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I've acquired a new superpower

danielwirtz.com

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Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#541

Post by irjustin »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #523
irjustin wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the focus in front right? What's the beyond?

It has roughly the same effect. Try it first with your fingers. Hold up your index fingers pointing straight up in front of the computer screen but in front of your face. Focus on the screen. The fingers should divide into four. Move your fingers until they combine. If you focus on your fingers you can do the same thing to the screen.

omg I got it!!!

Earlier I was looking out a window and thusly way too far. Now I'm in my bed and its about 3m to the wall and with your instructions it worked great.

It works pretty much the same as you said. Thanks for sticking it out with me!

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#542

Post by Kon-Peki »

nkrisc wrote: post #531
lazystar wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is that how long it takes before a newborn is given their SSN?

A few weeks, as I recall.

In a modern hospital, depending on how healthy a baby is, it might get as many as 15 minutes before the not-removable-except-by-cutting RFID-enabled tag is attached to the wrist or ankle and it becomes part of the hospital inventory and the movements are tracked religiously. They are deathly afraid of accidentally mixing up babies between parents (with a side of worry about them getting stolen). Each of my kids were born at a hospital that averaged a delivery every 15-20 minutes. A nurse may see 50 deliveries in a shift and keeping track is going to be a challenge.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#543

Post by nkrisc »

Kon-Peki wrote: post #542
nkrisc wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few weeks, as I recall.

In a modern hospital, depending on how healthy a baby is, it might get as many as 15 minutes before the not-removable-except-by-cutting RFID-enabled tag is attached to the wrist or ankle and it becomes part of the hospital inventory and the movements are tracked religiously. They are deathly afraid of accidentally mixing up babies between parents (with a side of worry about them getting stolen). Each of my kids were…

That’s true, I just meant SSN. Newborns are not anonymous by design.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#544

Post by jheriko »

i didn't use the trick, or read what it was until after i tried for myself. it took me about 7 seconds at a conservative overestimate...

then again, i did outperform my entire national cohort at school in almost every subject by a wide margin... an outlier.

the trick however is very clever, but it wont work in more complicated scenarios where attention to detail matters.

EDIT: after doing the first one near the top i tried the rest. with a bit of warm up its very fast. no tricks needed. maybe a relic of playing these games when younger and having a "once in a generation" level of learning power coupled with training it when very young when learning speed is multiplied by a huge scale factor. i had to zoom the last one, but the other two were incredibly fast, close to immediate. sub second.

EDIT2: the warm up was doing the first image once after reading the first few sentences.

EDIT3: this is not a superpower.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#545

Post by charlieyu1 »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #187

We got a magic eye book when I was maybe 6 - some time early elementary school. After learning how to do it, and also trying it by crossing my eyes to see an "inverted" image, I started doing it whenever I saw some repeating pattern IRL. It was most interesting when it was slightly uneven, for example a fence with sloppily applied vertical planks. Doing the magic eye would make it seem like some of them are closer to…

I can never do it. Always find it amusing when another kid knows how to do it.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#547

Post by linsomniac »

xrisk wrote: post #494
linsomniac wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I now always stay around in the movie theater to see who the sysadmins were that worked on the film, for solidarity reasons. :-) Pretty much all the movies these days have them, which I would have never imagined would be the case back in the '80s when I started this career path.

Huh I’ve never noticed a sysad credit in a credits roll. Are they labeled as something else?

It depends, sometimes yes sometimes no. Toy Story 2 says "systems administrators & support" for example: https://youtu.be/4rL_4Xqak1Y?si=R2ykfdSarIjjGDZP&t=288

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#548

Post by ben_w »

Snoozus wrote: post #490
warner25 wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally indulging in this side discussion: I remember thinking in high school and college that fame was the end-all of life, telling people that my goal was to have my own Wikipedia page. I saw it as something like the combination of being a "cool kid" (but for, you know, the whole of society instead of just one's school) and a sort of immortality. Anyway, over the last couple of decades as an adult, besides realizin…

That's just because US presidents are not very important. 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.

Humanity as a whole, perhaps not; but that is not the same as what cultures within do, and cultures have many ways to erase or diminish outsiders — and everyone's an outsider to some group.

Newton, Leibniz; Einstein, Lorenz and Riemann; Shannon, Kolmogorov; Crick, Franklin.

When the context is, to quote the parent comment:

> 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

I suspect only Newton and Einstein are even household names. I'd be very surprised if the average person has heard of even one of Lorenz, Riemann, Shannon, Kolmogorov, or Crick, even today, and my guess is that Franklin would probably be assumed to be an associate of either Roosevelt or Benjamin, given the widely claimed but inconsistently cited survey that 12% of Americans think Joan of Arc was Noah's wife.

And Crick's other famous research associate was Watson; I wonder how many times people got him mixed up with the fictional character, or briefly for the IBM computer.

Re: I've acquired a new superpower

#550

Post by HenryBemis »

brightball wrote: post #440
klondike_klive wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my dad's sayings when somebody in a film delivered a line and then disappeared was "6 months rehearsal for that."

The swordsman in Indiana Jones comes to mind. 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.

I remember hearing/seeing that "he had the shits" that day, and wanted to wrap-up the scene so he can go recover/rest.

https://screenrant.com/indiana-jones-swordsman-shoot-raiders...

"It sounds wrong to say one should thank Ford’s sickness for one of the most iconic scenes, but Raiders of the Lost Ark is definitely better off for it."

https://screenrant.com/indiana-jones-raiders-lost-ark-gun-kn...

"A much more elaborate fight scene was planned, but Ford developed dysentery while filming in Morocco..."

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