If by co-exist you mean EAT THEM, then yes, there was a lot of co-existence.
That's usually what happens when animals co-exist. Think about it -- if they weren't co-existing, how would they have any opportunity to eat each other?
That such an amazing man who contributed so much in his life died not of old age, but of *cancer* is evidence that there can be no great deity out there watching over everything
Who says that this omniscient deity has to be just, kind, or compassionate, or even feel those ways towards human beings?
I thought this Paul Krugman article, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? " was particularly insightful. But if you're off the mind that all economics philosophies got it wrong recently, you might not be too interested in it. The subtitle is, "Mistaking Beauty for Truth."
I'm teeter-tottering with two different attitudes here. First is I get what you mean, there's definitely issues with getting the talent and so on. Second, and this is where I'm having a bit of conflict here, is that I think the easiest way to fail is to say "you can't". I remember George Lucas talking about how he was in film school shooting student work and several of his classmates sat there complaining about how they couldn't get film. What he was saying was it was better to 'do' and solve the challenges as you go.
Hey, first of all, I never said, "I can't"! I just said it would be a lot easier to do this if there were a simple set up that someone could do on their own. And I was looking more towards movement art in general joining into open-source culture than my own pet projects.
You can't succeed without trying, true, but it won't guarantee you success, either. When I mean success, I mean actually getting a finished product, not making a living, making your money back, starting a career, or becoming famous or whatever. But to simplistically say that "Just trying leads to success" is obviously wrong, also. For every George Lucas, there are probably thousands, if not more, of people who started some film project, and it ran into a hiccup somewhere along the line, and it never got finished. Things worked out well for Lucas, the stars lined up for him. In the local film club I was in, there were a few guys with reputations for starting things and never completing them. People didn't want to work on their projects, despite who interesting and exciting the ideas were, because they knew nothing would ultimately come of it. The guys who actually completed things get people to pitch in, and they get more and more completed projects under their belt. I know of another guy whose had undeveloped film under his bed for some 15 years. They shot the movie, but they didn't have money to develop the film. He kept it under his bed while he tried to get the money together. One thing led to another, and soon he thought to use money on other projects that never went anywhere. After some years, the film was presumed to have gone bad. So, he never got it developed, but he still keeps the film under his bed. BTW, it's a great movie, I hear -- zombies or vampires or something.
Movie-making as an art, or a means of creative expression, is a bit different than a lot of other arts. If you're a writer, or a musician, or a painter, you basically work alone, and hours == success. You just put in hours, and you get products. However, with movies, you can't just throw hours into it. It's inherently a team project. To make a movie, what you really need is leadership and networking. That means you're able to get a hold of resources and expertise, and motivate people to participate, for whatever reason. Part of leadership is not leading your gang on a fool's errand -- or at least taking all reasonable precautions to avoid failure. That might mean not undertaking a project that really is more than you can chew. IIRC, Kubrick put off making AI until he thought that the technology had gotten to the point where he thought he could actually pull it off. He had a lot of conversations with Spielberg about the state of the art, which is why the project got handed off to him after Kubrick's death.
So yeah, I agree with you, you do need to go ahead and risk things, start projects, follow your dreams. But at some point, you actually have to produce something in the real world, especially in movies, because otherwise you're just going to be a disappointed dreamer -- and dreaming is easier than doing. And that motivations no one tro get on board of your projects. So what I'm saying is you need a *balance* of dreaming and doing. And with a simple system of motion capture, that makes a whole bunch more projects suddenly a lot more doable.
Nobody who studied *anything* back then thought that the Earth was flat. In fact, in Columbus' day, ocean-going navigators used the curvature of the Earth in their calculations.
Meanwhile, today, given all we know about physics, with all of highly educated people we have, nobody thinks interstellar travel is feasible -- unless it's some kind of wormhole or inter-dimensional travel. Which we can invent here on Earth, no need to do it on Mars or whatever.
After a little reflection, I think I see where our disconnect comes from. Yes, what you're talking about is a solution for anyone who wants to make an open source movie and have digital motion capture. I talked about that in my original post. But the larger issue that I'm concerned with is movement artists participating in digital creative culture. I don't see that happening with the methodology you talk about. I could be wrong, but is there evidence to the contrary?
In other arenas where the art has gone digital, it's been a self-sufficient lone artist finding like minded peers. In movement technology, if an artists has to hook up with an animator for any digital content to arise, that's a relationship that really hasn't generated much content yet. The first speed bump that comes to mind is sharing the large amount of video data between the producer and the animator. Do you mail them a mini-dv tape? Even hosting a compressed video file is a technological challenge for most people. Perhaps you could put it on YouTube.
I'm just imaging a non-technologically inclined dance troupe talking to someone, perhaps a visiting lecturer, asking, "We saw a really neat project where this dance troupe was doing some digitized work, how do we digitize our stuff?" and the answer is "First, tape all of your stuff with three to four cameras, and try to dig up an animator whose willing to sit down and take all the time to pin-point every move you guys make..." Much easier just to email them some mocap data for clean-up.
Again, I'm not saying it changes from impossible to possible, but lowers the barrier to entry by orders of magnitude. Like from writing to the printing press.
I admit my tone is a little argumentative, but my point is that there are significant barriers to entry for the movement artists that don't exist for other types of art that have successfully migrated to digital production. Programmers, writers, digital musicians, don't have to pitch to computer geeks to get their work digitized. They just sit down at their computer and fire up the program. Movement artists don't have that option.
I'm not saying it's impossible; it's just orders of magnitude harder. If you want to start a band, it's not hard to find a few musicians with instruments. But say you were in Lima, Peru, and you wanted to do this. How many animators do you think there are there, as opposed to guitarists? Very few.
I joined a local film club a few years back and it was hard to get anyone to show up for anything, if it wasn't their own pet project. Especially if someone has some background in it and is trying to do it as a profession, they aren't interested in working for someone else unless there is some money involved. Animators have plenty of their own great ideas and pet projects, and they don't want to spend all their free time taking orders from you, thanks very much. Perhaps you live in an area with a lot of digital work going on, where there are animators who are available. That doesn't cover most of the country. All of those problems simply vanish if you have a simple system that a single person can afford and can work.
What do you mean "recreate the animation"? You mean for each movement artist, you need *another* person to actually digitize the work? So instead of one person doing the work, like the programmer, artist, or musician, there is going to be a team: the performer and the digitizer? Let me guess. This second person is going to work for free, huh?
Or do you mean that the movement artists is going to also become a digital animator? They don't want to do that, any more than a musician wants to become a programmer -- they just want to do their art, and have it digitized. The point is to make the technology accesible to the artist, not the other way around.
Art has never paid its way in the history of humanity; even going back to the classic Greek and Roman times artists were patronized by wealthy sponsors. The modern day equivalent is grants and government support.
Well, come to think of it, you don't really need to open source it. If it retailed for some $1000, and it was as easy to set up as a stage lighting or sound system, then almost any 'movement performer' could afford one. I can't wait until this product hits the market!
BTW, how big is the performance area? How many data points can the system record?
Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business
Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
The actual blog has much more in-depth explanations of the myths. And, it has a special Bonus Myth!
Would you mind just open sourcing this? I've been wanting something like this for a really long time to do an open source movie.
Right now, artists from a lot of different domains can participate in open-source culture. There's open source music, open source art, open source writing, etc. The one 'media' where creators cannot participate in open source is movement -- dance, martial art, acting, miming, etc -- because there's no cheap way to digitize their work. If you open sourced your work you would change things forever. You would be like the guy who invented the computer or the printing press. I know the American dream is to invent something in your basement and become a millionaire, and I'd like that for you, but maybe things are changing in this day and age.
There are plenty of other explanations, but PalMD has no idea what Placebo means. The placebo effect is a real phenomenon where people actually, measurably 'get better' when they are conscious of treatment attempts. How could we know this is a real phenomenon? Because certain kinds of treatment are less effective when delivered without the patient's knowledge: "The placebo effect may be a component of pharmacological therapies: Pain killing and anxiety reducing drugs that are infused secretly without an individual's knowledge are less effective (in the latter case no more so than saline) than when a patient knows they are receiving them. Likewise, the effects of stimulation from implanted electrodes in the brains of those with advanced Parkinson's disease are greater when they are aware they are receiving this stimulation." From wikipedia.
[I]n what other fields are we swallowing "placebos" giving us the feeling that they work?
One of the big ones is surgery for pain - especially back pain. The thing is, you don't want to have people go through the risks of surgery just to open them up and do nothing and have them as a control group. Also, if you did open a person up and not perform the surgery, any doctor looking at the X-rays could immediately tell that the procedure was not performed, so no double-blind studies. So, a lot of surgical procedures are not exposed to the gold standard of scientific medicine, the double-blind control group study.
Here you go, fresh hot facts to whack your noodle!
A study that shows that "The United States has by far the most expensive health care system in the world". The US is spending per capita is $4,178, while the next runner up is Switzerland at $2,794. That's a whole 1/3rd cheaper!
This article says that the US ranked 37th in a WHO effort to rank health care systems, whereas socialist France was ranked #1, Italy #2.
"The U.S. health care delivery system is by far the costliest on the planet, but comparison studies consistently show Americans get second-rate results by nearly every benchmark.
Here's another article:
"But for most all the rest of us, measured by all basic health care outcomes, from infant mortality rates to life expectancy, the United States has steadily fallen from number one in the world to the back of the pack of industrialized nations. The World Health Organization now ranks the U.S. health care system in 42nd place compared to all other countries."
How do you "see" this? Every other industrialized nation has some form of socialized medicine, whether it's single payer or government run hospitals. By any measurement, they all have better outcomes and spend less money than we do.
Slashdot Mirror
If by co-exist you mean EAT THEM, then yes, there was a lot of co-existence.
That's usually what happens when animals co-exist. Think about it -- if they weren't co-existing, how would they have any opportunity to eat each other?
...what we are seeing here is not an image per se but something more like the result of the Rutherford/Geiger/Marsden experiment.
What is an 'image' per se then?
It's probably like one of those long exposure photographs.
Of what?
For those who modded this insightful -- please explain to me what this explains!!
That such an amazing man who contributed so much in his life died not of old age, but of *cancer* is evidence that there can be no great deity out there watching over everything
Who says that this omniscient deity has to be just, kind, or compassionate, or even feel those ways towards human beings?
I thought this Paul Krugman article, "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? " was particularly insightful. But if you're off the mind that all economics philosophies got it wrong recently, you might not be too interested in it. The subtitle is, "Mistaking Beauty for Truth."
And on programmer's day, programmers get to work 20 hours to meet a dealine!
I'm teeter-tottering with two different attitudes here. First is I get what you mean, there's definitely issues with getting the talent and so on. Second, and this is where I'm having a bit of conflict here, is that I think the easiest way to fail is to say "you can't". I remember George Lucas talking about how he was in film school shooting student work and several of his classmates sat there complaining about how they couldn't get film. What he was saying was it was better to 'do' and solve the challenges as you go.
Hey, first of all, I never said, "I can't"! I just said it would be a lot easier to do this if there were a simple set up that someone could do on their own. And I was looking more towards movement art in general joining into open-source culture than my own pet projects.
You can't succeed without trying, true, but it won't guarantee you success, either. When I mean success, I mean actually getting a finished product, not making a living, making your money back, starting a career, or becoming famous or whatever. But to simplistically say that "Just trying leads to success" is obviously wrong, also. For every George Lucas, there are probably thousands, if not more, of people who started some film project, and it ran into a hiccup somewhere along the line, and it never got finished. Things worked out well for Lucas, the stars lined up for him. In the local film club I was in, there were a few guys with reputations for starting things and never completing them. People didn't want to work on their projects, despite who interesting and exciting the ideas were, because they knew nothing would ultimately come of it. The guys who actually completed things get people to pitch in, and they get more and more completed projects under their belt. I know of another guy whose had undeveloped film under his bed for some 15 years. They shot the movie, but they didn't have money to develop the film. He kept it under his bed while he tried to get the money together. One thing led to another, and soon he thought to use money on other projects that never went anywhere. After some years, the film was presumed to have gone bad. So, he never got it developed, but he still keeps the film under his bed. BTW, it's a great movie, I hear -- zombies or vampires or something.
Movie-making as an art, or a means of creative expression, is a bit different than a lot of other arts. If you're a writer, or a musician, or a painter, you basically work alone, and hours == success. You just put in hours, and you get products. However, with movies, you can't just throw hours into it. It's inherently a team project. To make a movie, what you really need is leadership and networking. That means you're able to get a hold of resources and expertise, and motivate people to participate, for whatever reason. Part of leadership is not leading your gang on a fool's errand -- or at least taking all reasonable precautions to avoid failure. That might mean not undertaking a project that really is more than you can chew. IIRC, Kubrick put off making AI until he thought that the technology had gotten to the point where he thought he could actually pull it off. He had a lot of conversations with Spielberg about the state of the art, which is why the project got handed off to him after Kubrick's death.
So yeah, I agree with you, you do need to go ahead and risk things, start projects, follow your dreams. But at some point, you actually have to produce something in the real world, especially in movies, because otherwise you're just going to be a disappointed dreamer -- and dreaming is easier than doing. And that motivations no one tro get on board of your projects. So what I'm saying is you need a *balance* of dreaming and doing. And with a simple system of motion capture, that makes a whole bunch more projects suddenly a lot more doable.
Nobody who studied *anything* back then thought that the Earth was flat. In fact, in Columbus' day, ocean-going navigators used the curvature of the Earth in their calculations.
Meanwhile, today, given all we know about physics, with all of highly educated people we have, nobody thinks interstellar travel is feasible -- unless it's some kind of wormhole or inter-dimensional travel. Which we can invent here on Earth, no need to do it on Mars or whatever.
Yeah, but supposedly those banks are going to pay us back with interest.
Oh, I see. So the movement of the points are relative to each other, not some absolute co-ordinate system?
After a little reflection, I think I see where our disconnect comes from. Yes, what you're talking about is a solution for anyone who wants to make an open source movie and have digital motion capture. I talked about that in my original post. But the larger issue that I'm concerned with is movement artists participating in digital creative culture. I don't see that happening with the methodology you talk about. I could be wrong, but is there evidence to the contrary?
In other arenas where the art has gone digital, it's been a self-sufficient lone artist finding like minded peers. In movement technology, if an artists has to hook up with an animator for any digital content to arise, that's a relationship that really hasn't generated much content yet. The first speed bump that comes to mind is sharing the large amount of video data between the producer and the animator. Do you mail them a mini-dv tape? Even hosting a compressed video file is a technological challenge for most people. Perhaps you could put it on YouTube.
I'm just imaging a non-technologically inclined dance troupe talking to someone, perhaps a visiting lecturer, asking, "We saw a really neat project where this dance troupe was doing some digitized work, how do we digitize our stuff?" and the answer is "First, tape all of your stuff with three to four cameras, and try to dig up an animator whose willing to sit down and take all the time to pin-point every move you guys make..." Much easier just to email them some mocap data for clean-up.
Again, I'm not saying it changes from impossible to possible, but lowers the barrier to entry by orders of magnitude. Like from writing to the printing press.
I admit my tone is a little argumentative, but my point is that there are significant barriers to entry for the movement artists that don't exist for other types of art that have successfully migrated to digital production. Programmers, writers, digital musicians, don't have to pitch to computer geeks to get their work digitized. They just sit down at their computer and fire up the program. Movement artists don't have that option.
I'm not saying it's impossible; it's just orders of magnitude harder. If you want to start a band, it's not hard to find a few musicians with instruments. But say you were in Lima, Peru, and you wanted to do this. How many animators do you think there are there, as opposed to guitarists? Very few.
I joined a local film club a few years back and it was hard to get anyone to show up for anything, if it wasn't their own pet project. Especially if someone has some background in it and is trying to do it as a profession, they aren't interested in working for someone else unless there is some money involved. Animators have plenty of their own great ideas and pet projects, and they don't want to spend all their free time taking orders from you, thanks very much. Perhaps you live in an area with a lot of digital work going on, where there are animators who are available. That doesn't cover most of the country. All of those problems simply vanish if you have a simple system that a single person can afford and can work.
What do you mean "recreate the animation"? You mean for each movement artist, you need *another* person to actually digitize the work? So instead of one person doing the work, like the programmer, artist, or musician, there is going to be a team: the performer and the digitizer? Let me guess. This second person is going to work for free, huh?
Or do you mean that the movement artists is going to also become a digital animator? They don't want to do that, any more than a musician wants to become a programmer -- they just want to do their art, and have it digitized. The point is to make the technology accesible to the artist, not the other way around.
Time and an expensive studio set up. Have you ever seen a motion-capture studio?
Art has never paid its way in the history of humanity; even going back to the classic Greek and Roman times artists were patronized by wealthy sponsors. The modern day equivalent is grants and government support.
Well, come to think of it, you don't really need to open source it. If it retailed for some $1000, and it was as easy to set up as a stage lighting or sound system, then almost any 'movement performer' could afford one. I can't wait until this product hits the market!
BTW, how big is the performance area? How many data points can the system record?
I always thought this was insightful, but never could test that belief: Top Ten Geek Business Myths:
Myth #1: A brilliant idea will make you rich.
Myth #2: If you build it they will come.
Myth #3: Someone will steal your idea if you don't protect it.
Myth #4: What you think matters.
Myth #5: Financial models are bogus.
Myth #6: What you know matters more than who you know.
Myth #7: A Ph.D. means something.
Myth #8: I need $5 million to start my business
Myth #9: The idea is the most important part of my business plan.
Myth #10: Having no competition is a good thing.
The actual blog has much more in-depth explanations of the myths. And, it has a special Bonus Myth!
Would you mind just open sourcing this? I've been wanting something like this for a really long time to do an open source movie.
Right now, artists from a lot of different domains can participate in open-source culture. There's open source music, open source art, open source writing, etc. The one 'media' where creators cannot participate in open source is movement -- dance, martial art, acting, miming, etc -- because there's no cheap way to digitize their work. If you open sourced your work you would change things forever. You would be like the guy who invented the computer or the printing press. I know the American dream is to invent something in your basement and become a millionaire, and I'd like that for you, but maybe things are changing in this day and age.
There are plenty of other explanations, but PalMD has no idea what Placebo means. The placebo effect is a real phenomenon where people actually, measurably 'get better' when they are conscious of treatment attempts. How could we know this is a real phenomenon? Because certain kinds of treatment are less effective when delivered without the patient's knowledge: "The placebo effect may be a component of pharmacological therapies: Pain killing and anxiety reducing drugs that are infused secretly without an individual's knowledge are less effective (in the latter case no more so than saline) than when a patient knows they are receiving them. Likewise, the effects of stimulation from implanted electrodes in the brains of those with advanced Parkinson's disease are greater when they are aware they are receiving this stimulation." From wikipedia.
[I]n what other fields are we swallowing "placebos" giving us the feeling that they work?
One of the big ones is surgery for pain - especially back pain. The thing is, you don't want to have people go through the risks of surgery just to open them up and do nothing and have them as a control group. Also, if you did open a person up and not perform the surgery, any doctor looking at the X-rays could immediately tell that the procedure was not performed, so no double-blind studies. So, a lot of surgical procedures are not exposed to the gold standard of scientific medicine, the double-blind control group study.
He spent another hour debugging the problem then turned to his interviewer and said
The interviewer just sat there, hands folded, watching the guy for an hour while the candidate debugged the code?
I would agree that you're in bad need of facts.
Here you go, fresh hot facts to whack your noodle!
A study that shows that "The United States has by far the most expensive health care system in the world". The US is spending per capita is $4,178, while the next runner up is Switzerland at $2,794. That's a whole 1/3rd cheaper!
This article says that the US ranked 37th in a WHO effort to rank health care systems, whereas socialist France was ranked #1, Italy #2.
"The U.S. health care delivery system is by far the costliest on the planet, but comparison studies consistently show Americans get second-rate results by nearly every benchmark.
Here's another article: "But for most all the rest of us, measured by all basic health care outcomes, from infant mortality rates to life expectancy, the United States has steadily fallen from number one in the world to the back of the pack of industrialized nations. The World Health Organization now ranks the U.S. health care system in 42nd place compared to all other countries."
You're not really trying, are you?
*facepalm*!
It's been a long day...
OK, so if it wasn't Linux killing Sun, but rather commodity hardware killing Sun, what were people running on that commodity hardware?
How do you "see" this? Every other industrialized nation has some form of socialized medicine, whether it's single payer or government run hospitals. By any measurement, they all have better outcomes and spend less money than we do.