Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with perspective

What if the world was a glorious donut?

reverend cuttle — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 08:09:05 -0800

If I'm sitting on the terraformed surface of a Culture orbital, what does the horizon look like? For those unfamiliar with Iain Banks' Culture novels, imagine an artificial ring spinning on its axis and revolving around a star. People live on the inside (concave) surface of the ring.

Ostensibly, the curvature of the ring is gradual enough that the ground beneath them appears flat, as it does on the convex surface of the Earth. But what do they see when they look to the horizon? Can they see the far edge of the ring? Every time I try and picture this, my brain stops working.

Thanks for indulging a nerd.

"Oooh, look, an exotic native woman!" "Buzz off."

divabat — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 10:55:09 -0800

What are some good travel guide websites that aren't so Western-centric and don't treat other countries like exotic sights to gawk at? I just rediscovered Matador after randomly signing up for it years ago, and while it looks really promising, it does have a really strong colonial "we are American tourists off to see the exotic isles and be really awesome Americans saving the world" vibe around it. It's something I've noticed with travel companies in Australia too - I was at STA Travel's promo for gap years and to me it felt like the rest of the world was there for their entertainment, or that they were humble foreigners trying to civilize the savages with their volunteer jobs, or something.

Being Malaysian, and being used to being made exotic, that sort of vibe never really sat right with me. I've been travelling since I was a baby, I _love_ to travel, and I love volunteering wherever I can (I was on a world tour that was part performance part community work - best time ever). But I don't click with the party-hard, white-kid-saving-the-world-by-teaching-English, befriend-other-backpackers type lifestyle that groups like Matador and STA Travel tend to espouse.

Are there any other good websites and resources for travel that have a different view on things? I'm after more how-to sort of stuff, like the best organisations doing X or the most interesting things about Y in Z country, or how to pack for a trip (as opposed to personal stories of travel). I'm 23, so something geared for youth is great, but again I'm not much of a club-hopper type. Anything that can take account of currencies that don't really translate well overseas (Europe for Really Cheap!) would be great.

Thanks!

3D GeometryFilter: Is there a mathematical equation that defines relative lengths of objects at different depths of field for humans?

miasma — Sat, 16 May 2009 15:07:19 -0800

Is there an equation that defines the change in apparent size as a function of distance from the viewer? Basically, if I'm looking at a set of railroad tracks head on, if one plank is like 10 ft away, it appears to be one size. The same plank 20 ft away appears smaller. What is the relative size difference? Put another way, how big does a 1ft line appear to be at 10 ft, at 20 ft, etc.? Furthermore, is there an angle of convergence? Just like the planks on a railroad track will converge to a single point, if i wanted two planks at different distances to appear to be in the same overlapping plane, where would I need to place them?

Coming and going in Korean and English

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 27 May 2008 02:35:51 -0800

Languages: 'I'm coming' versus 'I'm going' in response to 'Come here!' So one of my students and I were talking about this, and I didn't have a good answer. In English, when your Mom says 'Come here!' the normal response is 'I'm coming'.

In Korean, the response translates directly to 'I'm going'. There's an interesting shift in perspective there (in English, I'm coming to you from your POV, in Korean I'm going over there from my POV), or interesting to me, at least, and one that I can't really explain, even by pulling explanations out of my butt, which is, I admit, my wont sometimes.

It's odd, because given the individual/group-centric cultural tendencies in play, I would have expected the opposite result. I expect that it may just boil down to English's tendency to respond to a question (unless it's 'do') or command using the same verb previously used, but I wonder if there's more happening.

So, yeah, two part question. Anybody have any ideas what's going on here, and for our speakers of other languages, which way do the languages you know express the motion in this situation?

looking for outside-the-box thinkers who changed the world

klanawa — Sat, 17 May 2008 23:02:46 -0800

looking for examples of world-changing innovation as the result of seeing a conventional thing in an unconventional way. my girlfriend has a writinging assignment wherein she must discuss a world-changing event (could be in the sciences but preferrably not, which is what makes it difficult) that came as the result of one's ability to see things in a new light. this last thing is key: there has to have been some pivotal point where our protagonist has had a revelatory shift in perspective on some possibly mundane thing.

we're thinking along the lines of one of the many connections in the documentary "connections" except less accidental and more visionary.

also, more obscure is probably better... nothing really comes to mind, except the usual sciency suspects.

How to Change my Worrywort Perspective

gb77 — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 12:58:21 -0800

How do I Change my Worrywort Perspective? Hi, everyone, I'm GB and I'm a chronic worrier.

Somehow, someway, along the way (I'm a 43 y.o. male) I've grown into a world class worrier. It's so bad I suspect I don't even realize how much I worry anymore. Sometimes I worry that I'm not worrying enough about something.

Over xmas, while I was under an awful project deadline, I had a short span where I suddenly had this great perspective: "Life is too short. Don't live your life worrying. Ease up. It'll all work out."

Well, that didn't last long. I'm back to my old self.

Remember the main character, Peter, from the movie *Office Space*, after he had that hypnosis session? He was so laid back, so zen, he looked unflappably happy. That's what I want -- or as close as I can get to it without becoming an irresponsible idiot.

Any thoughts?

Why can't you believe everything you read in a history book?

Dasein — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 05:36:52 -0800

I'm looking for two brief historical accounts of the same event or events, to show how history can be distorted. Bonus points if the events relate to European encounters with indigenous peoples in the Americas. It doesn't matter what event or period of history this recounts. I'm just looking for a couple of paragraphs in each account - and it can be as specific as the conduct of the Conquistadors in a particular battle or as broad as the settlement of the American West. The key things is to show how historical events for which we have good documentary evidence can be presented radically differently, especially in a propagandistic way with the more traditional account.

It doesn't really matter if the more modern account is itself not balanced, as long as it's at variance with the first. Thanks very much!

What were Eleanor Roosevelt's exact words?

albernathy0 — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 13:25:11 -0800

Hello, a while ago I heard a quote by Eleanor Roosevelt but since then I haven't been able to find it anywhere. It was along the lines of your mind growing with your experiences and age. The quote expresses her initial worry when as a late teenager she assumed her mind would maintain the same (limited) mindset, paradigm, mentality even into her adult, aged years. If I remember correctly the quote is short, being only a line or two. Thank you so much, this quote is very important to me!

Lion Cuts = Cruelty??

sfkiddo — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 21:17:09 -0800

I was looking for a cat groomer on Yelp today and was struck by the comments: only place that will do lion cuts in the city, most places won't shave cats, please don't shave your cat, etc. I realized that I've seen this sentiment quite often on the interwebs... This puzzles me: after all, dogs get groomed (aka shaved) and I never hear about it being "cruel" to the dog (the adjective of choice when it comes to cats). Could you help me figure out the cultural difference between shaving cats and shaving dogs?

Here are my working theories on why cats and dogs are stereotyped differently vis-a-vis grooming:

- Cats have a tendency to look baleful in photos. Our minds notice the lion cut (because it's different), register the regular look (baleful), and put it together that the cat is "mad" because of the lion cut;
- Cats are more "independent", thus we don't like the idea of them getting groomed into a cute shape because that means they're submissive and might end up in Paris Hilton's handbag;
- Dogs are "dirtier" than cats; thus, it's OK to groom them because they can't do it themselves.

Any other ideas? Also, my question comes from a US California perspective; would love to hear how everyone else thinks about this subject.

reasons for perspective

azriel2257 — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 08:28:50 -0800

How do living conditions affect an artist's perspective and art? I'm looking for articles (or opinions) dealing with how artists' living conditions affect their perspective and their art. While I've found plenty of information about how growing up poor or living in a poor neighborhood influences one's art, I'm looking for more random or less-conventional examples, like living in a slanted house, or living with rational/logical thinkers (::cough::engineers::cough::).
This might be the beginning of a thesis paper, so cite-able sources are a plus.

Thanks!

Gleaming the Cube: displaying a 3-d box of perspective-transformed bitmaps using client-side web technologies?

weston — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 03:11:53 -0800

How would one create a web page showing a 3D rotating cube, with sides of the cube displaying arbitrary visitor-supplied images as their faces? So, obviously this is a multi-step process: user visits site, user uploads up to six images, then user sees rotating cube. Getting users to visit isn't my responsibility, so I'm not worried about that, and uploading images is easy, so I'm not worried about that. Generating the rotating cube, on the other hand, is somewhat unfamiliar to me, so that's what I'm looking for help on.

My initial thought was to feed the visitor-uploaded images to a Flash movie, which would then smoothly execute a few perspective-transformation tweens on them, creating the cube illusion, right? However, the somewhat experienced Flash developer on my team showed me that Flash won't do perspective transformations (or even stuff like skew, transpose, and rotate) on bitmaps -- it simply treats bitmaps like a special fill-pattern on a polygon, and transforms only the border. This seems like a serious limitation to me, and I'm surpsised that Flash has it, but we can't find a way around it at the moment. Can someone prove us wrong and point us to a working method?

(In fact, curiously enough, tools or code libraries that perform transformations on raster images in general seem to be thinner on the ground than I would have thought. I was thinking there'd be all kinds of free libraries that did everything from rotations/translations to crazy conformal mappings, when in reality I'm having trouble finding much that does something beyond shrinking or cropping or some work in the colorspace.)

We also looked at using a 3D tool (Swift3D) to accomplish the job, but it didn't seem to allow for us to pass arbitrary images adorn the sides of the final rendered cube. And I'm not sure that it's outputting anything more sophisticated than outputting the swf equivalent of an animated gif.

If Flash really can't do this, I'm considering:

(1) Java applets. Never been a huge fan of them, but if I recall correctly, the Java 2D API has facilities for doing affine transformations on raster images. Heck, maybe even some super spiffy 3D API that'd make this easy (anybody know?)

(2) Now with more AJAX! I could always write some unholy mess that generates a series of frames for the cube in various states of rotation on the server side, and some javascript that dispays them on the client side. However, this option makes Java applets start to sound sensible.

(3) SVG? VML? VRML? I don't know much about any of those, so I'm just sortof hoping a passing MeFite might know these well enough to comment on whether or not they have any suitability for this task. Preferably more than #2.

(4) Are there better 3D tools than Swift3D that could let us script the behavior of the cube and parametrize the images displayed on its side, and deliver in Flash? If perspective transformations on bitmaps are truly impossible, then I suspect this doesn't exist, but one can hope...

(5) Anything else people want to suggest. Up to and including "don't do it" (though the client has convinced me the visual would in fact really help in selling his product).

Finally... any general pointers to resources about transformations on raster images or otherwise using raster images in a 3d context are welcome!

2nd person perspective narratives

0bvious — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:10:39 -0800

Fiction usually comes in two flavours: 1st person narrative or 3rd person description. What short stories or novels have been written in 2nd person perspective (i.e. from the reader's viewpoint)? Also, are there any movies shot entirely from this angle?