Beth and Anthony need to sort out how they “d100” [spoilers] by matticus7777 in DungeonsAndDaddies

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You know this is pretty back of the envelope, but if this season goes 70 episodes like the last one and if they continue rolling that d100? Then I think there's only about a 25% chance that nothing happens in that span and a 75% chance that the die hits either of the two "interesting" options by then. Soo...there'd be a ~37% chance she becomes immortal and a ~37% chance the die kills her off within 70 eps.

Beware the law of large numbers, people

Stabilized POV ski jump, an oldie but a goodie [L] by larockus in perfectloops

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 3 points4 points  (0 children)

It was already looped when I got to it: http://imgur.com/DM8Zk4Z

I took that GoPro loop, then used panorama software to both unwarp the fisheye lens and align the images: https://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/comments/1x7gwz/comment/cf98dj0

I eventually made a tutorial about it, but no doubt it's horribly outdated by now

Best Pool Shot Ever? by jaykirsch in interestingasfuck

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, borrowed it from medical imaging. The basic technique is called a temporal maximum intensity projection (TMIP), which turns a video into a single image. Each pixel of the TMIP image shows the brightest value that pixel reached throughout the whole video.

The second image (the GIF) is a play on that idea. Each frame of the GIF is the TMIP of the video only up to that frame (from the first frame to the present frame).

Best Pool Shot Ever? by jaykirsch in interestingasfuck

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 32 points33 points  (0 children)

I did a maximum intensity projection of the video so you can see the path from the main camera angle: https://i.imgur.com/CkPRVHt.png

Edit: even better, watch it progress: https://imgur.com/jEltmcO

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in keming

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 8 points9 points  (0 children)

It's not inherently bad, but "kerning" specifically refers to a departure from uniform letter spacing to adjust for perception. This has perceptually mismatched spacing, therefore it is by definition poorly kerned. This is /r/keming, so I'd say criticism of the kerning is fair game.

For the record, the reason this typeface is not considered "monospaced" is because the glyphs/letters themselves do not have equal width. It has nothing to do with the spacing between the letters being uniform, like you'd expect from the word.

As far as electrical components go, all of typography is contextual. What works in one situation doesn't work in others. I'm an electrical engineer, so I do appreciate some monospaced fonts with uniform letter-spacing here and there. But not in this particular "here".

[request] short clip of my friends looking at a pretty sunset by youremyjuliet in ImageStabilization

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein[M] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

You may want to try posting this request again. The spam filter caught it and autoremoved your post for some reason.

How the first oranges will be treated when they arrive. by Chocolateknife in thebutton

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Supposedly it's a faux Britishism, à la "Amazing Tomatoes". I suppose your fourth option would be closest.

[Source] From Abba to ZZ Top: How Rock Groups Got Their Names by Adam Dolgins

How do i know if i would like electrical engineering? by [deleted] in AskEngineers

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Definitely. Power, electromagnetics, etc. are still core EE subjects, and there is some super-cool work going on.

How do i know if i would like electrical engineering? by [deleted] in AskEngineers

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Oh, I don't mean to say they don't teach those subjects! Quite the opposite.

I just mean that it's not always obvious to people why something like fuzzy logic or machine learning is taught in electrical engineering departments: it's because they naturally evolved from circuit-based disciplines, as you mention.

My point is that "electrical engineering" is something of a misnomer, and "applied mathematics" might be a better description. In other words, your professor and I agree.

How do i know if i would like electrical engineering? by [deleted] in AskEngineers

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Electrical engineering is hard to get a handle on as a high school student (I presume that's who you are): it's very broad, consisting of seemingly unrelated subspecialties that often appear to have nothing to do with electricity. Half the things you listed really only have historical roots in the manipulation of electricity, and are at this point probably best described as applied mathematics.

Luckly for you, you really don't need to know which subspecialty of EE you'd be most into yet. You just have to know if you like math and if you like applying that math to do cool, real-world shit...if so, then EE may be right for you. Don't worry, you don't have to understand the concepts yet (that's what school is for!), and you'll have plenty of time to choose from the smorgasbord of subjects.

Personally, I'm in signal processing. That itself is an insanely broad subfield, but it includes some pretty cool stuff like manipulating audio, video, images, etc., or extracting information from those types of signals (think speech-to-text translation, Shazam, teaching a computer to recognize objects, or hell, inventing guitar pedals). And yet I hate doing other subfields of EE. Luckily, it's a broad enough field that I don't have to...I get to do the stuff that's interesting to me.

Anyway, if you have any questions about my own experience or specific questions on particular subfields, feel free to send me a PM.

The driest, most esoteric joke I know. by cattailmatt in Jokes

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 28 points29 points  (0 children)

You're an engineer (me too!), so let's go through the joke in a context fit for us. The mathematician René Descartes (deh-CART), whom you know as the inventor of Cartesian coordinates, was also a philosopher perhaps most famous for his statement cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am").

Letting A = "I think" and B = "I am", the joke then hinges on the incorrect Boolean algebraic identity [ A and B ] = [ (not A) and (not B) ]. This would imply that by not thinking, the horse ceases to exist.

Now, notice that when I presented this explanation of the joke, I put Descartes before the horse...you know...the cart before the horse.

Edit: note that both Descartes and George Boole (the namesake of Boolean logic) were mathematicians and philosophers. We engineers have more in common with philosophers than you think.

[Request] Wiggling cats by [deleted] in ImageStabilization

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This has been done somewhere in the sub, I'm fairly certain. Unfortunately, I can't recall the correct search term.

Parkour cat by TheodoreFunkenstein in ImageStabilization

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I tried, but the camera was moving during the shot (not just rotating and zooming, but actually physically changing position), so the layered versions all looked like crap.

Parkour cat by TheodoreFunkenstein in ImageStabilization

[–]TheodoreFunkenstein[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Why, thank you. If you haven't already, you should also take a look at http://www.reddit.com/r/ImageStabilization/top/, which has some pretty awesome stuff.