Sep 11th, 2008
Ever since I was a kid I’ve been very observant, always trying to understand why things are like they are or why I perceive them the way I do. Even though I can’t say I have studied physics, philosophy, neurology or psychology very deeply during my life, they are subjects that have always fascinated me. Often, upon being perplexed by some mystery of nature, I would keenly observe and finally conclude its reasons and solve it, as if it were a puzzle. There was one such mystery that I was never able to solve, though. I believed that I was simply not smart enough, so for the longest time I forgot about it. But today, as I was waking up, I seem to have found the answer.
This mystery is a trivial one, like most others that have puzzled me over the years. The enigma is: why do we see ourselves horizontally flipped in the mirror, and never vertically? It doesn’t matter where I’m looking from, the freckle on the left side of my face will always be on the right, but my head will never be where my feet are. I had always deduced that it was a matter of perception, but I was never able to solve the riddle in its entirety.
Now I believe I have found the reason. You may already have been ‘enlightened’, but if you have not, please read on. The key is: gravity. We are beings that not only cannot imagine living without gravity, but even our bodies have been shaped to match this fact, as we are symmetrical on an axis perpendicular to the ground. What this reveals is that we find left and right to be interchangeable, but never up and down; we cannot conceive the possibility of the sky being under our feet, but we very often take a right turn when we should have taken a left.
The next key, then, are expectations. If you ask someone to turn a chair around, will you expect them to put it upside down, with its legs up in the air? Of course not: they will turn it around a vertical axis, because gravity has conditioned us to it, so it’s the most logical response. They won’t even think of doing anything other than the latter, unless they’re being playful.
You might already see where I’m going with all this. Take a look at the following picture:
The leftmost picture is what you’ve always seen when you look in the mirror; nothing new. The second is what you’d expect to see, with the image in the mirror ‘corrected’. And on the third hinges my argument. If you look carefully, the second and third reflections are the same image, rotated 180º of one another; the third was simply the result of ‘flipping’ the image (as you would a paper sheet) vertically instead of horizontally. In fact, I could flip the image around any odd axis, and the result would be the same, only crooked to a different angle. What does this boil down to, then?
We choose to see the image in our mirror as having been ‘flipped’ horizontally, when in reality it could have been any direction, simply because we are conditioned to our expectations: that the feet must be against the ground. The correct image, in our mind, is the horizontal ‘unflip’, because flipping vertically would result in an image that is opposed to gravity; thus, we eliminate any other possible unflip. So, next time you’re in front of the mirror, looking at your face, stop and think that what you see is an inverted image, and left and right, up and down, or even north and south make no difference: it’s just backwards.
Jul 4th, 2008
I’m in my senior year, studying graphic design and doing my final year project, which will be due in January 2009. I’m a big gamer; played videogames since I was little and got my NES (which I still keep,) and have kept going at it since then, more or less uninterrupted. So I guess it’s no surprise that I decided to make, for my project, a game; the first videogame I’ve ever made. Nevertheless, this post is not about my project, but, rather, about my opinion on videogames, which I hope will serve to justify my choice. Though I consider myself a critical individual, I’ve cut videogames a lot of slack in the past; I’ve become a lot more critical of the medium lately, though, and done a lot of reading on the subject because of my project. Thus, a collection of some posts I’ve made elsewhere, on the subject of videogames: (continue reading)
Jul 1st, 2008
It was a busy day! I’ve been setting up this website, and the only thing I hadn’t yet done was post here. Among the update’s there’s a new main page with links to the blog, the portfolio and the piclog. The latter is a Pixelpost installation for what some people call a photoblog, but the word has a negative connotation to me (at least phonetically,) and it wasn’t meant to be for photographs only, so I chose ‘pic,’ for picture. The difference with this blog is that the piclog is more of a gallery with not much other than the pictures themselves; to flesh out the process, the ideas or the anecdotes behind them I will use this blog. So they’re meant to complement eachother.
I set up a script that lets me more or less automatically send my pictures from the piclog to my Flickr account. Why the redundance? Because Flickr is more ‘connected,’ so more friends, or whomever, can find my pictures, comment them, et cetera. I’m not really into text blog communities so I don’t intend to do the same with this blog.
Another thing I spend my time in today was uploading videos to Vimeo. I already had a YouTube account, but since Vimeo has so much nicer image quality, I signed up, and in a couple of hours I had already uploaded everything. Now my YouTube account is outdated; I’ll have to consider whether or not to upload the rest of the stuff there, since I will mostly just be using Vimeo to embed the videos here and get them streaming, to tell the respective tale. Some videos are kind of embarrassingly mediocre-to-bad, though, but I just put them up because they’re interesting one way or another.
So, what’s still left to do? The hardest work will be making a custom theme for this WordPress installation. It seems quite a bit more complicated than with Pixelpost, but I’ll just have to find the time, because I really dislike the overload of most ready-made themes, and the fact that I can’t comfortably go into the code and add a bar with the latest piclog updates, or Vimeo videos, or whatever. What else? Well, I should smoothen out the wrinkles in the piclog, and I also want to, eventually, integrate both blogs with the main page, and maybe the videos too. Not much else, for now!
Jun 30th, 2008
I don’t like blogs all that much, to tell you the truth, Dear Reader. I don’t think the phrase has much weight when it’s written as my first post in this here blog, though. I usually don’t like them because they feel exhibitionistic and egocentric in many cases. But there are some important, useful, interesting blogs out there, and these are nice to have; and am I to judge what a good blog is, anyway? A blog is good –it is useful– if it’s fulfilling a purpose. I may find some of those purposes less relevant, but it might be very much so for the person writing it.
What makes this blog worthy for me, then, even if I can’t foresee it getting any more than a visit per day? I simply needed a dumping place for my things; little things that might not be appropriate to display anywhere other than this tiny personal space, but which, put together, might form a collection worthy of showing. I lack a timeline for my doings in and out of the Web, one that could document my own growth. And I wanted a more personal web space, something that felt more like myself rather than what I do (my portfolio.) Yes: this blog is my face, my mind, my hands. It’s already starting to feel like it’s my child. I will not post here for you, Dear Reader; I will do it for myself.
El problema de conocer dos idiomas es el sentir la necesidad de comunicarse usando ambos, porque, no importa cuál se elija, siempre se va a dejar a un enorme grupo fuera. He elegido el inglés como el idioma principal de este blog porque es estadísticamente más hablado, pero intercambiaré con el español en la medida en que crea preferible. Espero me disculpes, Lector.
Eso a un lado, te explico el motivo de este espacio que he creado para mí, repitiendo parte de lo de más arriba. Sentí la necesidad de convertir mi sitio web no en aquello que yo he hecho, sino en un reflejo de mí mismo, un pequeño pedazo de mi propia piel que pongo aquí no para ti, Amado Lector, sino (y lo digo honestamente) para mí. Sentí el vacío que siente el que no deja huella; no por pisar poco fuerte, sino por dejar que la erosione el tiempo. Cuando no tienes registro de ti mismo es como si no dejaras de empezar. Con suma envidia del que te resume una vida entre un hache-te-te-pé y un punto-algo, abro este lugar que es hoy mi propia semilla.
