Believe it or not, but the field of optical illusions is still quite active. Here’s one of the newest ones by an digital artist jagarikin. The circles are spinning in place, but not moving or changing sizes. The arrows inside the circles is what makes it appear to be moving.
Here’s a good write-up of the effect called the Phi phenomenon.
Here are some more phi phenomenon effects he created that use color cycling:
Check out more of jagarikin’s work here.
At Star Wars: Galaxy Edge, you can build your own light saber at Savi’s Workshop. After being closed (likely due to union contract issues, not earlier stated parts availability issues) Disney World’s build a light saber workshop experience appears to be back open.
2021 prices are a whopping $219+CA tax but the experience regularly books up well in advance so reservations are highly recommended. Tom Bricker gives us a great description of the experience if you want to read it. There’s also lots of youtube videos of the experience as well.
However, many have strongly debated if it is worth it. The Disney build-a-saber experience is more than just a light saber, you also get a bit of a show while creating it. But if you’re looking for a really high quality saber, the jury seems to indicate you should look elsewhere.
So, if you want a truly beautiful piece – where should one go? It turns out, there are several.
Sabertrio makes arguably the best sabers out there. Running in the $500-$1000 range, they will definitely cost you. Parts availability have recently been a problem. Scans of the site show a great number of sabers out of stock in 2021.
Saberforge also makes high quality sabers for a lower entry price. You can even buy scratch and dent parts bags and put together your own.
Check out this link if you want to see other saber makers out there – everything from cheap Hasbro’s to $2000 custom works of art.
I’m a big fan of movies and of visiting the very places where movies were shot. I always find it amazing to see or be in the very spot these iconic moments in film took place.
Many movies and famous scenes, however, took place on a sound stage or on a set that is usually simply destroyed as soon as the shooting is done to make room for the next production.
Enter Expedia who commissioned 3D floorplans for many famous movies such as The Shining, Goldfinger, Lost in Translation, Pretty Woman, and The Hangover. For places that actually exist, they also have links to how to reserve these very rooms.
Film and furniture also covered these layouts and even sells prints of some of them.
If you want to check out a similar artist’s work, check out Boryana Ilieva’s website Floorplan Croissant where you can buy her own water color creations of famous locations.
Do you enjoy those little brain teaser puzzles made out of wood, metal, nails, horseshoes, and other everyday objects?
Puzzle Master is an amazing website with all kinds of puzzles. Everything from simple $10 packs full of wire puzzles, up to multi-thousand dollar works of art. Give it a look.
And just like that programmer’s were replaced by machine learning and pressing tab.
GitHub Copilot is a development plugin that uses AI to auto-complete what you’re coding. The AI was trained using github projects as its learning source. You start coding, press tab, and it gives you a list of what it thinks you might want next based on what it matches you might be developing.
Nick Chapsas tries out a number of programming tasks from basic data structures, creating an API, a calculator, and even fully implemented fizzbuzz. It does *shockingly* well.
I think this is the next obvious level of auto-completion we’ve had for years. I bet it almost certainly will come to mainline development tools in the next 5 years. It does, however, bring up some interesting legal points if someone unknowingly auto-completes a blob of code from an GPL or closed source project. This treads the fine line of auto-generated code and downright copying. My guess is that using IP violation code scanning tools to detect problems will be even more important.
Journalist and anchorman Brian Williams signed off for the final time last night after 28 years with NBC. You can see his farewell from last night’s episode of The 11th Hour on MSNBC. We wish him the best in his retirement.
Over the years, Jimmy Fallon’s crew at The Tonight Show has had a lot of fun with Williams’ news footage, editing him word by word into popular rap songs.
These are genius (warning: some explicit lyrics).
NoEnd House is an amature creepy-pasta short story from a few years back. It tells of a haunted house that has 6 progressively scarier rooms. Supposedly nobody who has made it to room six has ever been seen again.
The short story has a great premise, but many argue that Channel Zero’s version is an even better telling of the story. The six part series starts with them finding out about the haunted house and taking a visit. What happens next is some good story telling, but I thought the final chapters were a bit weaker than the first ones. The first few episodes are definitely worth a watch.
On a tangent, I think this is what Hollywood should be doing these days: taking promising but flawed ideas and working them into great ones. I understand why studios rehash tried and true IP’s like Star Trek, Star Wars, Marvell, etc. They always sell. But it doesn’t demonstrate any real talent to try and reboot old classics with tropey time travel, alternate universe takes, harmful revisionist cannons, or even political/social agendas. Most of the time they only succeeded in ruining critical themes, diluting, damaging, and turning classics into distasteful cash grabs. Lets wake up here Hollywood – there’s lots of great ideas out there if you have the eyes to see them.
Cassini mission to Saturn has to be one of the most amazing space adventures that has happened in my lifetime. I’m a huge fan of Saturn – from it’s hexagonal polar storms, to its rings, to its incredible moons. I would hang on every new picture that came from the mission. However, the below shot is one of the best of the lot.
Read more about the picture, the different planets you can see in it, as well as download the full-sized 90mb tiff version here: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia17172-the-day-the-earth-smiled
I loved the movie Home Alone. What if it was made today…
Now mid-career, I have been doing some math and adjustments to my retirement planning. One question that always gets asked is ‘When can I retire?’. This first boils down to ‘How much money do I need to have to retire’ (then in what ways can I arrange/distribute that money in a tax/minimal penalty way)
You read a lot about FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) folks that are ‘retiring’ in their 30’s. I say ‘retiring’ in quotes because it’s not your traditional retirement. The idea is that you carefully examine and reduce expenses to the point you are saving up to 70% of your income, and then retiring when your expenses reach the return on savings/investment. While there are variants, many folks are retiring on around $1M (or even less) in the 30’s to 40’s.
As a frugal person myself, I have been intrigued by the FIRE movement, but often found their calculations and assumptions to be very optimistic. Aggressive FIRE calculations work well in low-inflationary, 8% return markets we’ve had for the last 20 years. They do much worse in high inflation and lower returning markets that are being predicted the next 5-10 years.
Enter Brian Fry, a certified financial planner, who ran a bunch of interesting simulations to give you a much more realistic set of values if you want to retire at certain ages to ensure income well into retirement. I found his assumptions (listed in the artcle) to be MUCH more realistic than the $1M and retire numbers that I often see come out of FIRE calculations.