Pipe Nui

Visitaba el foro de discución de LightWave, el programa de animación que yo uso. Estamos a unas semanas de que salga una nueva versión y con la emoción los dichosos foros reciben demasiados usuarios haciendo preguntas tontas o poco relevantes. Sin embargo hoy apareció una pregunta que en principio me pareció inocente, incluso contuve una respuesta pensando que alguien caería en la trampa. La plática es en inglés:

usuario monfoodo: Explain the Anatomy of a Point. I know it holds information,but what is it's relationship to a poly surface and what ever else is interesting about it.
How does it work? scott

No hay mucha ciencia en explicar que un polígono es formado por puntos y que un punto es el elemento básico de la geometría. Aquí es cuando cae un incauto (que por cierto ya me ha echado la mano anteriormente):

Sensei: Polygon is created from at least one point.. Polygon surface is created from interpolation between points that are attached to this particular polygon.

Entonces todo se pone raro cuando el primer usuario responde:

monfoodoo: I do know all that.i trying to find out what the nucleus of a point is.What makes it tick(as they say). Is it a small brain of sorts? Does it hold its own information,does it read information.Does it think? scott

En este momento yo trato de responder con algo que puede relajar la situación:

Yo: If you read the documentation, you'll discover that there's only one thinking queen point, the rest are merely workers.


Usuario Exception: Although it does think, it is not self aware. Indeed the analogy could be stretched to worker ants, but unlike my predecessor, I argue against a queen point. All are equal, like a working ticking communist system, they work efficiently and effectively towards the end they are created for. Making and deleting points doesn't really make or delete them either, there is a general repository of point, an equivalent of Nirvana if you will, from which they are retrieved. The points drag swirls of knowledge with them, imagine bullets shot through a viscose luiqid made up of two different colors, the bulet will drag the knowledge along with it for some distance. This knowsledge is deposited in our brains, it is what we 'discover'.
So much like the white mice in Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers huide we are governed by the point, although they are not sentient, and are unaware of our presence. It is therefore that we need to safguard the prvious point quality and balance, and why this new lw beta is so upsetting, as it threatend to increase poly counts, and thus, point counts...