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Walter Murch explains why 3D is fundamentally flawed. "It is like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time." Anyhow, it's not like 2D films are really 2D. When we see a character on screen walking towards us, we don't say "how come that tiny man is getting larger?" We know that he's getting closer.
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A squishy centrist like Reagan could never get elected today. He wanted to eliminate all nuclear weapons, raised taxes, did nothing to restrict abortion, and surrounded himself with moderates as advisors. Most of the conservatives worshipping at the altar of Reagan seem to know very little about him.
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Great news from the world's largest retailer. They're going to make their cheapest stuff healthier. Right now, the less money you have, the worse your food is—this would change that. Also, they're going to reduce their profit margins on produce. All of this came out of talks with Michelle Obama, as a part of her initiative to reduce childhood obesity. (The Times should update their style guide. "Wal-Mart" was renamed to "Walmart" several years ago.)
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Wasn’t the Walmart name change only a few months ago? The copyright footer on the walmart.com site still has the hyphen.
They changed it to “Walmart” in their logo in 2008, and then formalized it in 2009 in their quarterly earnings report. In the year or so between those two events there was a lot of debate among copyeditors as to whether they should include the hyphen or not, but that was settled with the formal name change.
There is one bit of weirdness, coming in the form of the footer at the end of their news releases:
Which explains the website footer. I definitely understand the line that they’re trying to draw, but I can appreciate that it could be puzzling. But I’ll give the Times this: they’re consistent. After reading through a good 200 story titles that include the word “Walmart,” I only see them referring to it as “Wal-Mart,” and never as “Walmart.” So maybe they’re not inconsistent, but merely wrong. Or, viewed a certain way, hyper-correct. :)
I’d be cautious about proclaiming that “3D will never work, period.” You sound like someone saying that color photography will never happen on the basis that light is composed of a full spectrum of wavelengths, and therefore we will never be able to fully replicate a given image.
Walmart is really messing with my principled objections. Last year they embraced energy saving lighting and now they are going to help people to be more healthy. If they can pay a living wage I might have to amend my negative view of them.
Hooray for Wal(-M)mart! Good for Michelle Obama.
“I’d be cautious about proclaiming that “3D will never work, period.” You sound like someone saying that color photography will never happen on the basis that light is composed of a full spectrum of wavelengths, and therefore we will never be able to fully replicate a given image.”
The difference is that the human eye is biologically evolved with the rods and cones necessary to perceive color within the visible light spectrum. The point about our brains and eyes being evolutionarily conditioned to both focus and converge at the same distance is an apt one; it’s not like trying to introduce visible-spectrum color to photography, it’s like trying to photograph and print an image using only infrared.
I’m entirely unimpressed with 3D. It’s kitchy and distracting, as though the physical barrier of the glasses between my eyes and the screen is also a metaphorical barrier that prevents me from becoming engrossed in the narrative.
That LA Times piece is rather…nuanced?
Well, I don’t sound like that—I didn’t say it. :) I only said that it’s “fundamentally flawed,” and I think that’s true. But I don’t think it’s impossible, just that the current technology isn’t going to work.
Waldo: I guess it was Ebert’s title, not yours.
Sam: I didn’t say my argument about spectrum was valid — the point was that it wasn’t. If you want to take the evolutionary tack, I could also make a similar argument about how we aren’t adapted to assign depth to flat images, but we manage just fine.
…after more than 30,000 years of human artistic endeavors, I think we ought to be able to agree that we’re mentally adapted to interpret depth out of flat images, and there’s no contrary biological conditioning because it doesn’t require us to converge and focus at different differences. If converging and focusing at different depths was something that was going to come naturally to us, people would be studying those kitchy little magic eye posters from the 1990s in art conservatories.
Sam: My point is not “stereo flat imagery doesn’t hurt your eyes”, but rather “technology will change”. We’ll have full 3D at some point, it just won’t look like today’s technology.
3D just seems like a ploy by electronics companies to sell TVs at higher margins. And now they can sell accessories that cost $200 a pop that are customized to just their brand. It’s a sweet deal. By the time the fad wears off, they will have made a good deal of money. What will consumer electronics companies think of next?
Personally, I’d like a refrigerator that worked like an inventory control system and knew the right point at which to order supplies. It would be even better if the fridge could go to the grocery store and pick those items up before I got home. It be awesome if it could scan the pantry using RFIDs or something like that and restock that as well.