Which is why good mocap often comes from artists, specifically, dancers who know which body motions project the most convincing effects. AFAIK a lot of mocap is used in conjunction with IK. A good (or in this case, bad) example is Gollum in LOTR. It was done with mocap, but the body proportions were altered, his legs were longer than the mocap actor. So they just used IK and extrapolated the captured motion to longer bones. But if you watch his walking gait, it's unnatural and unconvincing, he lurches around with unnatural motions because the leg motions didn't scale properly. Just because you have longer bones doesn't mean your muscles move any faster, but to match the mocap, they had to speed up the leg motions. It looks like crap.
Check out the film, you'll see there is little similarity between it and Rube Goldberg devices, except in the very general sense of a long string of devices that bump into each other and interact in a convoluted chain of causality, Rube's devices actually DO someting, Fischli & Weiss's device does nothing, but in a most interesting way. The first time I saw that film, it was looping on a monitor at MOCA in LA, I was so astonished I sat down and watched it twice. It took me years to locate a copy of the film, I found a VHS tape in the store of MOCA in Chicago for only $20. And yeah, I do share your distaste for overly clever stealth marketing tricks like the Mini robot.
Yeah, well Honda's cog ad was plagiarized from a famous 1987 performance art film, "Der Lauf der Dinge" (The Way Things Go) by Fischli & Weiss. So "brilliant" and "real work" are not words you could apply to the Honda ad, unless you think stealing someone elses original idea is real work and a brilliant idea.
>Yeah, its fairly obvious you're some religious view.
And your religion is equally obvious. You worship technology.
For the price of your camera, you could buy a ticket to travel across the country to visit your distant friends in person, rather than having merely a photo of them. Your attachment to material posessions is an obstacle to forming attachments to real people.
My sister found the sharks tooth while hiking, she keeps it as a memento, perhaps lucky charm was a bad choice of words.
Since I am not merely an "english-speaking westerner," speaking as a multilingual buddhist, I am merely pointing out that people are too attached to material posessions. Filling your pockets with crap will not reduce the emptiness in your life.
Nah, I don't see it, but it's obvious the CG was done so that axis of motion is away from the camera, which makes any sloppy work harder to detect. Sure the bot bends in the direction of motion of the car, but it looks like it should fall over if its feet weren't bolted down. This is the difference between an artist and a CG technician. I remember in art school, we spent many hours studying human anatomy, body posture and motion, so we could make our images more realistic. You can't just do mocap and IK and get it right, it takes an artist to make it look convincing. This CG bot is based on human body mechanics, if he'd have made the bot look nothing like a human, it would be easier to suspend disbelief.
Right now, I have absolutely nothing in my pockets whatsoever, except maybe a little lint. When I leave the house, I carry as little as possible, just 2 keys, and my wallet. I hate carrying around crap.
The answer is: it depends. Any mail system can store and transmit messages made with several different double-byte character encodings. But a truly compatible webmail system would look at the headers, detect the type of encoding (i.e. EUC, ISO-1022), and set the HTML headers to make the browser switch to the proper coding, so it displays properly instead of showing mojibake.
Mac.com webmail supports Japanese, I just got some Japanese email and I checked the web interface (I usually use mail.app) and it works great. I know lots of people using.Mac for blogs.
You're not even close. Leather is mass produced, it starts in a mechanized slaughterhouse, and is processed in massive tanning factories using huge quantities of industrial chemicals.
Yep, remember your conservation of momentum, the bot doesn't move when it grabs the car, it should at least absorb part of the kinetic energy and have to push back, or be pulled along with the car a tiny bit. Consider a similar collision on a smaller scale, what would happen if you tried to halt a guy on a bicycle? And notice the bot casts a shadow but the car doesn't. Totally fake. Also notice all these "tests" are done with a locked-down camera, that's a giveaway of a bad CG producer, anyone with real skills would have used a handheld camera and used move matching.
You are not your data. It all came out of your head, that's where you are. My old pal Timothy Leary used to say "why should I remember all that crap when I could just type it in a computer?" Well, you should remember it because if you don't exercise your brain, you become stupid and senile, just like ol' Tim did in the end. You remind me of a joke by Dave Thomas (the SCTV guy, not the Wendy's guy), he said "As you get older, you discover your body is just a means to move your head from place to place." If I dropped you on a desert island or some other place where your data was worthless, you'd still have to eat, breathe, excrete, etc. Your data is not intrinsically valuable to your life. That was the whole point of James Burke's exercise, the "empty your pockets" test was just the beginning of a lesson that people are far too dependent on technology. Burke hypothesized what would happen if technology failed due to a massive, permanent electric power outage. He figured most people would starve to death before they figured out they could grow their own food.
You're right, it's a dead giveaway. Notice the guy holding the clipboard, the lighting is camera left since the clipboard casts a shadow on his chest. But the fake CG shadows from the "robot" indicate the model was lit from the camera upper right. And none of the background objects (i.e. the cart) casts shadows anywhere near as distinct as the "robot." Come on fakers, don't you know that your lighting has to be consistent between composited layers?
It's times like this when I recall the old TV show "Connections" by James Burke. He said he liked to challenge people to empty their pockets or purse and try to find one object that wasn't mass-produced. Keys, coins, paper, pens, money, etc, it's all mass produced. I've tried this on dozens of people, and only one person had a single non-manufactured object, my sister had a fossilized shark's tooth she carried as a lucky charm. Everybody carries around nothing but manufactured crap. It's all instantly replaceable garbage, nothing of any intrinsic value. If you were stripped naked, you could replace all of it without difficulty, if you had some cash to buy new crap. Is that how you want to live, with a disposable lifestyle? Even worse, do you want to live a craphound lifestyle, reveling in consumerist crap like Cory does?
No, BB comments were pulled because Cory had a snit over a personal criticism. He lashed out and then when a few more people said he was acting like an asshole, he pulled the plug entirely. Cory can dish it out but not take it.
Most important, find a good writing instrument. For general writing, I particularly suggest a good mechanical pencil, I like Japanese mechanical pencils like the Sanford LOGO II 0.5mm or the Y&C GRIP500. Also fountain pens are particularly nice, and bring back some of the pleasure of handwriting. I use the Lamy Joy, it has a flat nib for calligraphic handwriting, but the Lamy Safari is also good, it's better for quick writing because it has a round point (I recommend the medium, not the fine point). Also particularly useful for ink pen writing are those whiteout pens, they're sort of like highlighters but they lay down whiteout.
Secondly, study a bit of calligraphy. You don't need to become a fine calligrapher, you just need to know a few methods to make your pen or pencil work for you, not against you. I recall seeing a news story about how a hospital set up a special handwriting class for doctors as a method to reduce errors on handwritten prescriptions. They were taught one simple italic script, it was easy to learn and is the simplest handwritten script. Grab a Speedball Book (available at any library or art store), it has all the basics of calligraphy. I don't know the exact title of the book, but every art store knows what a Speedball Book is.
Might be hard to find one, since the Infinitesimal Calc method of instruction was a fairly short-lived experiment that ended in the '80s, and anyone who got through it would have decades-old memories. I too would like to hear of anyone who got through the book successfully. I have a feeling the only ones were the author's own students.
The only positive remarks I've read here are coming from people who already learned calc using the standard methods, and found the book much later, declaring it logical and informative. So how would you know if it is appropriate for beginning calc students? I assure you it was a disaster, and was dropped for very good reasons. I dunno, maybe our instructor was exceptionally cruel or an exceptionally bad teacher, I have no way to compare, just as you have no way to compare what it would be like if you'd learned from Kiesler in your freshman calc class. YMMV.
Back in my day, it was presumed to be better to cover algebra more intensively and wait until college for calc. My high school added Advanced Placement calc classes a few years after I graduated, I would have taken it if it was offered.
Anyway, you sound like my elderly mom. She always says, "those darn college kids get younger and dumber every year." Of course she is slyly referring to the inverse corollary.
This calculus course made no freaking sense due to several problems:
1. The textbook was full of errors, we spent 1/3 of the course proofreading it. 2. The instructor didn't understand the material fully, and had trouble explaining it. Our course was the first attempt at teaching infinitesimal calculus. 3. The text spent too much time explaining WHY things worked the way they did, rather than spending time explaining HOW to APPLY calculus to problems.
As another commenter alluded to, I don't need to know set theory in order to add 2+2, although once I DID learn some set theory, I finally knew WHY the answer is 4. To this day, I still understand much of the WHY of calculus, but not any of the HOW.
The instructor came back to the test site, which was locked down and firemen prevented him from entering. Meanwhile I was over trying to find him at his office so I could hand in the test. I couldn't find him until several hours later, during which time I presumably could have consulted the textbook and cheated. So I got an F on the test.
The obvious problem is that advanced physics has little application to freshman calculus courses.
Physicists are weird about math anyway, I still remember a quote from a famous physicist (I can't remember his name but you'd recognize him) speaking about math, "if mathematics accurately describes reality, it ceases to be interesting."
This whole course went down in flames, not just my final. I did negotiate with the dean, that's how I got the D+. I considered my grades a reflection of the instructor's performance, not my own performance. The instructor deserved an F, not me.
I think you're right, studying from Kiesler made me constantly feel like I was a moron at algebra, which was pretty ridiculous because I was Honors Math and presumably had a better grounding in algebra than other students. Of course, it's hard to recall the specifics since this was almost 30 years ago and I have little memory left from that course, except for the bitter aftertaste. But fortunately, this Infinitesimals method was a short-lived experiment, AFAIK my university dropped it after only a couple of years, I heard that the Infinitesimals students had troubles meshing with the other students in 2nd year calc classes. I wouldn't know about that, I never made it that far.
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Which is why good mocap often comes from artists, specifically, dancers who know which body motions project the most convincing effects.
AFAIK a lot of mocap is used in conjunction with IK. A good (or in this case, bad) example is Gollum in LOTR. It was done with mocap, but the body proportions were altered, his legs were longer than the mocap actor. So they just used IK and extrapolated the captured motion to longer bones. But if you watch his walking gait, it's unnatural and unconvincing, he lurches around with unnatural motions because the leg motions didn't scale properly. Just because you have longer bones doesn't mean your muscles move any faster, but to match the mocap, they had to speed up the leg motions. It looks like crap.
It's not his house, it's Mark's house.
Check out the film, you'll see there is little similarity between it and Rube Goldberg devices, except in the very general sense of a long string of devices that bump into each other and interact in a convoluted chain of causality, Rube's devices actually DO someting, Fischli & Weiss's device does nothing, but in a most interesting way. The first time I saw that film, it was looping on a monitor at MOCA in LA, I was so astonished I sat down and watched it twice. It took me years to locate a copy of the film, I found a VHS tape in the store of MOCA in Chicago for only $20.
And yeah, I do share your distaste for overly clever stealth marketing tricks like the Mini robot.
Yeah, well Honda's cog ad was plagiarized from a famous 1987 performance art film, "Der Lauf der Dinge" (The Way Things Go) by Fischli & Weiss. So "brilliant" and "real work" are not words you could apply to the Honda ad, unless you think stealing someone elses original idea is real work and a brilliant idea.
>Yeah, its fairly obvious you're some religious view.
And your religion is equally obvious. You worship technology.
For the price of your camera, you could buy a ticket to travel across the country to visit your distant friends in person, rather than having merely a photo of them. Your attachment to material posessions is an obstacle to forming attachments to real people.
My sister found the sharks tooth while hiking, she keeps it as a memento, perhaps lucky charm was a bad choice of words.
Since I am not merely an "english-speaking westerner," speaking as a multilingual buddhist, I am merely pointing out that people are too attached to material posessions. Filling your pockets with crap will not reduce the emptiness in your life.
Nah, I don't see it, but it's obvious the CG was done so that axis of motion is away from the camera, which makes any sloppy work harder to detect. Sure the bot bends in the direction of motion of the car, but it looks like it should fall over if its feet weren't bolted down.
This is the difference between an artist and a CG technician. I remember in art school, we spent many hours studying human anatomy, body posture and motion, so we could make our images more realistic. You can't just do mocap and IK and get it right, it takes an artist to make it look convincing. This CG bot is based on human body mechanics, if he'd have made the bot look nothing like a human, it would be easier to suspend disbelief.
Right now, I have absolutely nothing in my pockets whatsoever, except maybe a little lint. When I leave the house, I carry as little as possible, just 2 keys, and my wallet. I hate carrying around crap.
The answer is: it depends. Any mail system can store and transmit messages made with several different double-byte character encodings. But a truly compatible webmail system would look at the headers, detect the type of encoding (i.e. EUC, ISO-1022), and set the HTML headers to make the browser switch to the proper coding, so it displays properly instead of showing mojibake.
Mac.com webmail supports Japanese, I just got some Japanese email and I checked the web interface (I usually use mail.app) and it works great. I know lots of people using .Mac for blogs.
You're not even close. Leather is mass produced, it starts in a mechanized slaughterhouse, and is processed in massive tanning factories using huge quantities of industrial chemicals.
But thanks for playing.
Yep, remember your conservation of momentum, the bot doesn't move when it grabs the car, it should at least absorb part of the kinetic energy and have to push back, or be pulled along with the car a tiny bit. Consider a similar collision on a smaller scale, what would happen if you tried to halt a guy on a bicycle?
And notice the bot casts a shadow but the car doesn't. Totally fake. Also notice all these "tests" are done with a locked-down camera, that's a giveaway of a bad CG producer, anyone with real skills would have used a handheld camera and used move matching.
You are not your data. It all came out of your head, that's where you are. My old pal Timothy Leary used to say "why should I remember all that crap when I could just type it in a computer?" Well, you should remember it because if you don't exercise your brain, you become stupid and senile, just like ol' Tim did in the end. You remind me of a joke by Dave Thomas (the SCTV guy, not the Wendy's guy), he said "As you get older, you discover your body is just a means to move your head from place to place."
If I dropped you on a desert island or some other place where your data was worthless, you'd still have to eat, breathe, excrete, etc. Your data is not intrinsically valuable to your life. That was the whole point of James Burke's exercise, the "empty your pockets" test was just the beginning of a lesson that people are far too dependent on technology. Burke hypothesized what would happen if technology failed due to a massive, permanent electric power outage. He figured most people would starve to death before they figured out they could grow their own food.
You're right, it's a dead giveaway. Notice the guy holding the clipboard, the lighting is camera left since the clipboard casts a shadow on his chest. But the fake CG shadows from the "robot" indicate the model was lit from the camera upper right. And none of the background objects (i.e. the cart) casts shadows anywhere near as distinct as the "robot."
Come on fakers, don't you know that your lighting has to be consistent between composited layers?
It's times like this when I recall the old TV show "Connections" by James Burke. He said he liked to challenge people to empty their pockets or purse and try to find one object that wasn't mass-produced. Keys, coins, paper, pens, money, etc, it's all mass produced. I've tried this on dozens of people, and only one person had a single non-manufactured object, my sister had a fossilized shark's tooth she carried as a lucky charm. Everybody carries around nothing but manufactured crap. It's all instantly replaceable garbage, nothing of any intrinsic value. If you were stripped naked, you could replace all of it without difficulty, if you had some cash to buy new crap. Is that how you want to live, with a disposable lifestyle? Even worse, do you want to live a craphound lifestyle, reveling in consumerist crap like Cory does?
No, BB comments were pulled because Cory had a snit over a personal criticism. He lashed out and then when a few more people said he was acting like an asshole, he pulled the plug entirely. Cory can dish it out but not take it.
Most important, find a good writing instrument. For general writing, I particularly suggest a good mechanical pencil, I like Japanese mechanical pencils like the Sanford LOGO II 0.5mm or the Y&C GRIP500. Also fountain pens are particularly nice, and bring back some of the pleasure of handwriting. I use the Lamy Joy, it has a flat nib for calligraphic handwriting, but the Lamy Safari is also good, it's better for quick writing because it has a round point (I recommend the medium, not the fine point). Also particularly useful for ink pen writing are those whiteout pens, they're sort of like highlighters but they lay down whiteout.
Secondly, study a bit of calligraphy. You don't need to become a fine calligrapher, you just need to know a few methods to make your pen or pencil work for you, not against you. I recall seeing a news story about how a hospital set up a special handwriting class for doctors as a method to reduce errors on handwritten prescriptions. They were taught one simple italic script, it was easy to learn and is the simplest handwritten script. Grab a Speedball Book (available at any library or art store), it has all the basics of calligraphy. I don't know the exact title of the book, but every art store knows what a Speedball Book is.
Might be hard to find one, since the Infinitesimal Calc method of instruction was a fairly short-lived experiment that ended in the '80s, and anyone who got through it would have decades-old memories. I too would like to hear of anyone who got through the book successfully. I have a feeling the only ones were the author's own students.
The only positive remarks I've read here are coming from people who already learned calc using the standard methods, and found the book much later, declaring it logical and informative. So how would you know if it is appropriate for beginning calc students? I assure you it was a disaster, and was dropped for very good reasons. I dunno, maybe our instructor was exceptionally cruel or an exceptionally bad teacher, I have no way to compare, just as you have no way to compare what it would be like if you'd learned from Kiesler in your freshman calc class. YMMV.
Back in my day, it was presumed to be better to cover algebra more intensively and wait until college for calc. My high school added Advanced Placement calc classes a few years after I graduated, I would have taken it if it was offered.
Anyway, you sound like my elderly mom. She always says, "those darn college kids get younger and dumber every year." Of course she is slyly referring to the inverse corollary.
This calculus course made no freaking sense due to several problems:
1. The textbook was full of errors, we spent 1/3 of the course proofreading it.
2. The instructor didn't understand the material fully, and had trouble explaining it. Our course was the first attempt at teaching infinitesimal calculus.
3. The text spent too much time explaining WHY things worked the way they did, rather than spending time explaining HOW to APPLY calculus to problems.
As another commenter alluded to, I don't need to know set theory in order to add 2+2, although once I DID learn some set theory, I finally knew WHY the answer is 4. To this day, I still understand much of the WHY of calculus, but not any of the HOW.
The instructor came back to the test site, which was locked down and firemen prevented him from entering. Meanwhile I was over trying to find him at his office so I could hand in the test. I couldn't find him until several hours later, during which time I presumably could have consulted the textbook and cheated. So I got an F on the test.
The obvious problem is that advanced physics has little application to freshman calculus courses.
Physicists are weird about math anyway, I still remember a quote from a famous physicist (I can't remember his name but you'd recognize him) speaking about math, "if mathematics accurately describes reality, it ceases to be interesting."
This whole course went down in flames, not just my final. I did negotiate with the dean, that's how I got the D+. I considered my grades a reflection of the instructor's performance, not my own performance. The instructor deserved an F, not me.
I think you're right, studying from Kiesler made me constantly feel like I was a moron at algebra, which was pretty ridiculous because I was Honors Math and presumably had a better grounding in algebra than other students. Of course, it's hard to recall the specifics since this was almost 30 years ago and I have little memory left from that course, except for the bitter aftertaste.
But fortunately, this Infinitesimals method was a short-lived experiment, AFAIK my university dropped it after only a couple of years, I heard that the Infinitesimals students had troubles meshing with the other students in 2nd year calc classes. I wouldn't know about that, I never made it that far.