Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by JKCalhoun on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:46AM
(#47543265)
Seems like you could apply the clever transforms to generate a displacement map (that then allows you to move it across any source image and quickly get the Droste effect).
(I still have not made it all the way to the end of the video though, perhaps that is where they end up.)
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by jgwil2 on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:46AM
(#47543264)
This was the title used when I came across the video. Apparently YouTube uses many different titles for A/B testing but this is the one I got. Can't edit it now, unfortunately.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by wodenokoto on Friday March 27, 2026 @09:40AM
(#47542540)
It makes more sense when seen on YouTube where you get the thumbnail of one of M. C. Eschers famous drawings is shown.
It’s a drawing of a guy looking at a picture of a town with himself standing in the town, but it’s all twirled and twisted so it’s self repetition isn’t obvious.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by nticompass on Friday March 27, 2026 @09:37AM
(#47542506)
I clicked on the link and the video title is "Decoding Escher's most mind-bending piece", which is a lot better. I also had no idea what "3B1B video" meant, apparently it's a channel called "3Blue1Brown".
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by rcxdude on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:38AM
(#47543166)
Probably he didn't use these techniques explicity: the video mentions but doesn't emphasise that he probably sketched out the map by feel instead of analytically, which is probably one reason why he didn't fill in the center.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by SirMaster on Friday March 27, 2026 @09:48AM
(#47542624)
Depends how you define excellent. If the goal is to get more views then it's not all that great, and views are kind of the point of YouTube for many, especially if they are trying to make a living from it.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by hidroto on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:44AM
(#47544193)
It has been that way for a while now. I see Veritasium video titles and thumbnails change quite often, it can be quite annoying as it sometimes gives the appearance of it being a whole new video.
A/B testing a title feels wrong to me, its almost as bad as A/B testing a UUID.
Just pick a title and stick to it unless you need to fix a factual error.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by TeMPOraL on Saturday March 28, 2026 @07:43AM
(#47553687)
Right, but then there's this thing called "shared reality" and once you break it, all kinds of bad consequences happen.
This is even worse, as it also breaks temporal continuity for individual reality. E.g. I expect that if I saw a video titled X today, I'll be able to find it under title X tomorrow, and if I can't, it's one of the rare/marginal cases when it got banned/deleted/retitled, or I just misremembered. Titles becoming unstable in the general case is a bad situation.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by close04 on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:27AM
(#47543877)
> How (and why) to take a logarithm of an image
I watched it a few days ago and this descriptive title was part of the reason I clicked. I generally trust 3B1B anyway but normally a title like "This picture broke my brain" would put me off.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by 3b1b on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:53AM
(#47544357)
In case you're curious, when I ran that title/thumbnail AB test, the option "This picture broke my brain" did end up winning. I was a bit disappointed, because I didn't really _want_ it to win, but I did include it out of curiosity. Ultimately, I changed it to the other title, mostly because I like it better, and the margin was small.
I was genuinely torn about how to title this, because one of my aims is that it stands to be enjoyed by people outside the usual online-math-viewing circles, especially the first 12 minutes, and leaning into the idea of a complex log risks alienating some of those.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by 3b1b on Friday March 27, 2026 @04:07PM
(#47547568)
That level of granularity would be interesting. For what it's worth, the metric they go by is not click-through rate; it's expected total watch time. For example, if you have two thumbnails, A and B, and for every 100 impressions of A, there are 51 total minutes of watch time, and for every 100 impressions of B, there are 49 total, then what you'd see in the dashboard is "51% A, 49% B". More total clicks with less engagement will not necessarily win out.
I generally agree that it's a pretty wild choice to just let creators put up multiple titles. That said, it's hard not to play with the shiny toy when it's sitting right there, especially if you know it may mean the lesson reaches more people. In this case, I genuinely don't know what the "right" title is, even setting engagement aside. Is it fundamentally about analyzing an Escher piece? Is it fundamentally a lesson on complex analysis, and complex logs in particular? It's both, but you don't always want to cram two stories into one title. This becomes all the more challenging when titles are, inescapably, marketing.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by john_strinlai on Friday March 27, 2026 @12:27PM
(#47544812)
perhaps a bit inappropriate of me to say so here as it is off-topic, but i am going to take the opportunity anyways:
big thanks for all of your work making math both enjoyable and accessible. my kids (and i) love your videos. your positive impact extends far and wide.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by gowld on Friday March 27, 2026 @02:44PM
(#47546664)
As annoying as those titles are, the work that you (and few others, like Veritasium) do makes it well worth the tradeoff. Just keep reminding everyone that the annoying title gets the video into the brain of thousands of other people who aren't subscribed yet. It's a tiny price to pay for astounding value.
Everyone who watches your videos loves them and wants everyone else to watch them.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by ahns on Friday March 27, 2026 @09:47AM
(#47542601)
One of Dutch artist M.C. Escher's works is a man is admiring a piece of art that itself depicts the building the (very same) man is in [0]. Escher left out the middle bit of the painting, probably since it's fairly complicated, putting his signature there instead. The video itself is about the complex analysis used to fill in that missing middle, based on a paper ~20 years ago.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by rcxdude on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:33AM
(#47543112)
I think the gap also has a compositional purpose: the viewer's eye is meant to travel around the image in a circle, and the gap helps anchor that in a way that the filled-in version might not.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by pdpi on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:23AM
(#47543016)
The punchline is that you can fill in the centre of Escher's piece by using complex analysis, and it produces a very satisfying, "obviously correct", solution.
But, as with all jokes, the punchline isn't funny at all without the setup.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by griffzhowl on Friday March 27, 2026 @01:59PM
(#47546088)
Well, maybe, but that seems like a deliberately uncharitable interpretation of the question, which I interpreted more as "Can you summarize the video in ~1 line?" - or at least closer to that than "Can you give me the answer the video comes to without specifying the question it asks?"
Even in those terms the answer given isn't really an answer because it just gives an expression with undefined variables.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by db48x on Friday March 27, 2026 @05:13PM
(#47548328)
Obscurity indeed. This morning shortly after I woke up I read your message and could only think that you were referring to Awk somehow. That didn’t make much sense to me. Now, hours later and after finally eating something, it does make sense! You really do have to have your faculties about you.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by rcxdude on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:36AM
(#47543148)
The image is essentially a self-similar 'droste-effect' image in disguise. The warping of that image shifts that self- similarity into a visual loop, but the warped image still has a droste-style self-similarity in the center as well.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by oulipo2 on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:14AM
(#47542897)
The whole point is the explanation... it's a bit like someone telling you to take a 2 week holidays somewhere and you'd just say: it's too long, can't someone just get me a plane ticket there and back the same day so I can compress the stay?
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by OscarCunningham on Friday March 27, 2026 @10:47AM
(#47543296)
I've been wondering if you could do a similar thing for a Droste effect image containing two copies of itself. Packs of Laughing Cow cheese show a cow with two earrings, each of which is a pack of the cheese.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by gowld on Friday March 27, 2026 @02:55PM
(#47546776)
What "similar thing" are you asking for? The Laughing Cow image exists. The Print Gallery is an object itself existing at 2 zoom levels in the same place, but the cheese exists in different places. You can't have two copies of the same image in the same place - that's not a copy; it's just itself.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by manudaro on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:19AM
(#47543746)
I've been loking into how 3B1B builds their rendering pipeline, and it's honestly mind blowing. They use Python along with custom OpenGl shaders to handle most of geometric transformations, shich seems to be what creates those "brain breaking" visual effects.It's fascinating how our visual cortex tries to interpret overlapping geometric patterns and ends up producing such counterintuitive perceptions.
Shat I still can't quite wrap my hand around is... to what extent are these effects caused by the rendering itself, and how much of it is just how our brain interprets the visual information?
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by john_strinlai on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:35AM
(#47544043)
there is at least one video, if not a series of videos, where he explains his process in detail, showing the coding process and everything. it is a collaboration with another person where, if i recall, he is teaching them.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by manudaro on Friday March 27, 2026 @07:07PM
(#47549550)
This is great, thanks for digging these up. The workflow doc on Github is exactly what I wat looking for - didn't realize they had that level of documentation publicly available.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by pierrec on Friday March 27, 2026 @11:57AM
(#47544418)
This kind of technique can be used in 3D space as well! The analysis here represents Escher's techniques as conformal maps in the complex plane. Conformal maps are also possible, though more limited, in R^3. This is something that I explored some years ago and wrote an article about it, though it focuses more graphics than math: https://www.osar.fr/notes/logspherical/
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by toxik on Friday March 27, 2026 @04:10PM
(#47547604)
So to do this same Droste effect in 3D you would need a self-similar volume? Though since we can't really see 3D, we could never have that "one circle zooms in" effect.
Or could you walk around in such a world? That would be a very cool concept for a game.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by pierrec on Friday March 27, 2026 @04:50PM
(#47548082)
Though since we can't really see 3D, we could never have that "one circle zooms in" effect.
Well, the 3D structure just needs to be sufficiently "holey" for the effect to become apparent. For example a cage-like structure, or a house with no roof (when seen from above).
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by rappatic on Friday March 27, 2026 @02:01PM
(#47546124)
Similarly, it's possible to take the derivative of a song. You can use a Fourier transform to express the song's waveform as a series of sin and cosine functions, then take the derivative.
Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, you could express the song's waveform with the function 13 * sin(41x).
The derivative of this function is 533 * cos(41x).
Cosine, of course, is just a phase shifted sine, and the constant coefficient inside the function stays the same. So you're not changing anything about the shape of the wave, just stretching it vertically.
This has the effect of mimicking a "high pass filter," amplifying the volume of the highs.
Re:This picture broke my brain [3B1B video]
by toxik on Friday March 27, 2026 @02:48PM
(#47546713)
Well, you get the frequency domain derivative. This is the same as scaling the time domain by a linear ramp. Not exactly hugely useful, unless you happen to be in radar.
You can take the finite difference with eg np.diff(waveform) though.
(I still have not made it all the way to the end of the video though, perhaps that is where they end up.)
I see what you did there.
It’s a drawing of a guy looking at a picture of a town with himself standing in the town, but it’s all twirled and twisted so it’s self repetition isn’t obvious.
This would be an excellent title :)
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait
A/B testing a title feels wrong to me, its almost as bad as A/B testing a UUID. Just pick a title and stick to it unless you need to fix a factual error.
This is even worse, as it also breaks temporal continuity for individual reality. E.g. I expect that if I saw a video titled X today, I'll be able to find it under title X tomorrow, and if I can't, it's one of the rare/marginal cases when it got banned/deleted/retitled, or I just misremembered. Titles becoming unstable in the general case is a bad situation.
I watched it a few days ago and this descriptive title was part of the reason I clicked. I generally trust 3B1B anyway but normally a title like "This picture broke my brain" would put me off.
I was genuinely torn about how to title this, because one of my aims is that it stands to be enjoyed by people outside the usual online-math-viewing circles, especially the first 12 minutes, and leaning into the idea of a complex log risks alienating some of those.
The "broke my brain" title originally put me off from watching. I caved after a few days; I think the video is one of your best!
I generally agree that it's a pretty wild choice to just let creators put up multiple titles. That said, it's hard not to play with the shiny toy when it's sitting right there, especially if you know it may mean the lesson reaches more people. In this case, I genuinely don't know what the "right" title is, even setting engagement aside. Is it fundamentally about analyzing an Escher piece? Is it fundamentally a lesson on complex analysis, and complex logs in particular? It's both, but you don't always want to cram two stories into one title. This becomes all the more challenging when titles are, inescapably, marketing.
big thanks for all of your work making math both enjoyable and accessible. my kids (and i) love your videos. your positive impact extends far and wide.
Everyone who watches your videos loves them and wants everyone else to watch them.
fascinating, and absurdly confusing, that there are multiple titles.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Gallery_(M._C._Escher)
[0] https://pub.math.leidenuniv.nl/~smitbde/papers/2003-de_smit-...
But, as with all jokes, the punchline isn't funny at all without the setup.
Even in those terms the answer given isn't really an answer because it just gives an expression with undefined variables.
This kind of risks obscuring what's actually going on.
i will see if i can find it.
edit: "How I animate 3Blue1Brown | A Manim demo with Ben Sparks" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbu7Zu5X1zI
more on workflow: https://github.com/3b1b/videos?tab=readme-ov-file#workflow
code for videos: https://github.com/3b1b/videos
manim: https://github.com/3b1b/manim
manim community edition: https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/
Or could you walk around in such a world? That would be a very cool concept for a game.
Well, the 3D structure just needs to be sufficiently "holey" for the effect to become apparent. For example a cage-like structure, or a house with no roof (when seen from above).
His videos on Euler's formula inspired me to make a silly toy so I could play with it myself.
https://gitlab.com/aprentic/complex-viz/
Imagine, for the sake of simplicity, you could express the song's waveform with the function 13 * sin(41x).
The derivative of this function is 533 * cos(41x).
Cosine, of course, is just a phase shifted sine, and the constant coefficient inside the function stays the same. So you're not changing anything about the shape of the wave, just stretching it vertically.
This has the effect of mimicking a "high pass filter," amplifying the volume of the highs.
You can take the finite difference with eg np.diff(waveform) though.
Also curious what happens if you take Escher's painting and undo the effect. Probably not great since it wasn't in the video.
What a cool video.