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To “animate” means to breathe life into things. In these 5 exercises we make stones come alive. Preparation To get started I suggest this simple setup for you to try at home:  Ready? Let’s go! Thinking in time Stop-motion is simple: Take a picture, move the object, take the next picture, move the object, etc. Once you are done, you can play back all those images as a little movie. Tip: You can do the following exercises exactly as shown here or play around with them. Just make sure to have fun! Exercise 1: Timing Turn a stone into a bouncing ball.  Start with a stone above the middle of the page and hit the record button. Then move it down a little, take the next frame, move it again, and so on. Once it has reached the bottom, gradually move it up again until it is back to its starting position. Tip: At first you will notice that our steps are too big. As a result the animation plays way too fast! Just start over and make the steps smaller. Another tip: You can make the movement more...
8 months ago

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More from Ralph Ammer

Xunzi vs. Mengzi – Are People (No) Good?

About 2300 years ago, the great Chinese thinker Xunzi 荀⼦ wrote: “Human nature is bad“. But he wasn’t just having a bad day. The question—Are humans fundamentally good or bad?—is a major fork in the road. How you answer this question profoundly impacts your morals and how you live your life. Previous to Xunzi, another famous scholar had claimed that human nature was inherently good. Mengzi 孟子: Human nature is good The Ox Hill Mengzi had illustrated his idea with a story about a wooded hill. After the trees get chopped down and the sprouts are grazed by animals, the hill appears barren and unfruitful. He compares this hill to someone who can’t bring forth his good character under bad circumstances. For him, goodness is an integral part of every person’s nature. It merely requires the right circumstances to emerge. Goodness will grow forth naturally from every person if no one interferes. Willows and Bowls Someone suggested to Mengzi that a good character had to be forged from a man’s nature like bowls were made from a tree.  Mengzi objected that a tree must be violated in order to be turned into useful bowls. He can’t accept the comparison between […] The post Xunzi vs. Mengzi – Are People (No) Good? appeared first on Ralph Ammer.

3 months ago 66 votes
Bergson — Why we live in the past

Should we just live in the moment? In “Matter and Memory” the French philosopher Henri Bergson claims that this is not even possible. 1. Perception is physical First of all: How do we perceive the “current moment” anyway? Bergson suggests that the whole point of perception is action. For example, when some single-cell organism touches an obstacle, it moves away. That is the whole point of perception: to move in the right direction, to find food, to not be food—to survive. Perception serves future action, not insight. Accordingly, our brain is fully embedded in the material world and responds to the movements around it. Bergson refers to such a purely physical reaction as pure perception.  Yet he acknowledges that we are more complicated than single-celled organisms. The movements of our environment have to make their way through our complex sensory system with all its twists and turns. And this leaves us more options on how to act. So we don’t just react like a single-celled organism, we can choose from a range of potential movements. But how? We remember. 2. Memory is temporal Bergson distinguishes two kinds of memories: Some memories have become part of our body, they are a […] The post Bergson — Why we live in the past appeared first on Ralph Ammer.

5 months ago 63 votes
Edmund Husserl — Consciousness

You are awake. You think and you feel. But what is it that is doing all this thinking and feeling? We call it “consciousness” and over 100 years ago the philosopher Edmund Husserl made a bold attempt to uncover its secrets. Subjective experience is private The thing is: Consciousness is not “out there”, it is “in here“. It is personal and subjective. When I say that I like squirrels or that my foot hurts, then you will have to take my word for it. You can’t know what it is like to be me, and I cannot know what it is like to be you. Consciousness can only be observed from the inside, not from the outside. Since we can’t see the world through other peoples’ eyes, their experience remains deeply mysterious to us. Thus we all see the world differently. And this can lead to bitter conflict. Science is based on objective insight One way to overcome such conflict is to take an objective position. We take a neutral view from outside and focus on the things that we can all agree upon. We have learned to see ourselves “from the outside”. In fact, we can build a whole […] The post Edmund Husserl — Consciousness appeared first on Ralph Ammer.

10 months ago 93 votes
Show me!

Why do we like images? Because they help us understand things.  But what does that mean? Understanding Well, the world is complicated. And in order to make good decisions we need to know what is going on. Language can help us structure the world. So one way to understand things is to find the right words. We perceive colours and shapes, recognise a familiar object, and find the proper word for a concept. Then we can use this word to think and talk about our experience. Philosophers like Immanuel Kant have discussed in great detail how this transition from sensation to thought might work. The point is: When we understand the world, we move from concrete experiences to abstract ideas. Perception and Language One might also put it like this: We rise from the lower level of perception to the higher realm of language. Some people hold language in such high esteem to claim that smart people only think with words, logic or mathematics. Images are useless trinkets for people who are too lazy or too stupid to think.  But is that true? Functions of Images Images can support a variety of cognitive tasks. I like to distinguish four different […] The post Show me! appeared first on Ralph Ammer.

11 months ago 92 votes

More in programming

What Is Software Quality?

Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server

23 hours ago 4 votes
[April Cools] Gaming Games for Non-Gamers

My April Cools is out! Gaming Games for Non-Gamers is a 3,000 word essay on video games worth playing if you've never enjoyed a video game before. Patreon notes here. (April Cools is a project where we write genuine content on non-normal topics. You can see all the other April Cools posted so far here. There's still time to submit your own!) April Cools' Club

an hour ago 1 votes
Name that Ware, March 2025

The Ware for March 2025 is shown below. I was just taking this thing apart to see what went wrong, and thought it had some merit as a name that ware. But perhaps more interestingly, I was also experimenting with my cross-polarized imaging setup. This is a technique a friend of mine told me about […]

yesterday 3 votes
Great AI Steals

Picasso got it right: Great artists steal. Even if he didn’t actually say it, and we all just repeat the quote because Steve Jobs used it. Because it strikes at the heart of creativity: None of it happens in a vacuum. Everything is inspired by something. The best ideas, angles, techniques, and tones are stolen to build everything that comes after the original. Furthermore, the way to learn originality is to set it aside while you learn to perfect a copy. You learn to draw by imitating the masters. I learned photography by attempting to recreate great compositions. I learned to program by aping the Ruby standard library. Stealing good ideas isn’t a detour on the way to becoming a master — it’s the straight route. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. This, by the way, doesn’t just apply to art but to the economy as well. Japan became an economic superpower in the 80s by first poorly copying Western electronics in the decades prior. China is now following exactly the same playbook to even greater effect. You start with a cheap copy, then you learn how to make a good copy, and then you don’t need to copy at all. AI has sped through the phase of cheap copies. It’s now firmly established in the realm of good copies. You’re a fool if you don’t believe originality is a likely next step. In all likelihood, it’s a matter of when, not if. (And we already have plenty of early indications that it’s actually already here, on the edges.) Now, whether that’s good is a different question. Whether we want AI to become truly creative is a fair question — albeit a theoretical or, at best, moral one. Because it’s going to happen if it can happen, and it almost certainly can (or even has). Ironically, I think the peanut gallery disparaging recent advances — like the Ghibli fever — over minor details in the copying effort will only accelerate the quest toward true creativity. AI builders, like the Japanese and Chinese economies before them, eager to demonstrate an ability to exceed. All that is to say that AI is in the "Good Copy" phase of its creative evolution. Expect "The Great Artist" to emerge at any moment.

yesterday 2 votes