4 ms·

A bit off topic tidbit: Early Matlab version(s) had an interesting Easter egg. Once when frustrated with the learning on the REPL, I typed "fuck you" and the c

A bit off topic tidbit: Early Matlab version(s) had an interesting Easter egg. Once when frustrated with the learning on the REPL, I typed "fuck you" and the console spit out "your place or mine?" instead of an error that I was so used to.

vladTheInhaler 7y ago
Another little easter egg: typing "why" will return a randomly generated answer.
- teekert 7y ago
  also imagesc with no arguments (used to at least) return an upside down picture of some person. This led to some confusion in our lab at some point.
  - bauta-steen 7y ago
    Just 'spy' used to return one of the "spy vs spy" guys, but now seems to result in a dog.
  - CretinDesAlpes 7y ago
    Yes, it's showing the oldest son of a early matlab's employee. https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behind-the-matlab-default-image/ https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behin...
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    This Easter egg is responsible for one of the most terrifying evenings of my life. My first project in grad school was a visual perception experiment, written in Matlab. People were shown images that were either just noise (think static or clouds) or noise + a very faint shape, and asked to report which was which. The goal was to analyze the noise patterns associated with each response to identify how people recognize shapes (e.g., do you need all four corners to recognize a + sign). I tested the task on myself first. It’s fairly late, maybe 9:30 or 10pm, when I finally get everything running just so. Sitting in our pitch-dark testing room, in the middle of a deserted floor of a medical school, I run the analysis code. I’m expecting to see some simple shapes emerge from the processed noise; I think I used crosses, triangles, and Gabors as targets. Instead, however, window after window pops up with the creepy, distorted face of that child. I was tired, hungry, and had just seen The Ring, so I did the obvious thing: I slammed the laptop shut and high-tailed it home. The next morning, my labmate helped me figure out that I had written imagesc somewhere, instead of images, the variable that contained my results. TL;DR: Typo terrified me.
    - relenzo2 7y ago
      I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE!

vladTheInhaler 7y ago

Another little easter egg: typing "why" will return a randomly generated answer.

teekert 7y ago
also imagesc with no arguments (used to at least) return an upside down picture of some person. This led to some confusion in our lab at some point.
- bauta-steen 7y ago
  Just 'spy' used to return one of the "spy vs spy" guys, but now seems to result in a dog.
- CretinDesAlpes 7y ago
  Yes, it's showing the oldest son of a early matlab's employee. https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behind-the-matlab-default-image/ https://blogs.mathworks.com/steve/2006/10/17/the-story-behin...
- mattkrause 7y ago
  This Easter egg is responsible for one of the most terrifying evenings of my life. My first project in grad school was a visual perception experiment, written in Matlab. People were shown images that were either just noise (think static or clouds) or noise + a very faint shape, and asked to report which was which. The goal was to analyze the noise patterns associated with each response to identify how people recognize shapes (e.g., do you need all four corners to recognize a + sign). I tested the task on myself first. It’s fairly late, maybe 9:30 or 10pm, when I finally get everything running just so. Sitting in our pitch-dark testing room, in the middle of a deserted floor of a medical school, I run the analysis code. I’m expecting to see some simple shapes emerge from the processed noise; I think I used crosses, triangles, and Gabors as targets. Instead, however, window after window pops up with the creepy, distorted face of that child. I was tired, hungry, and had just seen The Ring, so I did the obvious thing: I slammed the laptop shut and high-tailed it home. The next morning, my labmate helped me figure out that I had written imagesc somewhere, instead of images, the variable that contained my results. TL;DR: Typo terrified me.
  - relenzo2 7y ago
    I WASN'T THE ONLY ONE!