Bear Down!

Wow, my heart is still pounding. The Bears must have caused at least a couple of coronaries today.

Okay, I know the rest of the country is rooting for New Orleans right now. But I live in Chicago. And the point of sports is to bond with the people in your own community. The Bears unite us. I hear strangers on the El asking each other, "You think they got a chance?" Today a group of people in Bears gear getting off the our train (probably coming back from the game) called out to Ken and me: "Go Bears!" We pumped our fists in the air and echoed it.

I can't betray my fellow Chicagoans. Just as New Orleans loves its team, Chicago loves the Bears. It is right and proper that Chicagoans should root for the home team.

So I hope New Orleans wins the Superbowl -- some other year.

To show my support for the Bears, I spent part of the day on a little art project.

It's one of the those Magic Eye images. So I apologize to those who can't see Magic Eye images. But we were shopping in a book store yesterday, and stopped to look at a couple of books of them, which inspired me to download a program for creating my own
(StereoCreator. Scroll down at that link) And then last night, Ken had a dream that we created a stereogram in which the 3D image moved. I'm sure it's been done before, but I haven't seen it, so I had to attempt it. For that I needed an animated .gif creator, so I downloaded unFREEZ.

Unfortunately, animated gifs with 28 cells are 28 times as large as normal gifs. So I cut down the number of frames and the color density to fit within Blogger's 3MB limit, and now the depth doesn't look exactly right. But still, as a first attempt...

Click on the image to enlarge and animate.



Wondering what it's supposed to be?

Click here.

I might post a few more (non-animated) stereograms if I have more homework to procrastinate on later.

UPDATE:

In the comments, Stereo DDD links to a couple of animated stereograms that outclass mine like Cary Grant outclasses Pauly Shore.

3-D staircase
3-D descent
3-D pink

The "descent" stereogram in particular is really a stunning work of art. Check out this guy's whole gallery.