some are surprised when i tell them i work and love making movies but that i don't like watching movies.

i don't find it so surprising. think for example of the people who like fucking but don't like kids.

or in a more artistic line, people who like cooking but not eating necessarily.

given how much i like doing nothing, i think it's time to coin the gerund nothinging

one hair at placed at random on the wall leads to a curve, a couple of them to a silhouette, and a bunch, plus some bath-art jam session, to a shape and a fun shower time.

Are you a creative mind? maybe an artist? Do you have a great sense of style, your visual skills are flawless and you are an excellent analytical thinker and can perform functional analysis?

Then, please, do not become a User Interface (UI) designer. We don't need more of you.

UI is a solved problem (for now). It has been for a few years now. Please stop reinventing ways to present information and functionality. We don't need more fancy UIs and metaphors. Just stop it. Please, stop it. Put your brains to work in other more useful things. The world will appreciate it. Thanks Very Much!

the fridge is not a good place to store your phone.

i remembered, just in time.

software renderers: please implement texture filtering or you'll end your days rendering flight progress screens for airplanes.

When you are in the plane and they announce there's the option to buy on-board articles (such as watches, perfumes, etc) at "the best prize", what do they exactly mean with "best prize"? is it "best prize" compared to all the other stores that are flying in the plane with us, I suppose?

some piece of information: as many music albums are released every year as mathematical theorems.

I personally think that maths are taught wrong. Or, perhaps, in the wrong order. See language. Kids learn to talk way before they learn to write. Kids learn to write way before they formalize language into a syntax. So by the time kids learn to write words and sentences, they are already familiar with it because they have used it for years. By the time kids learn to identify a subject or an adverb, they are already familiar with the concepts because they have been writing for years.

Now, mathematics is not being taught the same way. The teacher arrives one day and introduces trigonometric concepts and formalizes them right away, without the kids having had a chance to play with the concepts first, say for a few years, before this formalizztion work. This is very unlike language formalization. So I am not surprised trigonometry is regarded as a hard thing by studenrs. Of course it is!

I feel kids should be exposed to mathematics way earlier, or conversely, that formalization should happen way later. Let kids play with cosines for years (in a computer, in drawings, in music, in whatever works best for them) and let them build the intuitions of amplitude, phase shift and frequency naturally, easily, perhaps inevitably. By themselves. Then, years later, the teacher can start formalizing the concepts into the systematic naming conventions, categories and whatever relationships, most of which kids will find naturally agreeable.

I have seen this myself in my talks, that as soon kids can relate the mathematical concepts to things they perceive, strong intuitions are immediately built. That, together with the observation that language learning works that way and it is indeed highly successful, I can only hope this way of teaching maths was given a chance.

I guess somebody must be trying this, probably somebody in the first world (Scandinavian countries and some areas of Europe) are trying this, but I haven't done my homework and payed attention to the results.

Another quick mathematical image and animation. Experimenting with twisting the space inside out. Best seen in movement, here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XtSGDK

downstairs my office there's this very hipster food place where everything is overpriced, by 3x. and despite they have the stuff i want, and despite my employer pays my meals, i refuse to buy there and give those bastards any penny. because of their cheek. it's obscene.

Speaking of what.

Dear, USA. Locks for parking the bicycles, fences and alarms to protect your houses, or guns to defend your lives are all very third world strategies. You won't belong in the first world until you fix your inequality issue.

Dear, Europe. Your walls and anti immigration policies won't protect your society. Start working to fix the world-scale inequality problem you have created if you want to preserve your quality of life.

A rich country is not rich when its GDP is high or its wealth abundant. A rich country is rich when there's lack of poverty.

For the non-engineers who don't know what XOR means, there are three basic logic operations in electronics: AND, OR and XOR.

The AND operator is the "marriage works" operator: we are married if (and only if) you AND I are happily married. If any of us two isn't, then we won't last long.

The OR operator is the "wealthy couple" operator: we are rich if any of us is. If you OR I are rich, we are basically rich. We don't need to be both.

The XOR operator is the "horny partners try to sleep" operator: if nobody is in the bed then nobody sleeps. If you OR I are in bed but the other isn't then sleeping happens. However, if we BOTH are in bed, then again nobody sleeps.

This one was a 25 minutes doodle before dinner.

I still get surprised how important is to "just do" things rather than waiting to have the time for them, or plan and prepare them. If I had to wait to have an idea to sparkle, or wait to wake up with an epiphany or illumination of a great algorithm before starting to work on graphics, then I'd never do anything. But I think that unfortunately we all tend to fall in that kind of behavior. We are so afraid of wasting our precious time (so we can use it on social media, TV or the gym) that we have forgotten the beauty and, more importantly, the creative power of doodling, improvising, playing and just doing. And when I break the inertia and let myself start doodling, almost every time I end up creating something cool I never thought of or even imagined was possible. And the discovery of this fact makes me happy and invites me to engage in these non planned, low investment, improvisation sessions.

Today I had half an hour before dinner. So inspired by an amateur's adorable attempt to a simple XOR texture, popular in the early 90s amateur PC demos, and let my brain randomly walk though it structure see what I could do to it, much like if you decided to take and old outdated piece of furniture and a few tools and colors and give it a pass of beautification with improvised brush strokes and structure revamping.

First, I got rid of the discrete and discontinuous nature of the structure and made it smooth. Second, since the XOR texture is a regular fractal, I randomized some of its elements. And then I animated the fractal layers it is made of. Why? No particular idea, just random thinking/doodling/experimentation. A few minutes before dinner I had something that looked not bad at all, especially when seen in movement (here: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/Ml2GWy).