The World of Stuff .com

It’s stereoscopic!

Remember those “Magic Eye” images that were popular in the ’90s? The crazy pictures you kind of had to gaze at funny until a hidden image jumped out? I don’t know about you, but ever since I figured out how to see them (about six months ago), I’ve wanted to make my own. The software required to make good ones is very expensive. But some bright mind has presented a way to do it with, of all things, JavaScript. Check out the article, “Stereoscopic Vision in JavaScript,” and be sure to try out the working example of the script. You type a short string of text and the JavaScript thinks and chugs and spits out your text in a stereoscopic “image” that’s actually just a bunch of text. Plus, you get a choice of black-and-white or color (I recommend the latter for easier viewing.)

Have a look at this one I made (the solution is posted as a comment):

I wrote a bit about these images six months ago.

School is going better after the first day of the semester; i.e., I’m not feeling queasy anymore. My teachers I can put up with. But I’m getting loaded with homework for the weekends, and much of consists of essays. You may think it’s funny that I, a prolific writer, would have trouble writing an essay, but I don’t. I hate essays from the deepest crevices of my soul. Besides Brussels sprouts, I genuinely cannot think of something I hate and would try to avoid more than writing an essay or a paper.

But, well, I’ll just have to get used to it. (Insert some comment about colleges here.)

In other school news, the new campus was formally dedicated today, nine months to the day after the bells of the main building first rang. It was the auditorium that was holding it back. The ceremony, appropriately, was held in there. The general student body hasn’t even had a look inside yet, but we were able to get a glimpse of the place with a live closed-circuit TV feed of the event. Some teachers chose to show it during their classes, but others didn’t. My first hour teacher put on CBS instead (she couldn’t get CNN), and called the ceremony something along the lines of “stupid.” She didn’t even teach anything. Nay, she didn’t even lecture, because she hardly teaches when she does that (her lectures are quite funny, though).

For winter sales, businesses often use snowflakes in their advertisements in case you forgot that it was winter or something (though in all fairness, not all of us get snow). If there’s one thing you should remember from the first grade (besides that paste is not a good substitute for peanut butter), it is that snowflakes always have six sides. This gallery of recently discovered mutant snowflakes (sound warning) shows oddballs such as seven- and eight-sided flakes.