored as only those things that you do for the first time are. it really was a magic experience. i was overflowed by feelings as my clumsy fingers danced over the heavy keys. after all, i was making a dream come true. thing is, sometimes dreams are not that big, or deep, or pretentious. sometimes they are simple things, like, playing a piano. yet, they fell big, and therefore they are big big. my heart was beating fast, and my hands shaking. it was wonderful.


dot product girls
2012-06-01
according to my friend, "a dot product girl" is a girl that looks cute from the front, but not so much when looked from the side. my other friend turns her head at him with disapproval - not a polite idea. i suggest that perhaps we could call such individuals Lambert or Diffuse Persons instead. we soon realize that, sure enough, that wouldn't describe well what happens when you look to somebody from their back, unless you have your own wrapped and properly exponentiated dot product. anyway, by the time we decide we need circular harmonics to model these sort things we realize the bottle is empty and that, perhaps, it's time to leave already.