Model maker Adam Throgmorton shows off an incredible build – a fully functioning, massively intricate HO-scale replica of an old-school wooden rollercoaster. He reports he worked on it over the course of 6 years.
I’m also going to bet he’s not married since it seems to have its own table in the house. 🙂
Australian photographer Murray Fredericks journeys to the center of Lake Eyre, a desert salt lake. Fredericks drags all of his equipment out into the barren landscape, capturing the dramatic sky reflected in both the inch-deep water and his rectangular mirror. The images are breathtaking color-based works.
Jack Johnson captured this stunning 4K flyover of Japan’s cherry blossom trees. With the help of an app called Litchi, he was able to repeat his drone’s flight path over time to show them gradually blossoming.
When the robot overlords take over, they will amuse themselves at our expense like this…
Ben Einstein does an excellent analysis of the failure of many smart gadget companies.
His analysis breaks down like this:
First generation products are always plagued with bugs, fail whales, and even the occasional mass-recall – most companies can bounce back from these setbacks. But other companies do not. It boils down to risk.
Technical Risk and Product Risk
When it comes to hardware startups, there are two types of risk. They are manageable on their own, but together often spell failure. These risks are:Â technical risk and product risk.
Technical risk is the chance you can’t deliver a product due to an engineering or manufacturing constraint. Examples from Coin: getting an e-Ink screen, Bluetooth antenna, battery, and microprocessor all working in a 0.76mm thick PVC card.
Product risk, however, is the risk that many overlook. Most products have low product risk. They routinely fail in small ways, but those failures are viewed as mere annoyances. A pop top that breaks off once every 1000 cans of Coke, the Roomba that occasionally misses a spot, an Alexa that mistranslates your command and you try again. Not big deals. But an automated door lock that fails might leave one stranded outside at 2am in a bad part of town or opens the door to robbers, a website that exposes your address and bank accounts for emptying, or your sole payment method that fails you at a fancy dinner are another matter.
You likely have high product risk if any of these are true:
The Goal:
Your goal then is to only have high risk in one of the two risk classifications. Very few companies that have both kinds of risk survive. Tesla and SpaceX are notable exceptions, which should give you an idea of the efforts you will need to go to in order to overcome these risks. The other method is to reduce your feature set to minimize technical complexity or lower user expectations in case of product failure.
When the robot overlords come, they will amuse themselves at our expense like this…
Sales Wick is a long haul pilot and photographer. He was piloting a massive 10+ hour overnight flight from Switzerland to Rio de Janeiro. The route takes them across the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean. While most people will be settling in for a night of sleep, he sets up his camera and captures this transcendent video. I won’t do it justice, so just read his words:
“(We go) …past the bright city light of the capital of Algeria towards the Sahara. Tonight will be a special night, since its one of the few nights every August where countless shooting stars will be seen all over the night sky. Deriving from the constellation of Perseus, these meteor showers will guide us through the night.
 Just as the bright city lights are vanishing behind us, the Milky way starts to become clearly visible up ahead. It’s now pacing us, at almost the speed of sound, along the invisible highway and the pitch-black night sky above this surreal landscape. Ahead of us are another eight hours flight time, but we already stopped counting the shooting stars. And we got already to a few hundred.”
If you ever doubt there is beauty in the world – watch this.
The Lion King video game has a notoriously difficult level. Known simply as ‘the monkey level’, some consider it one of the hardest levels in gaming. But did you know there’s a story behind its legendary difficulty?
In the 90’s, Blockbusters started to rent out video games in addition to films. However, unlike film studios, who got paid every time their films were rented, video game developers didn’t get a cut of the profits. So, a lot of the video game industry hated the rental industry and wanted to make sure their games could not be beaten in the rental period.
Disney, in particular, had studies and metrics. They determined that most players would not buy a game if they could beat some large percentage of it in a rental period. Disney told the developer of the Lion King, Westwood studios, to put some giant difficulty spike early in the game to intentionally halt player’s progress. The game was nearly complete and the final deadline was fast approaching. The monkey puzzle was the only thing they could quickly implement on such short notice.
Here’s a developer’s commentary on how it went down:
Tutorial for creating beautiful 3D geometry fields using Cinema 4D
Fast Topographies in Cinema4D Tutorial from Greyscalegorilla on Vimeo.