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Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

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232 HOW THE MIND WORKSrepeat <strong>the</strong>mselves every eleven spaces. (The stuffed rows, you willnotice, are longer than <strong>the</strong> rest.) Copies that are more widely spacedequals a surface that is more distant. A real random-dot autostereogram,of course, is made of dots, not numbers, so you don't notice <strong>the</strong> snippedoutor stuffed-in material, and <strong>the</strong> uneven lines are filled out with extradots. Here is an example. The fun in viewing a real random-dotautostereogram is that <strong>the</strong> moment of pop-out surprises <strong>the</strong> viewer withpreviously invisible shapes:When <strong>the</strong> autostereogram craze hit Japan, it soon developed into anart form. Dots are not necessary; any tapestry of small contours richenough to fool <strong>the</strong> brain into locking <strong>the</strong> eyes on neighboring stripeswill do. The first commercial autostereograms used colored squiggles,and <strong>the</strong> Japanese ones use flowers, ocean waves, and, taking a leaf outof Ames' book, leaves. Thanks to <strong>the</strong> computer, <strong>the</strong> shapes don't haveto be flat cutouts like in a diorama. By reading in <strong>the</strong> three-dimensionalcoordinates of <strong>the</strong> points on a surface, <strong>the</strong> computer can shift every dotby a slightly different amount to sculpt <strong>the</strong> solid shape in cyclopeanspace, ra<strong>the</strong>r than shifting <strong>the</strong> entire patch rigidly. Smooth, bulbous

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