After 20 years, we finally have a new Simpsons intro! It’s sharper, cleaned up, and… fairly pure! A lot of new stuff has been included, with the only notable exception is the lack of Homer’s girly yelp at the end. The intro does a much better job of introducing the side-characters. The show has been in HDTV for a while, but the intro being two decades old was understandably not HDTV — this new intro is! (so that means the entire show is now being shown in HDTV… rejoice… European pirate TV downloaders! On the topic of piracy, The Pirate Bay’s trial begins next week! Stay tuned, it’s going to be a landmark case.)
While I’m linking videos, I have a failing Tetris player for your joyous consumption (and a Tetris cosplayer, but I imagine he’s being paid a lot to wear the Gameboy outfit… which makes it OK!)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB54GWO6Fn4[/youtube]I could’ve chosen any number of gaming videos, but I think about 90% of the Western population has played Tetris, so you should be able to relate to just how stupid this poor kid is.
Then to finish, I have a lovely picture of… the end of a rainbow! Sadly, there wasn’t a pot of gold, but it does look rather spectacular. I’d always been lead to believe it was impossible to photograph the end of a rainbow, due to the way they’re formed… I guess my science teacher was lying ALL THIS TIME! Now I have a weird urge to chase down rainbows…
Maddie
Feb 16, 2009
The end of the rainbow pic is SO COOL!!! My brother and I used to make our dad follow rainbows so we could see the end of them. He contributed to our antics by driving fifteen minutes out of the way on our way home from where ever we were, but we never caught the end of it=(
sebastian
Feb 16, 2009
Hehehe. That’s cute! The article estimated that they move at 20-30mp/h, would make it quite hard to catch one… but not impossible! It’s to do with the speed of the clouds, I guess
Maddie
Feb 16, 2009
My dad won’t drive us around like that anymore though=( haha. It was weird though that we made him chase rainbows…he in colorblind and can’t really see them. I guess he drove aimlessly to humor us.
sebastian
Feb 16, 2009
Ah, colour blind people… reminds me of the time I went paintballing with a colour blind friend…
(You can probably see where this one’s going…)
Nothing like having one of your friends sneak up behind you (when you really think you’re safe) and be shot in the ass from point-blank range…
‘I thought you were one of the enemy!!’
Maddie
Feb 16, 2009
Hahaha. At least it was an accident! My brothers would shoot me with paintballs and airsoft guns all the time. They froze their paintballs too! OUCH!!! Needless to say, I became a pretty good shot myself and enjoyed shooting them many a time in our backyard/forest=)
Jo
Feb 16, 2009
Tetris! My first game addiction! Love the new Simpsons intro.
andhari
Feb 16, 2009
Im in love with homer.
Ok that came out wrong.
sebastian
Feb 16, 2009
Yeah, Tetris, and then Cakemania… how the mighty titans fall from grace…
Homer hardly matches your description of ‘alpha male’, Andhari…
floreta
Feb 16, 2009
wow, i can actually see ‘the end of the rainbow’.
andhari
Feb 17, 2009
AHAHAHA touche.
who do you think ill be smitten with then??
sebastian
Feb 17, 2009
Hm… Me maybe?!
Did you make a wish, Floreta? Or wait… is that rainbows? I forget my folk lore…
Daniel Cassidy
Feb 18, 2009
Er Seb, you do realise that article is full of shit, right?
Rainbows always appear a fixed distance from the viewer. So of course it’s possible to photograph the end of one, you just need a high zoom over a large expanse of flat ground. Such as you might find on a freeway in Orange State, California.
“Moving at 20-30mph” my arse.
sebastian
Feb 18, 2009
Are you going to debunk it with proper science, or just get all angry and puffy and say it’s full of shit? I’m not sure an abject denial really counts as ‘proof’…
What’s the ‘fixed distance’ derived from? Is it _always_ X meters? I am sure I have seen a rainbow ‘a long way away’ and one that was ‘closer’.
Science, Dan, science!
Daniel Cassidy
Feb 19, 2009
Fine. You asked for it.
It’s a ‘fixed distance’ only in the sense that if you move towards a rainbow, the rainbow will always appear to move away at the same speed.
Consider a camera with which you are taking a picture of a rainbow. The sun must be behind the camera, because (except in some rare cases which I won’t bother covering) you can only see a rainbow when the sun is behind you. This is because a rainbow is formed when sunlight reflacts *and* reflects off of rain drops.
Consider an imaginary line of infinite length, passing from the centre of the sun through the focal point of the camera. Now consider an imaginary cone, the tip of which is at the centre of the camera, and the sides of which stretch infinitely at an angle of 42° from our earlier imaginary line. Any raindrops which bisect the sides of this cone are at exactly the right angle to refract and reflect the red part of sunlight into the lens of the camera.
Now consider an adjustment to the cone, placing its sides at an angle of 40.6° from the imaginary line. Any raindrops bisecting this new cone are at exactly the right angle to refract and reflect the violet part of sunlight into the lens of the camera. Any raindrops between these two imaginary cones will refract and reflect the other infinite colours of the rainbow, depending on their exact angle.
Each raindrop reflects only a very small amount of light, so to see a rainbow there must be many raindrops between the edges of our two cones. The distance of the raindrops is not important; any raindrops at the same angle between the two cones will reflect the same colour of light and will reinforce each other. The more raindrops there are at a given angle, the brighter the rainbow will be. The fewer there are at a given angle, the dimmer the rainbow will be, until it becomes so dim that it is not visible at all at that angle.
The edges of our two imaginary cones diverge with distance. That is, the further away a point on the edge of one of our cones is, the greater the absolute distance between that point and the nearest point on the edge of our other cone. Therefore, if we assume that there are equal amounts of rain at all distances from the camera, then at greater distances from the camera there will be more raindrops between the edges of the cone than at nearer distances.
From here it is easy to see why rainbows generally appear to be in the distance. The nearer the landscape intersects our imaginary cones, the fewer raindrops can possibly reflect light to produce a rainbow at that point. Where the landscape doesn’t intersect our cones at all (i.e. above the horizon), the rainbow is brightest because raindrops are in line of sight for the maximum distance (i.e. to the distance where the clouds themselves drop below the horizon, or to the distance where it is no longer raining). This explains why rainbows often appear only above the horizon.
Look again at the picture above and you will see that the rainbows do not end at any definite point. They simply grow more and more faint. Past a certain point, which you will perceive as the ‘end’, your visual system dismisses the colours as noise, unless you consciously look for them.
The illusion of the ‘end’ of the rainbow is strengthened in the picture you’ve posted by the spray of water from a car tire at the point where the rainbow is almost invisibly faint. This brightens the rainbow at that point, in contrast with the much fainter colours below.
sebastian
Feb 19, 2009
Well I think this just became the authority on any would-be rainbow catchers.
Thanks for the education… I feel enlightened!