One of the games was a "spot the differences" between two pictures with an ever decreasing timer for each round. Using this trick I was able to easily surpass the high score, and garner a crowd watching me perform this mind numbing feat.
Probably my peak fame right there.
My son and I always make jokes about everyone's 5 minutes of fame. Some random person on the jumbotron at a sporting event "Yup, there's his moment, it's over now."
At least yours got you something ;)
Sadly no one saw this 'feet'.
The guy famously trained for months for the fight scene and a tired Harrison Ford just pulled out the gun and shot him. Everybody thought it was hilarious and that became the scene.
Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizing the obvious - how terribly shallow that is, and missing so much of what's really good in life - I've realized how fleeting fame seems to be even for the truly famous. Even looking over the list of US Presidents (never mind lesser political figures like VPs, cabinet members, congressmen, etc.) as someone who has always been interested in history, I look at some names and think, "who?" or "I've heard the name, but know nothing about him." I mean, of course you can still read about them, but that even a US President can be largely forgotten as a household name within 250 years is really a stunning thing to think about; they are ultimately no more immortal than someone who only has their name in a genealogy database or on a grave marker.
> He was the man most gracious and fair-minded, > Kindest to his people and keenest to win fame.
Those are the last lines of Beowulf. A man who won great fame among his people by slaying monsters and dragons. It's telling that the final line of the poem ends with his most dominant trait, "and keenest to win fame." Wanting fame is not wrong, and is far from shallow. The question is, "fame for what?" Regardless of whether you think Beowulf existed or not, it's telling that for a whole culture that the most important characteristic of a great man in one of their great poemsis "keenness to win fame," almost as a wink, with the bard saying "and if you want to be sung like this hero, you must desire fame just as keenly, and so do great deeds."
This may be something I'm making up, but I have the feeling that the fame = immortality concept came out of legacy: people wanting to create a family that continues on after themselves (and is rich, powerful, etc). Which makes sense, because then we're talking about a logical extension of the reproductive instinct. But in the modern world even that seems unreachable to me: we're so utterly different from our grandparents that we might as well be aliens, and the same will probably hold true for our own grandchildren.
I guess all that puts me in the Mike Tyson school of thought on legacy: "We're just dead. We're dust. We're absolutely nothing."
Even if you are remembered briefly, what’s remembered isn’t you it’s just some vague representation of you that will fade over time.
Some famous Roman emperor might have said something similar 2000 years ago for all I know but I forget his name. :P
Humanity will not forget Newton, Einstein, Shannon and Crick. And up to a point, trying to do what they did, discover new things about the universe is not an unhealthy goal.
And yet you might be able to list some Roman Emperors, for good or bad (Cesar, Augustus) or even politicians (Cicero, may e Seneca) after 2000 years.
Put the pair of images in front of your eyes.
Bring your finger between your face and the image.
Now look at your finger.
Move your finger back and forth.
While doing this, notice that at a particular distance, the images in background will perfectly overlap each other.
That's your moment.
Pull out your finger and look at that image.
---
Should take lot less tries to learn doing it without finger. I have taught cross eye to my siblings and cousins using this method. But if you always need finger to focus it's fine.
I have otherwise good vision, I can read small text from farther than most people (I didn't realize not everyone could read all the small letters on an eye test), I don't have a problem seeing things up close either, etc. but I lack the ability to properly cross my eyes for some reason.
It's too bad because I've spent a decent amount of time at bars with those spot the difference machines lol
https://triaxes.com/docs/3DTheory-en/522ParallelCrosseyedvie...
which some people struggle with, somebody posted a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autostereogram
to HN yesterday which some people get and others don't. (That's different from the "cross-eyed stereogram" because one of them involves having two images and the other one has one image with two images hidden in it)
In these later examples (starting with the easy puzzle of the OP, and your 3d examples), I find that I do the process in two stages.
Unfocus my sight until the third image shows up in the middle at the correct size (as a blurry mess). Then try to focus the center image.
It makes me wonder if the wall-eyed version could be useful for eye health.
I've often heard when doing computer work, you should focus on something 20 meters away for 20 seconds, every 20 minutes.
Doing a wall-eyed magic eye seems like the same thing physically, your focal point is much further away.
Would be cool to have some software that lets you overlap two coding windows, so you have a 3d terminal.
I think the "cross eyed" phrase is a bit ambiguous.
What I ended up with (I think) is a focal point not closer than the screen but farther than it. My eyes didn't want to do it at first but then they did.
What is weird about it is the focusing and focal point are out of sync --- my brain can do it but the weird feeling is one of "gosh, this thing is a lot closer than it should be" where "should be" is based on focal point, and "is a lot closer" is based on focus.
Don't want to do this too much, feels like I could easily decalibrate my brain for real life lol.
For most people, having the images resolve in front of the plane of the page such that in resolved overlaid image the right eye sees the left image, and the left eye sees the right image, will work ... and it can work even if the images are farther apart than the interpupillary distance.
Which is why for ASGs people advise you to look past the picture. Or why you bring the pic close to your eyes (so close that you basically have no choice but to look beyond the picture)
Try that.
Hold the rolls like binoculars where right roll is pointing at right image and left is at left image.
It's like a DIY VR headset where your brain/eyes only gets two same looking things to focus. No outside noise.
I used to not be able to do the "magic eye" 3d images until recently, and this trick is pretty handy.
My usual method is just to brute-force linear scan from left to right, top-to-bottom. May not be elegant, but it works.
I, on the other hand, 37 years later,am basically permanently crosseyed from the experience lol. It somehow became a resting state for me from all of the practice, so I’m always doing it on any kind of repetitive patterns, and even “successfully” on random ones which does some really weird stuff in your visual cortex.
As it happens, I also can't focus on the images in TFA after crossing my eyes to get the shimmer the author refers to.
Makes you wonder if the kid he was talking about had a lazy eye or crossed eyes or something.
The game is usually called 'Photo Hunt'
Was the high score holder on there for a few years.
