Ramblings of Narc

I recently had someone tell me: “Not many people care if others are depending on what they say. I admire that you do.”

For some reason, that made me think. It wasn’t clear to me why, at first. I just thought it was odd.

And then it hit me: I didn’t think it was something I should be admired for. Why? Because caring if others are depending on me isn’t about integrity (though that is the end result, it’s only a bonus), it’s about responsibility.

The way I see it, I’m responsible for everything I say. If someone asks me what the best way to fix their computer is, and I give them bad advice that trashes it, they’re going to come to me and be pissed off that I trashed their computer. And they’d be right.

So the statements I make are carefully researched to be truthful, or close enough that nobody’s going to be coming to punch me in the face for trashing their computer. This extends to non-professional statements I make because it’s a habit I’ve taught myself, and so the result is integrity — I’m reliable — but it’s not because I’m actively trying to be reliable, it’s because I just don’t want to be punched in the face.

I miss being asked how to do something. Even if I didn’t know the answer, the fact of being asked made me feel like I was a point of contact, a reference.

More than that, when I didn’t know the answer, I did have some ideas of where the answer might be. A bunch of times I’ve searched for something and found it in 30 seconds because I knew where to search.

I miss being a reference. I miss being important. And very directly useful.

So go ahead, ask me something. I’ll do my best to help.

So I recently got pointed towards Pointilism, which is “a style of painting in which small distinct points of primary colors create the impression of a wide selection of secondary and intermediate colors.”

Before I continue, an example:

(sourced from harley.com; copied to local storage to avoid hotlinking)

If you ever get the chance to take a close look (the painting is Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges-Pierre Seurat), you’ll see each “dot” is actually made up of several smaller dots that, from a distance, “form a single hue in the viewer’s eye”.

Relevance? TVs and computer monitors work the same way. Especially LCDs.

Firstly, a bit of background. An LCD monitor works by shining a light through a grid of pixels whose opacity can be controlled individually. Stop. Look at that again — the only control over a pixel is its opacity. You can’t control its color. For examples of this, look around you; find an LCD clock. Or use this one I found on the Web:

Look at it carefully. See the digits? They’re made from these:

Remember how I told you before you can only control the opacity of each pixel? Well, each segment of that 7-segment display (the image above) is a pixel. How do you make the number 1 on that? Easy: turn on pixels B and C, turn off all the other ones:

Look familiar? Let me show you the number 2, as well:

Yeah, by now you’re thinking “okay, I’ve seen those a million times before; they’re everywhere. What’s your point?” My point is: the same technology (or, rather, the same basic idea) is at work in your LCD monitor.

One more time — an LCD monitor works by shining a light through a grid of pixels. The only control over the pixels themselves is their opacity. So why aren’t LCDs black & white? Because the pixels are colored. In fact, each pixel your computer sees is actually three pixels on your monitor: a red one, a green one, and a blue one.

Why red, green and blue? Because these are the primary additive colors. When light of these colors is emitted, it can be merged together to form any other visible color. The only thing you have to control is the brightness of the light. And to control that on an LCD? That’s right, you control the opacity of the pixel the light is shining through.

Here’s a simulated view from up close on an LCD:

If you take a powerful magnifier and put it up close to your LCD monitor, you’ll see something very much like that.

Want to make black? Make the three pixels (red, green, blue) completely opaque. White? Make them fully transparent. Any other color? Vary the opacity. Red, green, and blue are easy — fully opaque the ones you don’t need. But yellow?

Well, yellow light is a combination of red light and green light. So? Make the blue opaque, the others transparent. You get yellow very much like this one.

But wait, that only gives us 8 colors: black; red; green; blue; cyan; yellow; magenta; and white!

Well, not exactly. Unlike that seven-segment display, the opacity of a monitor pixel isn’t either “on” or “off”. It’s anywhere in-between. Want “12% opaque”? You’ve got it. How does that help you? Let’s take this color here:
this is a sample color

That color is defined on a computer as: 80% red, 86% green, 0% blue. As you can see, it’s a bit darker than our yellow from earlier.

And that’s the magic of LCD monitors: through controlling only the amount of light that can shine through a colored piece of glass, you can obtain any of about 32 million colors. Isn’t that awesome?

I get really irritated by people who write every paragraph as one single very very long sentence that looks like they’re on crack and really can’t stop typing because if they did they would get taken away by the IRS man and then be forced to stare at a wall for 15 hours a day and the wall would stare back ’cause there’s mini-micro-cameras in the walls that feed to a huge wall-sized TV that everybody in the local town square looks at. *takes a deep breath*

For the girls among them, I finally have something to say: “You can’t be female, you have no periods!” Evidently, this can work similarly on a male (“You must be a guy [...]“).

I’m very amused by what that says about me… does it make me seem female?

On a more serious side-note, what irritates me about people who spell and punctuate badly is that I tend to be chameleonic, in that I pick up other people’s accents and such, and I’m terribly afraid of ending up with their bad spelling. And grammar. And punctuation. Which is why correcting them is therapeutic for me. So, um… anyone need a copy editor?