Try to run "texexec" from command line to see if you have context installed. It comes with most modern TeX distributions. Or look at www.pragma-ade.com for info and download.
It is a TeX format similar in a way to LaTeX, but targeted less to the technical/math/science crowd and more towards general purpose and professional publishers. It is much easier to use various fonts, colors and graphics and do all sorts of fancy stuff.
I must addmitt to trolling a little (as you probably suspect), because 1) context will benefit from better cpu and more memory quite a bit, it uses perl, and integrate metapost and other things, so I am not sure it would even run on an old dos box. But I don't see why wouldn't it run on a 10 years old linux box. 2) Yes, there is whole bunch of stuf that is easier to do in a wysiwyg environment. On the other hand, you can do things easily with context that would take a lot of work in word.
For example: Why would you use lynx to get the graphics today? Assuming you want graphics relevant to some sort of topic (instead of the first 10 random pictures you come across), say, pictures of oranges. You go to Google images and search for orange. Now, on the first page, there are only six pictures of oranges (I'm giving the peel the benefit of the doubt). Using Konqueror (or graphical browser of your choice), you know that immediately, because they're displayed. Using lynx, you need to download all 20 images by hand and use an external program to view them.
That depends. If I knew exactly what graphics to get, using lynx would be faster. I would just load the pictures I need, nothing else. In the situation you describe, a modern graphical browser would indeed speed things up.
Also, people of today wouldn't use TeX for their layout. It's good when you want your documents to look like they came from a professional printer, and I use it for my papers at school, but if you're just making a newsletter for your club meeting with some pasted text, it's almost certainly faster to fire up Word (or some equivalent), copy-and-paste, insert your graphics and drag them around to appropriate positions.
I am willing to bet you that I can produce a newsletter of this kind faster in TeX than you in Word. Typing in the filenames of the graphics will not take longer than your draging, and I can get the formating faster and better with TeX.
For example, you don't need to keep recompiling because you didn't get the scale factor of \includegraphics just right; you just drag the image handlebars to the appropriate size. You don't need to recompile your document because you changed the font size/face of your headers and you want to see if they look good.
That's why I would specify absolute size of an image, instead of scale factor.
Oh, and you are using a fancy font where all the 'O's look like oranges, aren't you (is it even possible to have random TTF fonts in a LaTeX document)? This isn't a technical manual you're writing here, it's your fancy Orange Eating Club newsletter.
It is possible to have random ttf fonts in LaTeX, but it is not easy. However, I did not say anything about using LaTeX. For a newsletter, I would probably use ConTeXt. Yes, I could make better looking newsletter today than 15 years ago, but not because or more powerful machine. Just because of new TeX packages and formats.
Your example is akin to someone saying, "modern languages allow programmers to develop programs in one tenth the time that it would take them 20 years ago," and another saying, "Well, today, I would use C, and use only APIs that were available 20 years ago. Vim has better syntax hilighting, and compiling is a little faster... I don't see much of a speedup."
That's correct. But that's because I believe that the tools I had 15 years ago are still the best tools for the job today.
The LaTeX Companion, if you decide to use LaTeX. It is probably the most complete guide. There is also a bunch of introductory books, I don't remember any titles of the top of my head. Look at www.tug.org (TeX user group), they have good list of resources.
You may also want to look at ConTeXt, I am not sure if ConTeXt manuals are available in print, but you can download pdf files from www.pragma-ade.com (warning, some of the pdf files are huuuuge).
Each time I plug in a new joystick and it just works, each time I plug in a new digital camera and it's just there as another drive, each time I alt-tab out of a game, check a walkthrough website, then alt-tab back, I think back to the old days where code was really efficient and didn't do any wasteful background tasks like that.
You are right about that. But:
I remember helping a friend with a C++ assignment, via the net. Each time, she'd have to exit her telnet program, run Borland's C++ compiler from the command line, check the output, quit the compiler, reopen telnet, reconnect to the MUD we were talking over, then describe what had happened. Now... She'd just show me what's on her desktop via Messenger while we kept chatting.
Some 10-15 years ago, I would use screen, run telnet in one virtual terminal, editor in another and command line compiler in third one. Cuting and pasting from one to another was pretty much instant, and even faster would be redirecting output to a file and sending the file over the net. It may be easier to do that now, but not necessarily faster.
And if some cycles get used up doing weird UI gimicks that I'll never use - like making the UI scalable so the partially sighted can use it, I'm willing to trade that.
I totally agree with that. OTOH, I am told that text only interfaces with screen readers etc were better for partially sighted or blind users than todays UI's. It seems to be getting better now, but as far as I know, for a long time the accessibility of user interfaces went down.
I don't know about anyone else but I can't code 2^(years / 1.5) faster so I wouldn't be able to keep up with that damn responsive text based compiler. On the other hand, I am that much faster overall as I now call an API that adds all that "bloatware" instead of having to code my own damn mouse drivers, my code is largely debugged on the fly...
I agree with that....and I can't remember the last time I lost several days just trying to format a newsletter in to columns.
That happend to me sometimes in mid 80s. I was still using Microsoft Word then.
Pick an every day but semi complex task that people do now. For example: For a homework project, go on line, grab half a dozen graphics and ten blocks of text from those websites, put them all in to a stylishly laid out newsletter format. Do that on a P4, then do it on an a DOS PC from 15 years ago.
Hmm, let's see, just for the sake of the argument: To get the text, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. Slightly faster now, but not much. To get the graphics, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. There would be quite a difference in speed, but not because of cpu or memory, but because od modem speed. To lay out the newsletter, I would use TeX now just as 10--15 years ago. There are some new packages available, so it would be somewhat easier now, but again, that has nothing to do with the cpu or memory. The syntax highlighting in vim today is somewhat more powerful than in jed 10 years ago, and it does use more cpu and memory, so that would help me a little. The real speed improvement would come from actually running TeX and printing the thing. 15 years ago, it would take about the same time as the rest of the work, maybe an hour or so on a very slow machine. Now that would be just few seconds. So overall, the whole process would be about 5 times faster at most, if I rwally exagerate.
See if matching the same quality of work doesn't take you 2^10 times as long on that old PC, assuming you can even do it at all.
Well, last time I checked, 5 2^10. Of course that doesn't mean other tasks wouldn't show greater speedup. Perhaps this wasn't the best example. As far as the quality, the only difference would be in printing, and that only if I used color. Again, nothing to do with cpu nor memory, just with printers.
How is "landscape" a printer setting? Yes, it applies to printing, but also to creating a postscript or pdf version of the file. I would call it "page formating" rather than "printer setting". It has nothing to do with an actual printer. And, in TeX, it takes about 9 bytes to specify you want to format the whole document in landscape, and perhaps a little bit more if you need individual landscape pages in otherwise portrait oriented document.
Including png's is actually pretty easy. As far as the size of miktex --- you would have to compare that to the size of Word and Powerpoint together with all the fonts they use.
I like that. Didn't read the book. Adding "trip to the library" to my list of things to do this weekend...
Anyway, what about changing the question this way:
- If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood produced what looked like a block of wood hacked at in fury, called it something like "Evidence of madness" and displayed it in public, is that a work of art?
I call BS. While there may be some people working in fractals who do the digital equivalent of "walking around, randomly photographing...", there are plenty of people producing beautiful images by hand selecting which equation, what coloring method, which colors, and, in more complicated instances, what layering techniques to use.
There are also many people working very carefully with a camera, light, composition etc to produce images of kittens that you can see on the ceiling of your dentists office. I don't call that art.
I don't think the discussion was whether mathematically generated images can be used to produce art. The way I read the debate, the grandparent was arguing that mathematical images and images of space are not art simply because they are beautiful. In other words, you cannot equate art with beauty. Things that are really beautiful and visually stunning don't have to be art, and art can actually be really ugly.
In particular, check out the works of Sylvie Gallet, Damien Jones, and Kerry Mitchell (google on each name and take first link). Sure, they all use computers to produce the art, and each uses fractals as their medium, but each produces works of striking beauty and each has a style that is distinct to themselves.
Without commenting on any of the particular names, (as I don't know them), I must agree with you that an artist can definitely use computers and math to create art. And the comparison you make to photography is, IMHO, a very good one.
So if you have an artefact (e.g. a photograph) in your hand, how do tell whether it's 'art' or the output of a random process?
Without knowing anything about the artefact, I cannot.
To be concrete about this, seeing you're a photographer, suppose I took a camera, linked its shutter release to an atom of something with a half-life of a week or two so that when the atom decayed the shutter was released, and strapped the camera to the back of a blind man who was instructed to walk wherever he liked. At the end of the process there would be a picture. That is, I'm sure you'd say, not art.
I don't know what the person you are replying to would say, but I would definitely consider that an art!
Now, suppose some self important pompous artist took a camera and carefully and pompously framed a particular image, capturing a particular instant in time. That is, I'm sure you'd say, art. Even if the 'artist' happened to be standing beside the blind man at the same time.
Yes, I would call that art, too.
Now supposing the two photographs were dropped on the dark room floor, and when you picked them up you could not remember which was which.
I would consider that a wonderful art! Two pictures, identical yet obtained under such different circumstances, mixed up in a dark room and displayed side by side, with no way of telling which one is which. Wow!
What intrinsic property does a work of art have which allows it to be distinguished from non-art?
Work of art as a purely material object does not have to have any such intrinsic property. Some do, but in many cases you have to know more about the object to appreciate it as art. You see, artists can explore different things in their art. Somebody explores visual or material aspects of an object, somebody else explores randomness, and somebody can even explore his/her own pompousness and fame. An object of art does not exists by itself, in a complete vacuum. You need to know the context.
If there is no such property, then surely there can be no such thing as art, because it cannot be discriminated; if the property is in the eye of the beholder, then surely the product of the random process is just as much 'art' as the product of the artist.
It is neither.
But I like your comparison of computer generated images to photography: instead of shooting pictures of a real object, you take pictures of an imaginary one (no pun intended). A photographer can simply take a purely descriptive, documentary shot of an object, and similarly you can have purely descriptive, technical image of a Mandelbrot set. That's not art, unless an artist wants to use such picture and explore its "descriptiveness" or something. Or you can take a pretty pictures of kittens, flowers, mountains etc to create a visually pleasing image with no depth. That's not art either. That would be equivalent to producing beautiful images of Mandelbrot set with pretty colors etc. They are pretty like kittens or horses or frosted trees, but that's it. But then, a photographer can take a picture of horses that shows some dynamic composition, tells you something more about horses except that they are pretty. Ansel Adams can take a picture of a mountain that is not just pretty, it's fascinating in some way. I am a mathematician, not an art critic, so I am not really able to describe this. It has nothing to do with neither realism nor beauty. People call Adams's pictures realistic, but I don't think they really are. I believe that there is an equivalent of this kind of photography in the area of fractal images and computer generated images in general.
What exactly do you propose we should have done? Are you sure the alternative you are talking about isn't Iraqis on the street saying (or whispering) "thanks for getting rid of the tyrant, but why did you have to become another tyrant?" How would you implement security while still maintaining freedom?
However, when traveling to another country you must RESPECT that country. You are a guest, just as your a guest in someone's home. Failure to obey the rules of that country is rude, inconsiderate and frankly, you deserve whatever punishment is given for violations.
I agree with you that a traveler to another country should respect the country, its people and culture. However, as I have learned when I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and as those of us who are living in the US are learning now, respecting a country is definitely not the same as respecting its government!
I don't know if things changed during the last couple of years, but they did not do that in any country in Europe I ever visited, with the exception of Soviet Union in 1989. That was the only trip on which they asked me where am I going, where am I going to stay, and in addition to that I was supposed to go to a local police station to register immediately after arrival. I didn't, and nothing happend anyway.
On all my travels in Europe, before the country I am a citizen of joined the EU, nobody ever asked me anything about where I am going to stay. And in many cases I indeed did not know. Just imagine: "Well, officer, I am going to find a campground or a hostel tonight, and tommorrow I am hitting the road and hitchhiking south. Where? I don't know, depends where my rides go." or "I am going to sleep on a beach." That was years ago, but I know plenty of people who still do the same now, or at least did the same year or two ago. A friend of mine rode a bike from Prague to Paris, just imagine them asking "where are you going to stay tonight?", obviously he had a tent and sleeping bag straped on his bicycle, and was going to simply find a place to camp when he got tired.
I have slept in plenty of public parks, gutters and construction sites in Europe, and aside of people kicking me out when they came to work in the morning (couple times after sharing their breakfast with me, thanks), I never had any problem. I am rather neurotic, so when traveling very far away to a place whose culture, habits and laws I really don't know, I would get a reservation for at least the first night, but then I know plenty of people who wouldn't even thing that way and just go.
Also, the other day I got kicked out from a church after trying to drop things I found on the street onto the altar...
Anyway, as other posters said, this is not limited to games. Back at the days when I still climbed, I often ended up staring on walls of buildings trying the figure out the way up. And the other day I caught myself standing on the street in a heavy rain, looking at the rushing water trying to find the best way through the "rapids".
...then that is the fault of the admissions board and the prerequisites...
Obviously, the prerequisite courses were "tailored to the level of students". If I "tailor my course to the level of the students", then the person who gets my students after me will have a living hell trying to cover what they are supposed to cover. So they end up "tailoring" too. It's a viscious circle, and a reason why many consider the entire current American higher education system a fraud. I personally wouldn't go that far, but it certainly is a serious problem. A lot of my colleagues from different schools think that the solution is to just stick with the syllabus, assume that student's prerequisites were really what they were supposed to be, and if a student doesn't make it because of poor preparedness, too bad. If everybody did that from the very beginning, it would certainly be great, but right now there is just too many students caught in the system, and in most cases it is not their fault they are not ready for the classes. For that reason I don't think that's very good solution, but frankly, I know of no other.
Unless harsh shadows and high contrast between foreground and backround is what you are after.
I had a series of pictures where I emulated night flash photography by using high gradation paper and selectively overexposing the more distant parts of the picture on the prints. It really looked like the pictures were taken in complete dark with a flash, except when you looked carefully, the shadows and reflections were not always where they were supposed to be. Anyway, it was pretty interesting effect.
Pretty cool! There are several other programs like this, for Windows, there is free of charge WinGeom by Peanut Software, for Unix there is Kseg, Dr. Geo, and KIG, all free. Plus several commercial programs.
But it doesn't have to be an advanced course. Using fractals, you can introduce complex numbers, dynamical systems, chaos, pde's etc on very elementary level, while slowly introducing the equations and formulas. That's exactly what computers are good for -- visualizing and modeling.
I my previous place of emplyment, the administration people kept sending out messages with subject "Important information". Every time I went to look in my mailbox to find which day was a certain meeting rescheduled to, all I saw was 150 messages with subjet "Important information", with contents ranging from broken water main through electricity outages, reminders to get new parking stickers, class cancellations to announcements of important meeting etc.
And the best thing was that those people had the guts to constantly bother the faculty with stupid "inservices" on phone and e-mail usage.
Multiple machines on a non-weahtly budget. If the XP2000 didn't have the video card ($125 all by itself) and the RAM ($50) the total computer price here would be under 750$.
That's a lot of money for a familly with three kids paying for preschool, music classes etc!
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Try to run "texexec" from command line to see if you have context installed. It comes with most modern TeX distributions. Or look at www.pragma-ade.com for info and download.
It is a TeX format similar in a way to LaTeX, but targeted less to the technical/math/science crowd and more towards general purpose and professional publishers. It is much easier to use various fonts, colors and graphics and do all sorts of fancy stuff.
I must addmitt to trolling a little (as you probably suspect), because
1) context will benefit from better cpu and more memory quite a bit, it uses perl, and integrate metapost and other things, so I am not sure it would even run on an old dos box. But I don't see why wouldn't it run on a 10 years old linux box.
2) Yes, there is whole bunch of stuf that is easier to do in a wysiwyg environment. On the other hand, you can do things easily with context that would take a lot of work in word.
Simple: \includegraphics{blah.png}. Oh, did I forget to mention I use pdflatex?
For example: Why would you use lynx to get the graphics today? Assuming you want graphics relevant to some sort of topic (instead of the first 10 random pictures you come across), say, pictures of oranges. You go to Google images and search for orange. Now, on the first page, there are only six pictures of oranges (I'm giving the peel the benefit of the doubt). Using Konqueror (or graphical browser of your choice), you know that immediately, because they're displayed. Using lynx, you need to download all 20 images by hand and use an external program to view them.
That depends. If I knew exactly what graphics to get, using lynx would be faster. I would just load the pictures I need, nothing else. In the situation you describe, a modern graphical browser would indeed speed things up.
Also, people of today wouldn't use TeX for their layout. It's good when you want your documents to look like they came from a professional printer, and I use it for my papers at school, but if you're just making a newsletter for your club meeting with some pasted text, it's almost certainly faster to fire up Word (or some equivalent), copy-and-paste, insert your graphics and drag them around to appropriate positions.
I am willing to bet you that I can produce a newsletter of this kind faster in TeX than you in Word. Typing in the filenames of the graphics will not take longer than your draging, and I can get the formating faster and better with TeX.
For example, you don't need to keep recompiling because you didn't get the scale factor of \includegraphics just right; you just drag the image handlebars to the appropriate size. You don't need to recompile your document because you changed the font size/face of your headers and you want to see if they look good.
That's why I would specify absolute size of an image, instead of scale factor.
Oh, and you are using a fancy font where all the 'O's look like oranges, aren't you (is it even possible to have random TTF fonts in a LaTeX document)? This isn't a technical manual you're writing here, it's your fancy Orange Eating Club newsletter.
It is possible to have random ttf fonts in LaTeX, but it is not easy. However, I did not say anything about using LaTeX. For a newsletter, I would probably use ConTeXt. Yes, I could make better looking newsletter today than 15 years ago, but not because or more powerful machine. Just because of new TeX packages and formats.
Your example is akin to someone saying, "modern languages allow programmers to develop programs in one tenth the time that it would take them 20 years ago," and another saying, "Well, today, I would use C, and use only APIs that were available 20 years ago. Vim has better syntax hilighting, and compiling is a little faster... I don't see much of a speedup."
That's correct. But that's because I believe that the tools I had 15 years ago are still the best tools for the job today.
The LaTeX Companion, if you decide to use LaTeX. It is probably the most complete guide. There is also a bunch of introductory books, I don't remember any titles of the top of my head. Look at www.tug.org (TeX user group), they have good list of resources.
You may also want to look at ConTeXt, I am not sure if ConTeXt manuals are available in print, but you can download pdf files from www.pragma-ade.com (warning, some of the pdf files are huuuuge).
Each time I plug in a new joystick and it just works, each time I plug in a new digital camera and it's just there as another drive, each time I alt-tab out of a game, check a walkthrough website, then alt-tab back, I think back to the old days where code was really efficient and didn't do any wasteful background tasks like that.
...and I can't remember the last time I lost several days just trying to format a newsletter in to columns.
You are right about that. But:
I remember helping a friend with a C++ assignment, via the net. Each time, she'd have to exit her telnet program, run Borland's C++ compiler from the command line, check the output, quit the compiler, reopen telnet, reconnect to the MUD we were talking over, then describe what had happened. Now... She'd just show me what's on her desktop via Messenger while we kept chatting.
Some 10-15 years ago, I would use screen, run telnet in one virtual terminal, editor in another and command line compiler in third one. Cuting and pasting from one to another was pretty much instant, and even faster would be redirecting output to a file and sending the file over the net. It may be easier to do that now, but not necessarily faster.
And if some cycles get used up doing weird UI gimicks that I'll never use - like making the UI scalable so the partially sighted can use it, I'm willing to trade that.
I totally agree with that. OTOH, I am told that text only interfaces with screen readers etc were better for partially sighted or blind users than todays UI's. It seems to be getting better now, but as far as I know, for a long time the accessibility of user interfaces went down.
I don't know about anyone else but I can't code 2^(years / 1.5) faster so I wouldn't be able to keep up with that damn responsive text based compiler. On the other hand, I am that much faster overall as I now call an API that adds all that "bloatware" instead of having to code my own damn mouse drivers, my code is largely debugged on the fly...
I agree with that.
That happend to me sometimes in mid 80s. I was still using Microsoft Word then.
Pick an every day but semi complex task that people do now. For example: For a homework project, go on line, grab half a dozen graphics and ten blocks of text from those websites, put them all in to a stylishly laid out newsletter format. Do that on a P4, then do it on an a DOS PC from 15 years ago.
Hmm, let's see, just for the sake of the argument:
To get the text, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. Slightly faster now, but not much.
To get the graphics, I would use lynx then and I would use lynx now. There would be quite a difference in speed, but not because of cpu or memory, but because od modem speed. To lay out the newsletter, I would use TeX now just as 10--15 years ago. There are some new packages available, so it would be somewhat easier now, but again, that has nothing to do with the cpu or memory. The syntax highlighting in vim today is somewhat more powerful than in jed 10 years ago, and it does use more cpu and memory, so that would help me a little. The real speed improvement would come from actually running TeX and printing the thing. 15 years ago, it would take about the same time as the rest of the work, maybe an hour or so on a very slow machine. Now that would be just few seconds. So overall, the whole process would be about 5 times faster at most, if I rwally exagerate.
See if matching the same quality of work doesn't take you 2^10 times as long on that old PC, assuming you can even do it at all.
Well, last time I checked, 5 2^10. Of course that doesn't mean other tasks wouldn't show greater speedup. Perhaps this wasn't the best example. As far as the quality, the only difference would be in printing, and that only if I used color. Again, nothing to do with cpu nor memory, just with printers.
Those cycles aren't wasted. Sure, we do
How is "landscape" a printer setting? Yes, it applies to printing, but also to creating a postscript or pdf version of the file. I would call it "page formating" rather than "printer setting". It has nothing to do with an actual printer. And, in TeX, it takes about 9 bytes to specify you want to format the whole document in landscape, and perhaps a little bit more if you need individual landscape pages in otherwise portrait oriented document.
Including png's is actually pretty easy. As far as the size of miktex --- you would have to compare that to the size of Word and Powerpoint together with all the fonts they use.
I like that. Didn't read the book. Adding "trip to the library" to my list of things to do this weekend...
Anyway, what about changing the question this way:
- If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood produced what looked like a block of wood hacked at in fury, called it something like "Evidence of madness" and displayed it in public, is that a work of art?
I call BS. While there may be some people working in fractals who do the digital equivalent of "walking around, randomly photographing...", there are plenty of people producing beautiful images by hand selecting which equation, what coloring method, which colors, and, in more complicated instances, what layering techniques to use.
There are also many people working very carefully with a camera, light, composition etc to produce images of kittens that you can see on the ceiling of your dentists office. I don't call that art.
I don't think the discussion was whether mathematically generated images can be used to produce art. The way I read the debate, the grandparent was arguing that mathematical images and images of space are not art simply because they are beautiful. In other words, you cannot equate art with beauty. Things that are really beautiful and visually stunning don't have to be art, and art can actually be really ugly.
In particular, check out the works of Sylvie Gallet, Damien Jones, and Kerry Mitchell (google on each name and take first link). Sure, they all use computers to produce the art, and each uses fractals as their medium, but each produces works of striking beauty and each has a style that is distinct to themselves.
Without commenting on any of the particular names, (as I don't know them), I must agree with you that an artist can definitely use computers and math to create art. And the comparison you make to photography is, IMHO, a very good one.
So if you have an artefact (e.g. a photograph) in your hand, how do tell whether it's 'art' or the output of a random process?
Without knowing anything about the artefact, I cannot.
To be concrete about this, seeing you're a photographer, suppose I took a camera, linked its shutter release to an atom of something with a half-life of a week or two so that when the atom decayed the shutter was released, and strapped the camera to the back of a blind man who was instructed to walk wherever he liked. At the end of the process there would be a picture. That is, I'm sure you'd say, not art.
I don't know what the person you are replying to would say, but I would definitely consider that an art!
Now, suppose some self important pompous artist took a camera and carefully and pompously framed a particular image, capturing a particular instant in time. That is, I'm sure you'd say, art. Even if the 'artist' happened to be standing beside the blind man at the same time.
Yes, I would call that art, too.
Now supposing the two photographs were dropped on the dark room floor, and when you picked them up you could not remember which was which.
I would consider that a wonderful art! Two pictures, identical yet obtained under such different circumstances, mixed up in a dark room and displayed side by side, with no way of telling which one is which. Wow!
What intrinsic property does a work of art have which allows it to be distinguished from non-art?
Work of art as a purely material object does not have to have any such intrinsic property. Some do, but in many cases you have to know more about the object to appreciate it as art. You see, artists can explore different things in their art. Somebody explores visual or material aspects of an object, somebody else explores randomness, and somebody can even explore his/her own pompousness and fame. An object of art does not exists by itself, in a complete vacuum. You need to know the context.
If there is no such property, then surely there can be no such thing as art, because it cannot be discriminated; if the property is in the eye of the beholder, then surely the product of the random process is just as much 'art' as the product of the artist.
It is neither.
But I like your comparison of computer generated images to photography: instead of shooting pictures of a real object, you take pictures of an imaginary one (no pun intended). A photographer can simply take a purely descriptive, documentary shot of an object, and similarly you can have purely descriptive, technical image of a Mandelbrot set. That's not art, unless an artist wants to use such picture and explore its "descriptiveness" or something. Or you can take a pretty pictures of kittens, flowers, mountains etc to create a visually pleasing image with no depth. That's not art either. That would be equivalent to producing beautiful images of Mandelbrot set with pretty colors etc. They are pretty like kittens or horses or frosted trees, but that's it. But then, a photographer can take a picture of horses that shows some dynamic composition, tells you something more about horses except that they are pretty. Ansel Adams can take a picture of a mountain that is not just pretty, it's fascinating in some way. I am a mathematician, not an art critic, so I am not really able to describe this. It has nothing to do with neither realism nor beauty. People call Adams's pictures realistic, but I don't think they really are. I believe that there is an equivalent of this kind of photography in the area of fractal images and computer generated images in general.
What exactly do you propose we should have done? Are you sure the alternative you are talking about isn't Iraqis on the street saying (or whispering) "thanks for getting rid of the tyrant, but why did you have to become another tyrant?" How would you implement security while still maintaining freedom?
However, when traveling to another country you must RESPECT that country. You are a guest, just as your a guest in someone's home. Failure to obey the rules of that country is rude, inconsiderate and frankly, you deserve whatever punishment is given for violations.
I agree with you that a traveler to another country should respect the country, its people and culture. However, as I have learned when I grew up in communist Czechoslovakia, and as those of us who are living in the US are learning now, respecting a country is definitely not the same as respecting its government!
I don't know if things changed during the last couple of years, but they did not do that in any country in Europe I ever visited, with the exception of Soviet Union in 1989. That was the only trip on which they asked me where am I going, where am I going to stay, and in addition to that I was supposed to go to a local police station to register immediately after arrival. I didn't, and nothing happend anyway.
On all my travels in Europe, before the country I am a citizen of joined the EU, nobody ever asked me anything about where I am going to stay. And in many cases I indeed did not know. Just imagine: "Well, officer, I am going to find a campground or a hostel tonight, and tommorrow I am hitting the road and hitchhiking south. Where? I don't know, depends where my rides go." or "I am going to sleep on a beach." That was years ago, but I know plenty of people who still do the same now, or at least did the same year or two ago. A friend of mine rode a bike from Prague to Paris, just imagine them asking "where are you going to stay tonight?", obviously he had a tent and sleeping bag straped on his bicycle, and was going to simply find a place to camp when he got tired.
I have slept in plenty of public parks, gutters and construction sites in Europe, and aside of people kicking me out when they came to work in the morning (couple times after sharing their breakfast with me, thanks), I never had any problem. I am rather neurotic, so when traveling very far away to a place whose culture, habits and laws I really don't know, I would get a reservation for at least the first night, but then I know plenty of people who wouldn't even thing that way and just go.
They never let my dog in the store. Not fair!
Also, the other day I got kicked out from a church after trying to drop things I found on the street onto the altar...
Anyway, as other posters said, this is not limited to games. Back at the days when I still climbed, I often ended up staring on walls of buildings trying the figure out the way up. And the other day I caught myself standing on the street in a heavy rain, looking at the rushing water trying to find the best way through the "rapids".
Obviously, the prerequisite courses were "tailored to the level of students". If I "tailor my course to the level of the students", then the person who gets my students after me will have a living hell trying to cover what they are supposed to cover. So they end up "tailoring" too. It's a viscious circle, and a reason why many consider the entire current American higher education system a fraud. I personally wouldn't go that far, but it certainly is a serious problem. A lot of my colleagues from different schools think that the solution is to just stick with the syllabus, assume that student's prerequisites were really what they were supposed to be, and if a student doesn't make it because of poor preparedness, too bad. If everybody did that from the very beginning, it would certainly be great, but right now there is just too many students caught in the system, and in most cases it is not their fault they are not ready for the classes. For that reason I don't think that's very good solution, but frankly, I know of no other.
Unless harsh shadows and high contrast between foreground and backround is what you are after.
I had a series of pictures where I emulated night flash photography by using high gradation paper and selectively overexposing the more distant parts of the picture on the prints. It really looked like the pictures were taken in complete dark with a flash, except when you looked carefully, the shadows and reflections were not always where they were supposed to be. Anyway, it was pretty interesting effect.
I think there are some old open source version of APL, though. Of course j is an APL on some powerful steroids, so it doesn't really compare.
Pretty cool! There are several other programs like this, for Windows, there is free of charge WinGeom by Peanut Software, for Unix there is Kseg, Dr. Geo, and KIG, all free. Plus several commercial programs.
I was actually going to suggest Povray. Great tool for learning trigonometry and basic linear algebra.
Or if you are too unpatient to mess with povray, get geomview. You get faster output, and it is more interactive.
Just move closer to the subject ...and spend all your time wondering why all the people on your portraits have such big schozzolas.
But it doesn't have to be an advanced course. Using fractals, you can introduce complex numbers, dynamical systems, chaos, pde's etc on very elementary level, while slowly introducing the equations and formulas. That's exactly what computers are good for -- visualizing and modeling.
Decent e-mail clients will let you hide all quoted text with a single keystroke.
Well, if you can not comprehend that Anyushka is the same name as Anya and Sasha is the same as Alexey, than you have got a problem :)
I my previous place of emplyment, the administration people kept sending out messages with subject "Important information". Every time I went to look in my mailbox to find which day was a certain meeting rescheduled to, all I saw was 150 messages with subjet "Important information", with contents ranging from broken water main through electricity outages, reminders to get new parking stickers, class cancellations to announcements of important meeting etc.
And the best thing was that those people had the guts to constantly bother the faculty with stupid "inservices" on phone and e-mail usage.
Multiple machines on a non-weahtly budget. If the XP2000 didn't have the video card ($125 all by itself) and the RAM ($50) the total computer price here would be under 750$.
That's a lot of money for a familly with three kids paying for preschool, music classes etc!