Last week's SIGGRAPH had almost two days of sessions about 3D in Hollywood- both animation and live action. The recent revival of 3D movies is not just a marketing gimic, but involves a new understanding and implentation of technical details learned since the last 3D fad in the 1950s.
One of the more interesting presentations was In-Three's talk "Dimensionalization: Creating 3D Movies from 2D Images" in the 3D Cinema session. They showed a space battle clip from Revenge of Sith which had been "Dimensionalized" which is their term for 3D-conversion. They showed dimensionalized clips from other movies with people and nature scenes, the latter which can be challenging. Overall, I thought they were pretty good- just a bit short of have filmed in 3D in the first place.
Dimensionalization involves includes volumizing individual objects and positioning them in a 3D depth-of-field. Some is this is done automatically by the software, and some of it is interative. The interative part includes outlining objects to improve efficiency and quality. It also includes fixing flaws like how to filling in missing "around the edge pieces", and erasing "eye discomfort artifacts" where the the stereo view doesnt quite work right. The director also adds "artistic control" such as highlighting portions of depth of view. In-three showed various examples from a complex Sith space battle scene where the director might want to highlight the action of subset of spaceships. My perception was movie-dimensionalization operated in a similar fashion to movie-colorization 15 years ago with both computer and artistic components.
As of last week the In-Three presenter said that LucasFilm had not commited to dimensionalization of the six movies yet. They also did not mention names of other clients and movies when asked, but I think they are definately doing some.
Wired ran an article in 2005 about American jailed in China for pirating IP. Its kind of rough when your own government hates you too. (He should have been released about now)
The head of Disney-Pixar Animation, Ed Catmull, talked about the same issues in filmmaking last week. He was concerned with balance between artists, technologists and production staff (schedulers) in maximizing creativity and get movies out.
There is suspicion some female gymnasts use hormone or hormone-suppression to delay puberty. Its not clear how you'd test for this.
This is not new. Male opera singers used to cut their balls off to keep saprano voices. I recall some tv newsmagazine story about parents keeping a severely retarded(?) child from turning into an even more unmanageable adult.
I lived in china 30 years ago during the "poor times". The staple wasnt the sugar+spicy rich "Chinese food" you see in American Chinese restaurants, but simple steamed rice and cabbage. Plus a seasonal vegetable and maybe pork on Sunday.
Human society needs a variety of personality types from hyper-extroverts to near-austistic introverts. Even during ancient tribal hunting grousp we needed this variation to survive. To say there is a one-standard "normal" is ridiculous.
When you can routinely analyze for "parts per trillion" as these newer technology economically allow, you find nearly every chemical to some degree. I remember a scare a couple years ago when they found dioxin in nearly every agricultural product they looked at, but in parts per trillion. They would find ten thousand other poisons too if they look. Some legislation written without a significance-floor, so that puts some watchdogs intoa quandry.
1) Inforamtion Week reports market is still strong.
2) I attend our area's open source and Java user groups occasionally. There always seems to be more recruiters than attendees (as recent as Tuesday). At least we get free pizza dinner out of it.
3) Our company has had a hard time recruiting graphics and Java wizards. Many recs still open.
4) On the monthly mailing from SIGGRAPH/Creative Heads there are 300 openings for graphics wizards.
The IRS was cranking out its first stimulus checks within two months of being ordered to. They claimed they could do it a little faster, but were waiting for the April 15 filings to improve their address database. (The tax-address database is 95% accurate at the end of April, but decays to 85% accuracy by the beginning of April because Americals move often.) There were some snafus as expected. Also there was some complexity as the categories and amounts of checks - about the same complexity as Arnold's demands.
I've wonder why I've seen so few reports of massve database leaks from Federal and State financial systems compared to industry. My guess is there are few hckers conversant in COBOL, OS-360 and nine-track tapes. One of the rare bright spots in this mess.
The bearings that rotate the left solar panels during the course of an orbit to maximize sun exposure are damaged. These bearings are similar to your CV Boot in an automobile. Without rotation power is cut by more than half. It is then not sufficient to power all the modules. They are looking at repairs, but this subsystem was really designed for repairs.
According to a recent PBS special, some countries health systems are based on private insurance, but regulations allow them to offer only one price to everyone regardless of age, gender,or pre-existing conditions. This what private US employers usually offer their employees.
Viking explicitly tested for "biological activity" and had a false-positive result due to an oxidizing soil. I think they blamed it on a peroxide at that time, but Viking didnt have as accuratate analyszers as Phoenix has.
I recall it was Carl Sagan who suggested biological life was locally anti-entropic and one should look for chemical disequilibriums like free oxygen or methane. Over time these substances naturally move into lower energy states through chemical reactions if life wasn't present. However, planetary surfaces and interiors may not be closed energy systems. Mars soil is bombarded by solar UV; Io is heated by Jupiter tidal stress. These energy injections can create life-like chemical disequilibriums too.
The British-US legal tradition relies strongly on living witnesses. Even material evidence has to have a directly witnessed chain-of-control to believable (remember doubt created in the Simpson trial). Crimes committed during World War II are just about to pass out of the realm of US legality as the last living witnesses are dying. Once in rare while a court may recognize one level of hearsay, but no deeper.
Ditto for much civil laws: Dead people cant own property and will it to a future-reanimated frozen-corpse. The dead can create trusts to hold and control property for a limited amount of limited time period, usually not much longer than any currently living person.
So you can view living society as kind of a time-ship. Legalities extend backwards and forwards in time in the minds of those currently alive, but not much further beyond that. Then they become the realm of history or science fiction.
We are talking about an ancient and fundamental metabolic subsystem in all eucharyote life for the past billion years. I suspect tinkering with it will affect lots of things. Thats why dieting is so difficult in an environment of plenty - hunger is such basic drive of life.
I was thinking if you make some sort of sticky/locking children's blocks, then you could physically build some wormy-branchy play-object by locking the cubes together into words. Then each player could rotate the play-object with their hands to look for good attachment points for future word bars.
The only difficulty is implementing bonus squares (cubes) visualization this way. Thats an important, but not absolutely essential part of the 2D game. Maybe the playing board could be simulataneously physical blocks and a computer graphics representation. The computer graphics represnetation would depict the pink and blue bonus squares. Maybe the physical letter blocks could show the bonus colors when they they occupied the bonus locations.
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Last week's SIGGRAPH had almost two days of sessions about 3D in Hollywood- both animation and live action. The recent revival of 3D movies is not just a marketing gimic, but involves a new understanding and implentation of technical details learned since the last 3D fad in the 1950s.
One of the more interesting presentations was In-Three's talk "Dimensionalization: Creating 3D Movies from 2D Images" in the 3D Cinema session. They showed a space battle clip from Revenge of Sith which had been "Dimensionalized" which is their term for 3D-conversion. They showed dimensionalized clips from other movies with people and nature scenes, the latter which can be challenging. Overall, I thought they were pretty good- just a bit short of have filmed in 3D in the first place.
Dimensionalization involves includes volumizing individual objects and positioning them in a 3D depth-of-field. Some is this is done automatically by the software, and some of it is interative. The interative part includes outlining objects to improve efficiency and quality. It also includes fixing flaws like how to filling in missing "around the edge pieces", and erasing "eye discomfort artifacts" where the the stereo view doesnt quite work right. The director also adds "artistic control" such as highlighting portions of depth of view. In-three showed various examples from a complex Sith space battle scene where the director might want to highlight the action of subset of spaceships. My perception was movie-dimensionalization operated in a similar fashion to movie-colorization 15 years ago with both computer and artistic components.
As of last week the In-Three presenter said that LucasFilm had not commited to dimensionalization of the six movies yet. They also did not mention names of other clients and movies when asked, but I think they are definately doing some.
Wired ran an article in 2005 about American jailed in China for pirating IP. Its kind of rough when your own government hates you too. (He should have been released about now)
The head of Disney-Pixar Animation, Ed Catmull, talked about the same issues in filmmaking last week. He was concerned with balance between artists, technologists and production staff (schedulers) in maximizing creativity and get movies out.
There is suspicion some female gymnasts use hormone or hormone-suppression to delay puberty. Its not clear how you'd test for this.
This is not new. Male opera singers used to cut their balls off to keep saprano voices. I recall some tv newsmagazine story about parents keeping a severely retarded(?) child from turning into an even more unmanageable adult.
I lived in china 30 years ago during the "poor times". The staple wasnt the sugar+spicy rich "Chinese food" you see in American Chinese restaurants, but simple steamed rice and cabbage. Plus a seasonal vegetable and maybe pork on Sunday.
My browser must be broken :-)
Human society needs a variety of personality types from hyper-extroverts to near-austistic introverts. Even during ancient tribal hunting grousp we needed this variation to survive. To say there is a one-standard "normal" is ridiculous.
When you can routinely analyze for "parts per trillion" as these newer technology economically allow, you find nearly every chemical to some degree. I remember a scare a couple years ago when they found dioxin in nearly every agricultural product they looked at, but in parts per trillion. They would find ten thousand other poisons too if they look. Some legislation written without a significance-floor, so that puts some watchdogs intoa quandry.
1) Inforamtion Week reports market is still strong.
2) I attend our area's open source and Java user groups occasionally. There always seems to be more recruiters than attendees (as recent as Tuesday). At least we get free pizza dinner out of it.
3) Our company has had a hard time recruiting graphics and Java wizards. Many recs still open.
4) On the monthly mailing from SIGGRAPH/Creative Heads there are 300 openings for graphics wizards.
That Black Hole probably has consumed trillions of hours of human surfing.
(World Wide Web was invented at Cern.)
The Earth is .0426 light seconds wide. Nothing is faster than celerity.
The IRS was cranking out its first stimulus checks within two months of being ordered to. They claimed they could do it a little faster, but were waiting for the April 15 filings to improve their address database. (The tax-address database is 95% accurate at the end of April, but decays to 85% accuracy by the beginning of April because Americals move often.) There were some snafus as expected. Also there was some complexity as the categories and amounts of checks - about the same complexity as Arnold's demands.
I've wonder why I've seen so few reports of massve database leaks from Federal and State financial systems compared to industry. My guess is there are few hckers conversant in COBOL, OS-360 and nine-track tapes. One of the rare bright spots in this mess.
The bearings that rotate the left solar panels during the course of an orbit to maximize sun exposure are damaged. These bearings are similar to your CV Boot in an automobile. Without rotation power is cut by more than half. It is then not sufficient to power all the modules. They are looking at repairs, but this subsystem was really designed for repairs.
If the #$%^ book reads aloud to him!
Sometimes they allow a competition to use it and sometimes they dont. The "gat Olympics" had to change its name to the "Gay Games".
According to a recent PBS special, some countries health systems are based on private insurance, but regulations allow them to offer only one price to everyone regardless of age, gender,or pre-existing conditions. This what private US employers usually offer their employees.
Viking explicitly tested for "biological activity" and had a false-positive result due to an oxidizing soil. I think they blamed it on a peroxide at that time, but Viking didnt have as accuratate analyszers as Phoenix has.
I recall it was Carl Sagan who suggested biological life was locally anti-entropic and one should look for chemical disequilibriums like free oxygen or methane. Over time these substances naturally move into lower energy states through chemical reactions if life wasn't present. However, planetary surfaces and interiors may not be closed energy systems. Mars soil is bombarded by solar UV; Io is heated by Jupiter tidal stress. These energy injections can create life-like chemical disequilibriums too.
In its back to school sale. Its not half as cool as an Apple computer, but approaching One-Laptop pricing with commodity standards.
I think the only thing saving the IRS is that operates with COBOL software and nine-track tape and not many hackers can do those these days.
I forgot the exact country, but one of the major western European countries had a significant chunk of taxpayer ids stolen last year.
The British-US legal tradition relies strongly on living witnesses. Even material evidence has to have a directly witnessed chain-of-control to believable (remember doubt created in the Simpson trial). Crimes committed during World War II are just about to pass out of the realm of US legality as the last living witnesses are dying. Once in rare while a court may recognize one level of hearsay, but no deeper.
Ditto for much civil laws: Dead people cant own property and will it to a future-reanimated frozen-corpse. The dead can create trusts to hold and control property for a limited amount of limited time period, usually not much longer than any currently living person.
So you can view living society as kind of a time-ship. Legalities extend backwards and forwards in time in the minds of those currently alive, but not much further beyond that. Then they become the realm of history or science fiction.
They charge @$2000 a gram. (Close to a million dollars a pound.) People just do a gram or so.
I haven't heard of any actual problems, but this one of the more extreme. The 'u' is a long vowel, so it doesnt sound like it.
We are talking about an ancient and fundamental metabolic subsystem in all eucharyote life for the past billion years. I suspect tinkering with it will affect lots of things. Thats why dieting is so difficult in an environment of plenty - hunger is such basic drive of life.
I was thinking if you make some sort of sticky/locking children's blocks, then you could physically build some wormy-branchy play-object by locking the cubes together into words. Then each player could rotate the play-object with their hands to look for good attachment points for future word bars.
The only difficulty is implementing bonus squares (cubes) visualization this way. Thats an important, but not absolutely essential part of the 2D game. Maybe the playing board could be simulataneously physical blocks and a computer graphics representation. The computer graphics represnetation would depict the pink and blue bonus squares. Maybe the physical letter blocks could show the bonus colors when they they occupied the bonus locations.