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A pithy endnote for a film.
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
— Auguries of Innocence, William Blake
Remember the progressive jpegs from the Netscape days? Over a slow (and I’m refering to speeds in the 28.8 kbs era) internet link, a progressive jpeg is displayed in stages, starting with a low resolution version of the image. Subsequent scans replace it with higher resolution versions (I ought to post an example here). If we could smoothen the transition, it would resemble the process of focussing an image through a camera lens. No nostalgia here… thanks to improved connection speeds, baseline jpegs (those that display top-to-bottom) download pretty fast anyway, eliminating the need to preview the image in stages at lower resolutions. I don’t see many progressive jpegs on webpages these days.
Pardon the geekiness, but I thought this could be another (probably unoriginal) analogy of how we perceive our friends and acquaintances. So we meet someone for the first time, and ask for the first order detail. The image is a blur and we see just the most general patterns. The picture clarifies as we get to know the person. The underlying complexity get revealed. The blobs we see here and there resolve into recognisable, and possibly unrecognisable, shapes and objects. The broad solid primary color regions turn into subtle shades. First impressions change, and then we see the mushed up, the beautiful and the ugly with unmistakable clarity.
Friends of mine don’t all see the same image. Most who know me stop at the level 2 scan — the next level of resolution above the rudimentary. A handful see things a few levels deeper. It depends as much on the extent of interaction as personality compatibility and worldview. Some parts go unnoticed by most. At worst, they don’t resemble anything and appear to blend into the background. I don’t think anyone sees the full resolution, perhaps not even myself.
Some acquaintances think of me rather positively — their first impressions are not usually balanced. Perhaps it’s the way I look or dress. If they get a bit more time, they’ll ask the obligatory get-to-know-your-background questions, where revealing your past affiliations with institutions is almost unavoidable, at least in this corner of the world. Names of mutual acquaintances may surface, with no consequence, and then they size you up and fit you into preconceived mental baskets with their friends of your ilk.
Friends get shocked when I do say or do things they deem uncharacteristic of me. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so predictable anymore. The image resolves and reveals, and they glimpse the dissonances previously invisible…
I’m on a movie spree lately. With the fortnightly core screenings, EU Film Festival and Japanese Film Festival happening almost end-to-end, I feel torn. In the past two weeks, I’ve watched Scoop, Offside, Robocon, and A Class to Remember II and IV. I might review them if I find time.
I just had my third driving lesson. Driving a manual transmission car for the first time, I became a total n00b despite accruing more than 10 lessons on an auto-transmission car. I thought I did pretty well in the first half of the hour when I managed to keep count of the times my engine went dead due to improper clutch motions, but that was not to be… Well, it’s been a while since I drove.
Reminder to myself: I need to find a local vendor for solar filters, specifically the Baader Astrosolar filter. Mercury will transit the Sun on the morning of 9 November. I may go on leave/off that day, but then again… maybe there’s no need to. The transit begins before sunrise and ends at 8:08 am local time. I could arrive at office early to observe the event from inside the office. I’d then need to do some homework – confirm that the Sun will not be obstructed by buildings, check that the image quality is acceptable even through the glass window pane, estimate if I need to use a higher magnification (Mercury’s angular size is about 10″), blah. Besides the mercenery benefit of saving myself a day’s leave, observing from the office also makes a great outreach opportunity :)
This (and this) is too good to be true. How cool can this be? You’re out in the middle of the city with your date and the radio talk show host gently guides you through his itinery of solar system and galactic objects, under the stately glow of the Milky Way. City dwellers won’t know what they have been missing until they see it for themselves. The education and outreach potentials of this event are tremendous. The naive optimist in me is unwilling to believe that it cannot happen here – it just takes more work.
And an oddball news: TV station aims at an alien audience. I’m so looking forward to the alien rebroadcast in 2096.
