28 Critical Reflections: random 8 to 14

Shiny, and streamlined. With fairings, you know? And fins. All around them, people flying on their own, individually, with some kind of back-pack... jet, I think. No noise. Even the birds weren't disturbed, darting and swooping amid the human flocks.[2]

My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand, the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive. The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and grip of this hand into the stone.[7]

The image in a mirror is not a sign for it and cannot be used in order to lie (if not by producing a false object to be reflected, but in this case what stands for the supposed object is the false body, not its reflection).[3]

The specular highlight often reflects the color of the light source, not the color of the reflecting object. This is because many materials have a thin layer of clear material above the surface of the pigmented material. For example plastic is made up of tiny beads of color suspended in a clear polymer and human skin often has a thin layer of oil or sweat above the pigmented cells. Such materials will show specular highlights in which all parts of the color spectrum are reflected equally. On metallic materials such as gold the color of the specular highlight will reflect the color of the material.[6]

"Shut up", I told the breakfast table. "I asked for coffee and waffles, not your dream from last night."

I finished my breakfast in a silence that was, I suspect, sulky on one side. "Reflective surfaces, huh? Sometimes they can get above themselves."[2]

I like the contrast of foreground horizontal form with background vertical one, also between them the rhododendrons and lake with reflections.[5]

This can be explained by the existence of microfacets. We assume that surfaces that are not perfectly smooth are composed of many very tiny facets, each of which is a perfect specular reflector. These microfacets have normals that are distributed about the normal of the approximating smooth surface. The degree to which microfacet normals differ from the smooth surface normal is determined by the roughness of the surface. At points on the object where the smooth normal is close to the half-angle direction, many of the microfacets point in the half-angle direction and so the specular highlight is bright. As one moves away from the center of the highlight, the smooth normal and the half-angle direction get farther apart; the number of microfacets oriented in the half-angle direction falls, and so the intensity of the highlight falls off to zero.[6]

28 Critical Reflections random 15 to 21
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Sources

[1] http://www.neworleanspast.com/art/id62.html

[2] Ken MacLeod, Reflective Surfaces, New Scientist, 2009.

[3] Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics, Indiana University Press, 1979.

[4] Clive Fencott, Reflections on seeing River Form in Barbra Hepworth's garden in St. Ives.

[5] http://www.flickr.com/photos/nigelhomer/316548379/

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specular_highlight

[7] http://www.barbarahepworth.org.uk/texts/

[8] tripadvisor.co.uk