Another chapter done; two to go

So, here's what I've been doing for the past few weeks.  

Looking out the screen at the birds,
and typing math. 

Even though I'm in Panama, and even though I'll only be here for a little while longer, I've been playing the tourist/sightseer only to the tiniest extent.

One small excursion: my husband and I visited the BioMuseo.
I love the room full of life-sized sculptures of the animals
that crossed the land bridge between the Americas when it first formed.

Instead of being out-and-about, I've mostly been sitting on the screened porch in my AirBnB, fans blowing to keep the sweat to a minimum, while I immersed myself in writing.  

Panama is amazing, but what's inside my head also captivates me, and getting it out onto paper (or in this case, into electrons and data bits?) has been really absorbing.  Last Saturday, at 5 p.m. -- just before Easter --I finally hit "Save" on Chapter 8.  So my Easter became a true Sabbath, with no book crooning to me like the Sirens crooned to Odysseus; I didn't have to lash myself to a mast to avoid thinking about the next image, the next paragraph. 

I've learned a bunch of new skills that allow me to make images in a coding language called Tikz.  For example, by connecting straight lines and arcs of circles, I created this image of two hands pointing at each other.

The math/perspective reason for creating those hands is to say that if you look past your fingers, gazing into the distance, you get a "floating hot dog" to appear.  And I also figured out how to make the floating hot dog!

The fading toward the edges! I know how to do that now!

I've learned so much, by dint of writing about it, about stereoscopy.  In fact, I learned enough to create my very own 3Dish images, and figured I'd share them here.  With each of these, if you diverge your eyes (that is, relax them and look "through" the images, as though you're gazing at something on the other side far in the distance just like the hot dog from your fingers), these might pop into 3D for you, with some things floating and others further back.

If you gaze "through" this, the circles might appear to
float above the background and the squares to float higher still. 

Leaving tikz aside for one moment, I used an Excel template from Dave Richeson's excellent blog to create this Magic Eye image, too.

You might be able to see a floating "D" with a smaller "T" floating behind it, in the middle.
Those initials are because the working title of my book is "Double Take".

And back to Tikz skills, including the shading techniques:

This pair of rooms, if you look at them, might become 3D. 
I try to merge the two dots by looking at
the image as if they were a far-off moon.

I've also learned that getting to successfully see thing pop into 3D is not easy, but I've been getting better with practice. The first time in my life that it worked for me was only about a year ago; Tufte had a stereo pair of elevation maps in his book and suggested that sometimes it takes several minutes of looking at the image and relaxing the eyes to make it work.  So I just sat there for about two minutes, and eventually a 3D world emerged from the flat pages of his book. So cool!

So, all this image-making and learning means that I have now finished seven of the nine chapters I was hoping to write (I skipped past Chapter 6 on mirrors; I also have Chapter 9 on moving images ahead).  Now that I'm this far into the book, I know I'll want to do a major revision on at least one earlier chapter.  But I've made so much progress! I not only have drafts with a lot of words and ideas and pictures pulled together, but I've developed some pretty nifty Tikz coding skills that delight me.  Whoop!