If the 90’s and 2000’s belonged to the geek – the world now, and will, belong to the designer and creator.
Even 10 years ago, convincing visual effects were relegated to super expensive, high end development houses, programmers with Phd’s, and blockbuster movie budgets. Now, you can achieve things impossible 10 years ago – using a lot of creativity and free tools like Blender. Check out this somewhat frantic talk by Ian Hubert on the crazy and almost free ways he creates effects using free software that were impossible just a few years ago.
Traveling through hyperspace ain’t like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that’d end your trip real quick, wouldn’t it?
Han Solo – Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
Moving to Vulcan and DirectX 12 isn’t like going from DX9 to DX11, or Opengl 3.0 to OpenGL 4.0. These new API’s add quite a bit of work that used to be done by the graphics driver. This gives devs more control, but it also makes things a lot more tricky.
Microsoft has generated a good set of videos to teach some of the unique and tricky parts of DirectX12 to those with some graphics background. These videos help teach a number of tricky topics and usages that aren’t immediately apparent by reading the docs.
Conservative rasterization:
Presentation modes in Windows 10
This video has terrible audio quality, but it does a great job covering the various flip modes and delays that they introduce:
Resource Barriers:
This is one of the big concepts that trips you up and causes a lot of confusion.
I love the feel they got from this shooting technique – and think they’re really onto something.
Check out this great little video shot at a quaint bowling alley (Bryant Lake Bowl and Theater) in Minneapolis. Features some excellent and innovative drone-based camera movement.
Soon to be seen in rap videos near you? How about a 165″ diagonal screen TV that folds up and hides under the floor when not in use? If you’d like one, C SEED’s television will only set you back $400,000.
One should be cautious as this video is clearly just rendered – it’s not video of a real thing. Also, it’s actually 6 panels that fold together.
This kind of design isn’t new. The common problems are doing a really good job at hiding the seams between panels (maybe they can use colored led’s to help fill the crack?). History has shown the hardest part of these kinds of displays are balancing the brightness and colors between the panels – especially as the display panels age.
A guy takes an electric skateboard, creates a simple frame to make the carpet surface, gets his Aladdin costume all set, and takes you on a magic carpet ride.
There is a making of video that showed they used an original Boosted Board. Maybe this will be my next Halloween costume?
However, in the age of covid and social distancing, maybe we need to try out some of his ideas for confession during this Lent. Things like the ‘mass confessions’ could be interesting…
We know that if you talk after having inhaled helium, your voice goes up because of the lighter air density of helium vs nitrogen. But what about playing a wind instrument after inhaling helium?
Turns out the answer is yes – and comedically so.
Swing along to 14:45 to see the bagpipe action. (Recorder at 6:50, Saxaphone at 7:55)
Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from the Harvard Medical School, was a profound and prophetic woman. She is famous for addressing congress, her own medical profession, and culture at large. In one visit to congress, she laid out her feelings quite clearly:
I am at once a physician, a citizen and a woman, and I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged and the planned have the right to live.
Who were these expendable human lives? The unborn – and as time has shown – especially African American unborn. When Roe v. Wade was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1973, Dr. Jefferson was outraged. She saw the decision not only as a direct assault upon the unborn, but also upon the ethics of her profession. She later told the U.S. Congress that the decision “gave my profession an almost unlimited license to kill.”
Her words have proved prophetic – especially for African Americans. The CDC reports that 619,591 abortions occured in 2018 (most recent data) and has a breakdown that has stayed fairly consistent year over year:
White
Black
Hispanic
Other
Abortions
135,328
117,626
70,195
26,975
Abortion rate (per 1000 women of same ethnic group)
This is also true even after you control for income and compare with all other ethnic minorities that experience discrimination – but still have much lower abortion rates. A fact that even the press struggles to find answers for, and some groups try to hide by saying the overall percentage of black abortions is less than white women (completely ignoring the fact that the black population in the US is more than 3 times smaller).
So, if you are interested in saving black lives – then the biggest silencer of their voices is abortion. This should make us want to ask some hard questions about policy, players, and the groups, that appear to be targeting unborn black lives – more than any other minority.
