Discussions of current MRB issue

<b>[Tom] "Is there such a thing as "safe code" that works properly on everyone's computer?"</b>

Not yet. It is one of the prices we pay for living in a time of innovation. Standardization is a good thing, as long as it does not happen too soon in the growth cycle of a New Thing.

We seem to have standardized on screw thread specifications at about the right time. But we standardized on a computer operating system (Windows) way too soon. (Windows is not the best currently available OS in terms of either technology or performance, but it is best in terms of overall value. That means, unfortunately, that we are stuck with it for the foreseeable future.) Computer technology is still evolving too rapidly for anyone to do more than guess what the best solution is today, let alone three weeks from now.

Wisely (or is it just dumb luck?), we have not yet chosen a (single) standard for computer display systems.

LB

Referring to the 2007 June 15 MRB, Boris Starosta writes:<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I had a hunch that the two images in figure 6. might be a stereo pair. They're pretty useless as presented, as the comparison in spectral response at this resolution in not readily perceived. On my hunch I made a stereo pair. It took quite a bit of rotation to align the images, but sure enough they make an excellent stereo image with very good disparity and depth effect. Perhaps the instrument moved slightly between the two exposures?

Remember my tutorials on free-viewing stereo pictures:
www.starosta.com/3dshowcase/ihelp.html

Here it is in both cross-eyed and parallel-eyed formats:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">


-|Tom|-

Tom,

The latest issue (Sep 07) Of MRB looks pretty good. I did find a problem though. In the <i>Meta Science In The News</i> section, at the bottom, is a text box with Kid's Quotes. The box, and the text in it, are truncated (perhaps 10%) on the right.

Note that for a day or two when this issue was first available (before the pictures etc. were active, and before the Kid's Quotes were inside a box) the text of the Kid's test answers was visible in its entirety. No truncation.

LB

Some more about this truncated box.

At the left edge of screen there are three pictures. There is some unboxed text to the right of the pictures, and the boxed text with the Kid's Quotes is below the unboxed text.

If you squeeze the window so that some of the unboxed text is forced to flow below the pictures, the boxed text is also forced below the pictures. When that happens, the box moves all the way to the left edge of the window and is no longer truncated.

Unless you make the window very narrow.

I just made a change to affect this. But it displayed properly before and after the change in all three browsers (IE7, FireFox, and Safari) at my 1600x1200 screen resolution. And I don't know which browser and resolution you were using. It's getting to be a nightmare trying to make web pages look good for everyone. Someone should write a single program to preview all combinations! -|Tom|-