I use a Mac, so I know my machine hasn't been turned into a spamming zombie, but I get these things all the time. I'm guessing there's a virus that turns your computer into a zombie, and then spams email, pretending to be from everybody in your address book.
Nope. I use a Mac too, running the latest MacOS X with all the patches applied. It's the only machine I ever access my hosting account or email from. The spam definitely didn't come from me.
Their attitude is just assinie, and quite frankly shows that they don't know anything abuot how the internet works (hint: anyone can send email claming to be from anyone else. And almost all spam is faked this way)
I got through to talk to someone. Basically, they do understand what's going on, but they say that it doesn't matter if I sent it or not, if AOL complains enough and they don't terminate my account, AOL will blacklist them and that will cost them too much business.
They were able to tell me the subject line of the message being complained about, and it very definitely is spam that I didn't send. (and I'm the only user on my domain.) And, they did tell me that the complaint came from AOL.
You do own your own domain, right?
Yup, I do, but I'm really poor because I'm unemployed, and I prepaid my hosting service for a year. So, if they cut me off, I'll have to scrape together money to get a new hosting service (my web site hosts my resume and portfolio) and that would be a hardship to me at the moment.
I did my homework on hosting services before signing up, and the one I selected had the best customer ratings in its price class. It upsets me that I'm still having these problems.
The worst part of being jo-jobbed is that there's really nothing you can do about it, since you can't track down the offender. And the hundreds of bounce messages you get every day...
Fortunately, Mailblocks filtered out the hundreds of bounce messages, but they didn't include the original message so I can't report it to the FTC. I really want a copy of that original so I can have the spammer prosecuted, which is why I'm trying to get a copy from the hosting service.
My hosting service just emailed me to threaten to pull my account because someone complained about spam from my domain. The service threatens that they'll pull my account if they get another complaint. Basically, their policy is that they don't decide if my email is spam or not, if people complain that I sent spam they just pull the acount.
I have evidence that spam was sent with my email account name forged in the header, but no evidence it actually went through my computers or hosting service. I can't get a hold of an actual copy of the spam, since the hosting service didn't provide one and the several hundred delivery failure messages I received that look like they're for spam didn't include a copy either.
I'm really freaking out about it because my domain contains my portfolio and my email, and I'm job hunting.
Another aspect is knowing of ones' lifespan. Only humans and a few primates are aware of our own demise.
My first border collie knew she was old and sick. She selected her own replacement, taught him some tricks, and then once she saw he was doing okay with me, she died.
He lived until he was old and sick, and then I went off to college and he chose to commit suicide.
They understand that they can die, and they can choose when they're ready to go.
Look, I lived with border collies for 18 years. They weren't my pets, they were family. After 18 years of watching them, I believe they're not only as smart as people, but that part of the reason some people have problems with their border collies is that the dog is smarter than they are.
The thing is, there are two factors which prevent most people from understanding how smart they really are: one is that they can't talk (although mine tried and startled a few people by croaking out a kind of "hello" they don't really have the right vocal equipment) and the other is that they don't have the same priorities as people do: people worry about going to school and earning money and paying for the next vacation... border collies worry about making sure their family is happy and well, and they see you as their family.
The first dog that teachs another dog a language...I might be impressed...
My first border collie adopted my second one for me. (Long story.) She lived for about a month after that. During that time she taught him tricks.
For example, I would say "sit". She would sit. Then she'd look at the puppy, notice him standing there, lean over and push him into a sitting position with her nose. In a day or two he knew to sit when told.
She taught him to sit, bark, lay down, and walk at heel on command. Then, having ensured that there would be another border collie there to take care of me, she lay down her noble head and died of old age.
Of course, he also undersood me well enough to tell the difference between when I was just using the word and when I was actually talking about doing something with him.
And better than a three year-old child, they'll actually do what you tell them to do.
Uh, no. They'll do what they think is best. That's often the same thing, because they generally like to please, but not always. You don't really own a border collie. They own you. A border collie is not a pet, they're a family member.
I had border collies until I was 18. Or, rather, border collies had me until I was 18. As a small child one of them was my babysitter. She kept me safe, wouldn't let me eat anything bad for me, and herded me back into the house for meals and diaper changes. She had technically belonged to my grandmother, but upon my birth she lost all interest in my grandparents and devoted the rest of her life to caring for me. Everyone who tried to get near me, except my parents, got bitten. That includes my grandparents, aunts, and uncles - they weren't allowed near me. She was also picky about who I was friends with. Anyone she didn't like didn't get to play with me any more, because she'd growl at them and scare them off. I had no say in the matter.
In my later childhood and teens another border collie was my best friend. I felt strongly that he understood whatever I said to him. (My reaction to this article was "Only 200 words?") He did have a mind of his own though. I had to start locking him out of my bedroom at night or else I was likely to wake up cold on the floor and find him asleep in my bed under the covers with his head on my pillow. When we went out for a few hours and left him in the house, he'd knock the remote control on the floor and step on it to turn on the TV, then mash at it with his paw to channel surf. (He liked science fiction. He disliked rock concerts.) I treasure the memories of my last summer with him, swimming in the Deleware, hiking through the poconos, and picking black raspberries in the woods. When I went off to college, he committed suicide.
I have been unable to have another dog since because I haven't had enough time and energy to devote to a border collie, and having lived with two of them, no other dog measures up.
I'm a tailor, and I teach advanced classes about shirts. You don't need this "robot". You shouldn't have to iron your cotton shirts. Here's how to never iron, but have your cotton shirts look like you did:
First, open every button on the shirt and remove plastic collar stays (if any) before washing.
When you dry, cotton shirts can be dried on "hot" in most American home dryers, but I use "medium" when I go to a laundramat because their dryers are hotter.
When you take your shirts out of the dryer, if they feel bone dry to the touch, you've over-dried them. You should be drying them less. They should feel as if they have just the slightest hint of moisture left in them, which should evaporate naturally within about a minute or so. Over-dried shirts will be wrinkly. Properly-dried shirts shouldn't be wrinkly.
If your shirts are dried properly but are coming out of the dryer wrinkly, your loads of laundry are too big. Wash and dry a little less stuff in each load. The general rule is, when you put the wet clothes in the dryer, they should take up a bit less than half the space inside the dryer.
Finally, you should get to the dryer as soon as it stops (not 10 minutes later: right away!) and take out your shirts and hang them up on clothes hangers. Do not use wire hangers, use plastic hangers (such as those available cheaply at Target or Kmart) or wood hangers. Wire hangers can cause the shirt to get funny misshapen wrinkles in the shoulders, which can only be removed by re-washing.
If you do these things properly, your cotton shirts will look smooth and professional with no ironing.
Although Stargate in 3D would be pretty damned cool.
Actually, it isn't. I tried it. Sure, it converts to 3D okay, but you start to realize pretty quick that a lot of the scenes are simply blocked out fairly flatly. I think it makes it easier for them to define what will be where on screen that way, and that's all well and good for 2D, but in 3D it looks a little odd, like everyone has this odd tendency to get in line before having a conversation.
It simply wasn't very interesting in 3D, so I went back to enjoying it in 2D.
For better or for worse, Enterprise looks kinda nice in 3D. Lots of perspective shots.
In 3D films, the directors can make it look like stuff is popping out of the screen, and certainly they do, but really they shouldn't. Every time they do that particular trick you basically have to go cross-eyed to see it correctly, and doing it much causes eye strain.
Better to use 3D more naturally and converge at screen depth. The effect still looks fresh and real, and the audience doesn't get a splitting headache after a while.
Incidentally, some 3D films have been almost entirely filmed so the picture seems to be "from the screen backwards", such as House of Wax. They're a real pleasure to watch.
Okay, it's a niche market, but it's a market. Why not focus on maximizing the existing market and making a small but real profit, instead of just declaring it a writeoff?
GillBates0, I notice you're in New England. Drop me email (it's on my profile page) and I'll be happy to meet you sometime to give you a demo of current tech.
(Disclaimer: I am not employed by and receive no money or discounts from any designer, manufacturer, or retailer of any sort of 3d equipment. I'm just an enthusiast.)
How about Hitckcock's Dial M for Murder? It was originally shot with 3D in mind. From what I've heard from people that actually saw it in 3D, it really does add to the film and isn't just used for cheap novelty.
Strangely, Hitchcock hated 3D, thought it was a cheap gimmick, and only used it because the studio insisted. He said it was a "nine day wonder, and I came in on the ninth day". And yet he used it well.
I think perhaps a requirement of being able to use 3D well may be a lack of desire to emphasize the effect.
Maybe if a movie was specifically shot FOR 3D but appart from that, why?
3D provides an increased sensation of reality. It makes the material seem fresher and more alive. If done well, it makes you more able than ever to simply immerse yourself in the material and forget you're watching a video or movie.
Indeed, stuff shot for 3d often becomes distracting because they make a particular effort to point spears at you, throw things at you, etc. They're using 3D as a gimmick, and it's distracting. Stuff not shot for 3D can strangely end up better sometimes, because it just looks natural without any effort to remind you "look, it's 3D!"
Strangely, two of the 3D films that are considered to have the most natural and best quality use of 3D are "House of Wax" and "Gog", and the directors of both films are each blind in one eye.
I'm not talking about pr0n here, obviously.
Er, uh, uhm, yes. (*blush*) That can convert rather well...
But anyone who has a fair amount of technical savvy would not be impressed by the system I saw. But that was a few years ago, maybe they've made progress.
I don't know much about the system you saw, it doesn't sound very good. Please see my remarks above for my opinion of a system I bought for 2D to 3D conversion. I think the state of the art has substantially improved over what you saw. I've shown my system to a number of people, all technical professionals, and the general reaction is astonishment. I even showed it to a professional video technician and he absolutely can't believe it.
Most serious depth extraction algorithms still barely crawl on multi-GHz machines, and they still don't do a very good job.
That's what custom hardware is for...
If they can do this in real time then they definitely aren't extracting any sort of real depth. Just playing mind games.
I can't tell you if the system I have is extracting real depth or playing mind games, but I can say that it's good enough much of the time that I can't tell the difference, and generally don't care. If it's playing mind games on me, they're darned good mind games.
I haven't RTFA, but I'm dubious about this claim. There simply isn't enough information in a 2D image to construct a 3D image.
The linked pages don't tell a heck of a lot about how it works.
There isn't enough information in a single 2D image to construct a 3d image, but there's more information in a series of 2d images, such as a video clip. For example, an object moving through the scene shown covers and uncovers background, so this tells us that object is in front of the background, and the background is behind the object. Through various forms of such interpolation, a fair amount of 3d information can be drawn out of an image as long as either things in the scene move or the camera does.
This isn't new technology. I've had a similar device for a good six months now. I got the Virtual FX made by I-O Display Systems. The quality of its output depends on the quality of its source material, and it ranges from just okay (talk shows really just don't look that exciting for example) to quite shockingly good (Moulin Rouge is absolutely amazing).
If there were, your brain would already do it (and, in fact, already does to a limited extent).
Funny you should say that. With a little help, the brain can actually do the 3D interpolation I describe above. It's called Pulfrich 3D, and requires that you watch video in which the camera is moving from side to side, or rotating, or circling its subject, or objects are moving across the scene from one side to the opposite, and that you wear a simple set of glasses with a shaded lens over one eye. (Which eye depends on the direction of motion on screen.) So, it might work very well with NASCAR, but probably won't work at all with The Ellen Degeneres Show. When it does work, it's really stunning: you suddenly see very natural-looking depth in the screen. When things stop moving, it's also stunning: everything suddenly becomes flat.
I don't see how computer technology is going to improve on what your brain can already do.
If you're in the Boston area, please send me email, and it will be my pleasure to drop by sometime with the equipment so we can toy with it together for an hour or two, and you'll be amazed. I might even be able to scrounge up some Pulfrich glasses so you can compare.
We could force him to take meds till he was 18 and now we have to get a court order. Since he is not a danger to himself or others the liberal courts want to protect his rights.
I'm sick and tired of hearing "liberal" used as a buzzword for all things wrong in this world. Liberal has nothing to do with it. As you describe him, he sounds like he is a danger to himself. If this is the case, then the court is failing not because it is (or is not) liberal, but because it is failing to see that he is a danger to himself.
He lives with my wife and and has his own room.
I wrote above about my mother's mental illness, I'll assume you can find and read that for some details.
When my family situation had degenerated to the point that my father was considering divorce, he made one last effort to get my mother to go to a doctor for treatment. She went for one session and refused to go back. My father went back several times however, to consult with the doctor about what to do. He still loved my mother, and did not want to abandon her, but he could see she was ruining his and my lives.
The doctor told him two things:
1) By staying with her and supporting her, he was continuing to allow her to destroy his and my lives.
2) By staying with her and supporting her, he was enabling her to continue to refuse treatment, because she could (and increasingly did) just hole up in the house and wallow in her delusions instead of having to confront any reality. Divorcing her might feel like abandonment, but it was also a last method of forcing her to deal with the world, which could potentially result in her seeking treatment as a way of enabling herself to get work.
Ultimately in her case it didn't work, but the doctor was right - if my father had continued to support her, she would have just stayed home and deteriorated. Indeed, even after the divorce, she took the money she got from him in the divorce and just lived on it until either it ran out or she lost it (hard to say which, she tended to lose large amounts of money) before she made any effort to find work or deal with reality outside the home she rented. Even going to the supermarket to get herself food was a reluctant duty, and she tried to get me to do her shopping for her.
So, it was "keep her home and she'll just get worse and worse for sure, or push her out and maybe she'll have some small chance." My father chose the one course of action that gave all of us a chance. I know it was very painful to him, I know it was even more painful to her, but at least it wasn't a guaranteed failure like just supporting her at home would have been.
If you flat out tell her she's wrong, she'll probably just get upset with you and, as you say, incorporate you into some paranoid belief.
If you play along with her delusion, you are reinforcing it, which can make her condition worse. She may be voicing her delusions as statements, but she may be doing so to seek input from you without actually asking. So, when she says "The FBI planted invisible video cameras in the tree outside my window to spy on me," what she may mean is "Do you think it would be reasonable to believe that the FBI planted invisible video cameras in the tree outside my window to spy on me?" By playing along, you're giving your approval to the delusion, which may lead her to believe more firmly in such things. So, I wouldn't recommend that route.
There's no way for you to win - you can't just talk her out of her beliefs instantly - but what you can do is observe facts without offering judgment. So, if she says "The FBI planted invisible video cameras in the tree outside my window to spy on me", sasying "no they didn't" won't help, but if you said something more factual and less confrontational like "Hmm. I haven't seen anyone in your trees, and I think it would be awfully difficult to make a camera invisible. Do you think perhaps you might be mistaken?" she might at least think about it, even if what immediately comes out of her mouth is a refutation of what you said.
Alternatively, you could simply state your feelings without disagreeing directly - "Gee, that sounds odd."
What do other people do?
I try to stay very far away from such people, but then, I've already had my fair share of dealing with the mentally ill in my life.
To give you some hope, my sister is now married, has just had a baby, and is starting a part-time course in medical physics.
Speaking as the son of a woman with severe paranoid schizophrenia and a man who, prior to my birth, was cured of multiple personality disorder (but still has some rather severe personality quirks), I strongly urge that people with incurable (chronic) mental illnesses choose not to have children. (Note: I'm not advocating that the mentally ill be sterilized or anything like that, I'm suggesting they make they choice of their own free will to simply not have children.)
The consequences to the life of the child if the parent loses control of their illness are much too severe. Even if they keep the illness mostly under control, the occasional slips can do far more emotional damage to a child than to an adult. No child should ever have to go through what I did.
Also (and this is a big pet peeve of everyone who actually knows anything about the disease), schizophrenia does NOT mean you have multiple personalities. That is multiple personality disorder. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind" if you look at the roots of the word, but that means that their mind is split from reality and that they live in their own internally-created world, not that their mind is split into two or more pieces.
Please note, however, that it's also possible for someone with schizophrenia to also suffer from multiple personality disorder. (Yes, I know they don't call it "multiple personality disorder" any more, but that's the common name.) Moreover, in that case, some of the personalities may be more lucid, better coping with the schizophrenia, than others. This can lead to some fairly severe swings between fairly normal behavior and extraordinarily nonsensical behavior.
My mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was 3. She took her meds until I was 5, when she decided she felt so good and symptom free that she didn't need the meds any more, and stopped taking them. Permanently.
She was an intensive care nurse, she should have known better.
This began her slide into increasing insanity as the years went by. My father stuck around, knowing that if he left her she'd take me and ruin my life forever, and waited. When I was 12 I figured out she was completely out of control, and told my father "Mom's crazy, I'm leaving so she won't hurt me, are you coming?" and he left with me and divorced her. Getting a legal separation from her ruined my father, and myself, financially. She took him for all he was worth, and took my entire college fund along with it. There are many other lasting problems in our lives that she caused, like that she didn't let me have friends as a child so I still have difficulty socializing, that she destroyed most of the family photos, so my father has practically no pictures of me as a child, or that 20 years later I still have nightmares about her regularly, or that 20 years later I can tell my father still misses the beautiful and loving woman he married, who just disappeared into insanity.
Over the next 6 years she made at least three, and possibly four attempts to kill me. It's hard to say what to think about the fourth, because while it was unquestionably a murder attempt, she was so delusional by that point that she was trying to kill my father and couldn't tell I wasn't him.
When I was 18, I moved 350 miles away from her and didn't tell her where I'd gone. My aunts and uncles, not realizing the severity of her illness, told her anyway, and she showed up on my doorstep. I eventually had to move several times, change my phone number several times, and stop telling my family where I lived in order to escape from her. I have not seen her in about 15 years, and pray that I will never see her again.
When I was 20 or so, she murdered my uncle, and has been institutionalized since.
I have two bits of advice for people dealing with a loved one with schizophrenia. Firstly, dameron is right, MEDS MEDS MEDS. If they get on their meds early after developing symptoms and take them regularly FOREVER, they can live a relatively normal life. Unfortunately, schizophrenics are notorious for going off their meds. My father took me to several mental health professionals who advised me on how to deal with my mother, and what they all told me was that schizophrenia is cumulative: the meds prevent it from getting worse and reduce the immediate symptoms, but the longer it goes untreated the worse it gets and it will never get better. So, after 17 years of no treatment, my mother was incurably insane, and all meds could do was stop her from getting even worse and make her more controllable.
The second piece of advice I give you is, if the person goes off their meds and doesn't get on again almost immediately, push them out of your life, get them as far away from you and your family as you can, and if you have to, pack up and move to get away from them. Once they get really bad, nothing will stop them from trying to come interfere with your life. Nothing. Not court orders, not police, they won't care about those things. (Or, if they're paranoid, those things may just agitate them into worse behavior. My mother's reaction to a restraining order was to show up at my house and try to beat down the door in a blind rage.) You'll never be safe again. Escape while you still can. This is what the doctors advised my father, it's why he divorced my mother, and it's why he and I are alive today. Even if they're not violent, they'll just keep showing up and making a severe nuisance of themselves and disrupting your life until they make it into a living hell.
Here I was, unemployed, using all my contacts to try to get in on the programming for OpenCourseware, and they outsourced it to India while I struggled to pay the rent.
I think it's time for me to contact my state elected representatives and let them know how MIT is harming the local economy by sending work out of the country when there are top notch people unemployed here, and suggest that I'd be unhappy if the state were to give MIT any particular financial breaks or other incentives.
Slashdot Mirror
My hosting service just emailed me to threaten to pull my account because someone complained about spam from my domain. The service threatens that they'll pull my account if they get another complaint. Basically, their policy is that they don't decide if my email is spam or not, if people complain that I sent spam they just pull the acount.
I have evidence that spam was sent with my email account name forged in the header, but no evidence it actually went through my computers or hosting service. I can't get a hold of an actual copy of the spam, since the hosting service didn't provide one and the several hundred delivery failure messages I received that look like they're for spam didn't include a copy either.
I'm really freaking out about it because my domain contains my portfolio and my email, and I'm job hunting.
He lived until he was old and sick, and then I went off to college and he chose to commit suicide.
They understand that they can die, and they can choose when they're ready to go.
Look, I lived with border collies for 18 years. They weren't my pets, they were family. After 18 years of watching them, I believe they're not only as smart as people, but that part of the reason some people have problems with their border collies is that the dog is smarter than they are.
The thing is, there are two factors which prevent most people from understanding how smart they really are: one is that they can't talk (although mine tried and startled a few people by croaking out a kind of "hello" they don't really have the right vocal equipment) and the other is that they don't have the same priorities as people do: people worry about going to school and earning money and paying for the next vacation... border collies worry about making sure their family is happy and well, and they see you as their family.
For example, I would say "sit". She would sit. Then she'd look at the puppy, notice him standing there, lean over and push him into a sitting position with her nose. In a day or two he knew to sit when told.
She taught him to sit, bark, lay down, and walk at heel on command. Then, having ensured that there would be another border collie there to take care of me, she lay down her noble head and died of old age.
We're talking about a border collie here. They want to be on whatever side of the door you are on.
My border collie learned all the spellings.
In two languages.
Of course, he also undersood me well enough to tell the difference between when I was just using the word and when I was actually talking about doing something with him.
I had border collies until I was 18. Or, rather, border collies had me until I was 18. As a small child one of them was my babysitter. She kept me safe, wouldn't let me eat anything bad for me, and herded me back into the house for meals and diaper changes. She had technically belonged to my grandmother, but upon my birth she lost all interest in my grandparents and devoted the rest of her life to caring for me. Everyone who tried to get near me, except my parents, got bitten. That includes my grandparents, aunts, and uncles - they weren't allowed near me. She was also picky about who I was friends with. Anyone she didn't like didn't get to play with me any more, because she'd growl at them and scare them off. I had no say in the matter.
In my later childhood and teens another border collie was my best friend. I felt strongly that he understood whatever I said to him. (My reaction to this article was "Only 200 words?") He did have a mind of his own though. I had to start locking him out of my bedroom at night or else I was likely to wake up cold on the floor and find him asleep in my bed under the covers with his head on my pillow. When we went out for a few hours and left him in the house, he'd knock the remote control on the floor and step on it to turn on the TV, then mash at it with his paw to channel surf. (He liked science fiction. He disliked rock concerts.) I treasure the memories of my last summer with him, swimming in the Deleware, hiking through the poconos, and picking black raspberries in the woods. When I went off to college, he committed suicide.
I have been unable to have another dog since because I haven't had enough time and energy to devote to a border collie, and having lived with two of them, no other dog measures up.
I'm a tailor, and I teach advanced classes about shirts. You don't need this "robot". You shouldn't have to iron your cotton shirts. Here's how to never iron, but have your cotton shirts look like you did:
First, open every button on the shirt and remove plastic collar stays (if any) before washing.
When you dry, cotton shirts can be dried on "hot" in most American home dryers, but I use "medium" when I go to a laundramat because their dryers are hotter.
When you take your shirts out of the dryer, if they feel bone dry to the touch, you've over-dried them. You should be drying them less. They should feel as if they have just the slightest hint of moisture left in them, which should evaporate naturally within about a minute or so. Over-dried shirts will be wrinkly. Properly-dried shirts shouldn't be wrinkly.
If your shirts are dried properly but are coming out of the dryer wrinkly, your loads of laundry are too big. Wash and dry a little less stuff in each load. The general rule is, when you put the wet clothes in the dryer, they should take up a bit less than half the space inside the dryer.
Finally, you should get to the dryer as soon as it stops (not 10 minutes later: right away!) and take out your shirts and hang them up on clothes hangers. Do not use wire hangers, use plastic hangers (such as those available cheaply at Target or Kmart) or wood hangers. Wire hangers can cause the shirt to get funny misshapen wrinkles in the shoulders, which can only be removed by re-washing.
If you do these things properly, your cotton shirts will look smooth and professional with no ironing.
It simply wasn't very interesting in 3D, so I went back to enjoying it in 2D.
For better or for worse, Enterprise looks kinda nice in 3D. Lots of perspective shots.
In 3D films, the directors can make it look like stuff is popping out of the screen, and certainly they do, but really they shouldn't. Every time they do that particular trick you basically have to go cross-eyed to see it correctly, and doing it much causes eye strain.
Better to use 3D more naturally and converge at screen depth. The effect still looks fresh and real, and the audience doesn't get a splitting headache after a while.
Incidentally, some 3D films have been almost entirely filmed so the picture seems to be "from the screen backwards", such as House of Wax. They're a real pleasure to watch.
Okay, it's a niche market, but it's a market. Why not focus on maximizing the existing market and making a small but real profit, instead of just declaring it a writeoff?
GillBates0, I notice you're in New England. Drop me email (it's on my profile page) and I'll be happy to meet you sometime to give you a demo of current tech.
(Disclaimer: I am not employed by and receive no money or discounts from any designer, manufacturer, or retailer of any sort of 3d equipment. I'm just an enthusiast.)
I think perhaps a requirement of being able to use 3D well may be a lack of desire to emphasize the effect.
Indeed, stuff shot for 3d often becomes distracting because they make a particular effort to point spears at you, throw things at you, etc. They're using 3D as a gimmick, and it's distracting. Stuff not shot for 3D can strangely end up better sometimes, because it just looks natural without any effort to remind you "look, it's 3D!"
Strangely, two of the 3D films that are considered to have the most natural and best quality use of 3D are "House of Wax" and "Gog", and the directors of both films are each blind in one eye.Er, uh, uhm, yes. (*blush*) That can convert rather well...
There isn't enough information in a single 2D image to construct a 3d image, but there's more information in a series of 2d images, such as a video clip. For example, an object moving through the scene shown covers and uncovers background, so this tells us that object is in front of the background, and the background is behind the object. Through various forms of such interpolation, a fair amount of 3d information can be drawn out of an image as long as either things in the scene move or the camera does.
This isn't new technology. I've had a similar device for a good six months now. I got the Virtual FX made by I-O Display Systems. The quality of its output depends on the quality of its source material, and it ranges from just okay (talk shows really just don't look that exciting for example) to quite shockingly good (Moulin Rouge is absolutely amazing).Funny you should say that. With a little help, the brain can actually do the 3D interpolation I describe above. It's called Pulfrich 3D, and requires that you watch video in which the camera is moving from side to side, or rotating, or circling its subject, or objects are moving across the scene from one side to the opposite, and that you wear a simple set of glasses with a shaded lens over one eye. (Which eye depends on the direction of motion on screen.) So, it might work very well with NASCAR, but probably won't work at all with The Ellen Degeneres Show. When it does work, it's really stunning: you suddenly see very natural-looking depth in the screen. When things stop moving, it's also stunning: everything suddenly becomes flat.If you're in the Boston area, please send me email, and it will be my pleasure to drop by sometime with the equipment so we can toy with it together for an hour or two, and you'll be amazed. I might even be able to scrounge up some Pulfrich glasses so you can compare.
When my family situation had degenerated to the point that my father was considering divorce, he made one last effort to get my mother to go to a doctor for treatment. She went for one session and refused to go back. My father went back several times however, to consult with the doctor about what to do. He still loved my mother, and did not want to abandon her, but he could see she was ruining his and my lives.
The doctor told him two things:
1) By staying with her and supporting her, he was continuing to allow her to destroy his and my lives.
2) By staying with her and supporting her, he was enabling her to continue to refuse treatment, because she could (and increasingly did) just hole up in the house and wallow in her delusions instead of having to confront any reality. Divorcing her might feel like abandonment, but it was also a last method of forcing her to deal with the world, which could potentially result in her seeking treatment as a way of enabling herself to get work.
Ultimately in her case it didn't work, but the doctor was right - if my father had continued to support her, she would have just stayed home and deteriorated. Indeed, even after the divorce, she took the money she got from him in the divorce and just lived on it until either it ran out or she lost it (hard to say which, she tended to lose large amounts of money) before she made any effort to find work or deal with reality outside the home she rented. Even going to the supermarket to get herself food was a reluctant duty, and she tried to get me to do her shopping for her.
So, it was "keep her home and she'll just get worse and worse for sure, or push her out and maybe she'll have some small chance." My father chose the one course of action that gave all of us a chance. I know it was very painful to him, I know it was even more painful to her, but at least it wasn't a guaranteed failure like just supporting her at home would have been.
If you play along with her delusion, you are reinforcing it, which can make her condition worse. She may be voicing her delusions as statements, but she may be doing so to seek input from you without actually asking. So, when she says "The FBI planted invisible video cameras in the tree outside my window to spy on me," what she may mean is "Do you think it would be reasonable to believe that the FBI planted invisible video cameras in the tree outside my window to spy on me?" By playing along, you're giving your approval to the delusion, which may lead her to believe more firmly in such things. So, I wouldn't recommend that route.
There's no way for you to win - you can't just talk her out of her beliefs instantly - but what you can do is observe facts without offering judgment. So, if she says "The FBI planted invisible video cameras in the tree outside my window to spy on me", sasying "no they didn't" won't help, but if you said something more factual and less confrontational like "Hmm. I haven't seen anyone in your trees, and I think it would be awfully difficult to make a camera invisible. Do you think perhaps you might be mistaken?" she might at least think about it, even if what immediately comes out of her mouth is a refutation of what you said.
Alternatively, you could simply state your feelings without disagreeing directly - "Gee, that sounds odd."I try to stay very far away from such people, but then, I've already had my fair share of dealing with the mentally ill in my life.
The consequences to the life of the child if the parent loses control of their illness are much too severe. Even if they keep the illness mostly under control, the occasional slips can do far more emotional damage to a child than to an adult. No child should ever have to go through what I did.
My mother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was 3. She took her meds until I was 5, when she decided she felt so good and symptom free that she didn't need the meds any more, and stopped taking them. Permanently.
She was an intensive care nurse, she should have known better.
This began her slide into increasing insanity as the years went by. My father stuck around, knowing that if he left her she'd take me and ruin my life forever, and waited. When I was 12 I figured out she was completely out of control, and told my father "Mom's crazy, I'm leaving so she won't hurt me, are you coming?" and he left with me and divorced her. Getting a legal separation from her ruined my father, and myself, financially. She took him for all he was worth, and took my entire college fund along with it. There are many other lasting problems in our lives that she caused, like that she didn't let me have friends as a child so I still have difficulty socializing, that she destroyed most of the family photos, so my father has practically no pictures of me as a child, or that 20 years later I still have nightmares about her regularly, or that 20 years later I can tell my father still misses the beautiful and loving woman he married, who just disappeared into insanity.
Over the next 6 years she made at least three, and possibly four attempts to kill me. It's hard to say what to think about the fourth, because while it was unquestionably a murder attempt, she was so delusional by that point that she was trying to kill my father and couldn't tell I wasn't him.
When I was 18, I moved 350 miles away from her and didn't tell her where I'd gone. My aunts and uncles, not realizing the severity of her illness, told her anyway, and she showed up on my doorstep. I eventually had to move several times, change my phone number several times, and stop telling my family where I lived in order to escape from her. I have not seen her in about 15 years, and pray that I will never see her again.
When I was 20 or so, she murdered my uncle, and has been institutionalized since.
I have two bits of advice for people dealing with a loved one with schizophrenia. Firstly, dameron is right, MEDS MEDS MEDS. If they get on their meds early after developing symptoms and take them regularly FOREVER, they can live a relatively normal life. Unfortunately, schizophrenics are notorious for going off their meds. My father took me to several mental health professionals who advised me on how to deal with my mother, and what they all told me was that schizophrenia is cumulative: the meds prevent it from getting worse and reduce the immediate symptoms, but the longer it goes untreated the worse it gets and it will never get better. So, after 17 years of no treatment, my mother was incurably insane, and all meds could do was stop her from getting even worse and make her more controllable.
The second piece of advice I give you is, if the person goes off their meds and doesn't get on again almost immediately, push them out of your life, get them as far away from you and your family as you can, and if you have to, pack up and move to get away from them. Once they get really bad, nothing will stop them from trying to come interfere with your life. Nothing. Not court orders, not police, they won't care about those things. (Or, if they're paranoid, those things may just agitate them into worse behavior. My mother's reaction to a restraining order was to show up at my house and try to beat down the door in a blind rage.) You'll never be safe again. Escape while you still can. This is what the doctors advised my father, it's why he divorced my mother, and it's why he and I are alive today. Even if they're not violent, they'll just keep showing up and making a severe nuisance of themselves and disrupting your life until they make it into a living hell.
Here I was, unemployed, using all my contacts to try to get in on the programming for OpenCourseware, and they outsourced it to India while I struggled to pay the rent.
I think it's time for me to contact my state elected representatives and let them know how MIT is harming the local economy by sending work out of the country when there are top notch people unemployed here, and suggest that I'd be unhappy if the state were to give MIT any particular financial breaks or other incentives.