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Discussion

philosophy

The last thing one knows when writing a book is what to put first.

structure

text

layout

Paper

A piece of paper is white. Pages on this website are usually white. More often than not, I add a background.

Manila

I decided to scan the display from an old analog electric meter at work. (We have equipment going back to WWII. Tons of fun stuff buried under the dust.) The meter was white. I used a manila file folder as the background. Its color was approximately FFFFCC. The rest is history. Web pages on this site are supposed to look like a piece of paper in a manila folder. FFFFFF foreground on FFFFCC background.

Vortex

I was soaking canning jars in my sink at home one day. I wanted them to be spotless, so I added bleach and let them set for awhile in a full sink of water. After a bit, I plunged my hand into the stagnant water and pulled the plug on the drain. Scientist, artist, educator, and author that I am, I saw what many mortals have witnessed, but few have truly seen — a central region of reduced pressure, waves transmitted down the vortex, and total internal reflection which made parts of the sink invisible. Quick, whip out the digital camera and take a snapshot. (Digital cameras were just then becoming a part of daily life.) Repeat over and over again until it looks just right. Every idiot and his mother has a digital camera nowadays. How many of them truly see the world they are photographing? One fine day, I wash the dishes — ten years later, I have a watermark for my website.

Afterwards I realized that Wikipedia had done something similar. Their watermark is meant to look like a book made out of paper. Mine is meant to look like water running down a sink drain. I probably copied them inadvertently.

E-Globe

The eglobe logo has been my identifier for almost as long as I have been on the Web (as opposed to being on the Internet, which is somewhat longer). Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, there were very few web pages and even fewer images. On some early NASA website I found an image taken during the original Voyager 2 flyby of Neptune. (Neptune has a distinctly alien sound to it even though it's a part of our solar system. Neptune is just damn cool.) The image had some unknown resolution and color depth. The web at the time liked small images with very little color depth. On a whim, I decided to "posterize" an image of Neptune. What popped out was a very blocky image of the blue planet.

Hidden in Neptune's clouds was an outline that very few would see, My last name is Elert. I tend to see the letter "E" in everything (or the letter "G" since my first name is Glenn). On the day I decided to mess with the image of Neptune, I saw the letter "E". I decided to color it light yellow like a manila folder — at least, that's what I think happened.

legalese

text

The Physics Hypertextbook

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