Farming revolution is not being televised
Autonomous cars are getting all the press, but there is an even more disruptive side to self-driving vehicles that will almost certainly come first – autonomous farming.
Imagine running a farm completely from your study? Sending fleets of tractors and harvesters to work 24-7 without a single human setting foot in the field. They can be timed to plant, harvest, or plow when conditions are optimal. Be monitored remotely by camera and even be driven remotely.
They could be combined with small drones or robots that are able to do fine labor – like weeding without damaging the plants and using a minimal amount of chemicals:
This isn’t just about reducing labor efforts – it’s actually a potentially huge jump in productivity and capital outlay as well. Imagine fields that can be analyzed and automatically planted based on market conditions, soil conditions – all to maximize profit and production.
It could radically reduce costs and environmental impact of chemicals used to feed, weed, and protect by insecticides. Imagine a machine that could drive over a field – targetting weeds and plants and give it exactly the right amount of insecticides, feed, and weed killer on an individual level.
This technology is not science fiction – it’s here in prototypes now. It should become ubiquitous in the next decade or two. Here’s a good overview of what’s coming and already in development
Chasing Lights in the Himalayas
Filmmakers Robin Pogorzelski and Simon Bourrat were in Nepal working on the documentary “Everest Green” and shot this short film in their free time. It’s packed with beautifully lit and composed vignettes – truly beautiful and worth a watch.
Emergence by Universal Everything
Universal Everything’s latest interactive visual experiment. You control a character standing in the midst of thousands, each of whom reacts to your movements while you remain an individual.
How easy it is to make anyone say anything now
More proof that seeing is NOT believing.
I’ve posted numerous research papers that show how easy it is to make videos do what you’d like. How to take snippets of voices and make people say whatever you’d like. We can even now make people do dances on video they can’t do in real life. How easy is this to do? Deep fakes are shockingly easy as it turns out and only needs a few savy folks to make one.
Here’s the latest example where former US president Obama is made to say whatever the actor behind them wants.
Quick hyperlapse of 2018 Burning Man art
My stay at Gold Butte Fire Watchtower
Here’s a little video clip from the afternoon that turned really windy. View was very obstructed due to all the smoke from wildfires. Air quality was actually listed as hazardous – so I didn’t get out much this day.
Getting dressed in the 1700’s
What a great series!
The National Museums Liverpool has some great videos. One set of them involved getting dressed in 18th century garb. We’ve all seen period movies. Now you can see how actors, and the original nobelmen/women of that era dressed.
Here’s what men wore and how they dressed:
Now, if you thought getting dressed as a 18th century gentleman was complex. Try being a 18th century lady. Bonus points for explaining the old nursery rhyme ‘Lucy Locket lost her pocket’, but others suggest it had a more tawdry meaning.
Your first game
Time for me to shake my fist and tell you darn kids to get off my lawn. Lets set the wayback machine to the 1980’s…
Ralph Koster shares the first video game he ever wrote as well as a great flashback to what almost everyone that wanted to learn to program did back in the 80’s and 90’s. We typed in long programs by hand from books we got at the library and computer magazines. We taught ourselves BASIC and smatterings of assembly. If you were really cool, you even tried to sell your games: which was done by copying them to a floppy, printing a dot-matrix label for it, and trying to sell it in a ziplock baggie.
I started by fiddling around with the programs I typed in to see if I could change them or make them do different things.
My very first video ‘game’ on my TSR-80 consisted of a bunch of black and white dots that would fall down from the top of the screen, and you moved your dot ‘ship’ back and forth to avoid them as the enemies rained down. They came down one at a time. Ridiculously slowly. But it was probably my very first ‘game’.
My second, more ‘real’ game was a castle adventure game. You were the sole heir of a long-lost uncle and had to search his castle to find the deed within 24 hours. It was a text adventure at its heart, but there was opening graphics. I even wrote my own graphics editor with which I drew those opening screens. I believe I still have the graph paper I used.
Anyway, for anyone who learned to program in the 80’s, Koster’s video will tug some familiar heartstrings. For you younger kids, this is how it was done back in the day…
Signed Distance Fields
Signed distance field rendering is a technique used in Team Fortress 2, and documented by Chris Green of Valve in the SIGGRAPH 2007 paper Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects. It allows you to render bitmap fonts without jagged edges even at high magnifications. This article describes how to implement the technique in libgdx.