Can you see Pi?
Reader: That's an irrational question.
Author: Yes, purely irrational, rather than a replica or imitation of an irrational question.
And so it begins ...
I'd been working with the hololens and just trying to see what it could do, trying to exploit its APIs. Having experience in software and in general having a personality an observer might describe as 'impatient', though I describe as 'not wanting to waste time', I tried to learn the basic, intermediate and advanced functionality then exploit it. And often times I'd find features or actions the API could do that weren't quite intended. The real jewels of the API that everyone missed for some reason, that were right there in front of everybody but somehow no one could see them. And as it turns out, usually that is where the real value is located, because this functionality was sort of accidentally put there not purposely and rationally developed for market needs, it just fell out when they put something else there, then someone recognized and exploited that purely accidental feature for great gains. Thus software intended for one purpose, as it grows, is often used in areas completely not envisioned originally, it was pure irrationality, and it worked beautifully.
What happened to me is that as I exploited the APIs and performed different actions I'd come across various problems and one by one knock them down. This is a story of one of those problems that I didn't knock down directly but eventually solved it ... solved it visually using the hololens.
And ... as it turns out, only recognizing it a year later, it was in fact THE problem. And if you ever again ask someone, "What should I be doing?" you may think to yourself upon hearing the words you've spoken, "I didn't need to say that at all, because I should be working on THE problem."
Back to the story, for instance while making some geometric shapes, determining formulas that could be used to create the object, I'd get stumped, and either accept something almost perfect or just drop it and do something else often something else entirely unrelated.
There was one problem I'd even, literally and actually, filled up quite a few notebook pages with math scribblings trying to figure out a problem. What it eventually came down to was a rounding error on an irrational number, for instance I needed an exact root 2, or an exact Pi, or else errors would be visible. If I addressed the errors individually, they would just pop up somewhere else, as I was always having to round these irrationals, and I took a rational approach to solve them. But in our 'rational' number system we can't represent an irrational number precisely, but we can get extraordinarily close. But there are also floating point limitations, CPU issues and so on, so the hardware doesn't get you closer at all, in FACT it takes you farther away. At this point, a good hearted person seeing your frustration might reveal to you a truth that the hardware was designed purposely that way, irrationally speaking, designed purposely by an evil person who was giving you hardware to keep you entertained, but not hardware you could use to expose the truth.
Continued in part 2 ...