world_of_engineering_75 shares this experience of 5D theatre. It has real fire effects that make you feel like the theater’s on fire. There’s very little information about where this highly dangerous attraction is located – but it is supposedly somewhere in China.
While somewhat cool – it’s realistic enough to be terrifying as fire often flashes over like this right before almost certain death for anyone in the room.
Fascinating Horror is a YouTube channel that tells the true stories behind real life disasters. It’s not a channel for the faint of heart as he covers some of history’s greatest disasters that often resulted in tremendous, and often terrifying, loss of life. If you ever wanted to know why OSHA exists, concert and sporting arena designs and safety crews are present, fire regulations, occupancy limits, building codes, and other government controls are in place at any place where people gather – this channel will show you why they say “Safety regulations are written in blood”
Eatch has created a complete robotic kitchen that can cook up to 5000 meals a day – completely unaided. And the meals it makes are not simple, fast food type meals or all the same kind. It is able to cook complex, healthy meals from fresh ingredients. Steak and asparagus, vegetable and shrimp dishes, curry and Indian dishes, rice and vegetables. It not only cooks them, but also dishes them up, cleans itself, and can cook up more.
The fellow from the Map Reading Company channel did something that I tried during my Mazamas mountaineering courses. He tried to find a video or document that described all the different markings, rulers, and parts of a standard baseplate compass and how to actually use them.
It turns out that he found what I found – a solid guide and explanation of all the parts didn’t exist. Even on the compass company websites. So he made this excellent video that shows how to use the different parts to set bearings, navigate, determine slopes, and use all the other hidden tools the compass provides you.
It’s worth stating that just having a compass and a map will do you no good unless you know how to use them. It’s like having a car but not knowing how to drive it. It is just as useless as not having one – or maybe even more dangerous if you use it wrong.
“I have a maps app on my cell phone” is something you read all the time from people that get lost and need to be rescued in Oregon. Why? Because it is surprisingly common to get into a spot with no signal or not enough signal to download the map. Some apps try to re-download the map every time you open it and greet you with a blank screen until it can re-acquire signal. Something you often don’t learn until too late – far in the wilderness. Beyond cell coverage, some canyon/bottom areas/cliff areas do not even have reliable GPS device coverage. Electronics have batteries that run out after you spend a few hours lost and using them – let alone more than a day or two. I lost a device when it started raining/snowing and the electronics got just wet enough to stop working/screen fogged up until it was dried out. Electronic devices can be dropped in water, or destroyed if you fall/drop it. Additionally, a surprising number of lost hikers don’t even have the basic navigation skills to understand where they are and how to get somewhere safely with a digital device or map.
Click this youtube link below to see his great video on baseplate compasses:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVf0v0TqoOg
His youtube channel also has lots of other videos about bearings, navigation on slopes/rough terrain/around obstacles, timing/pacing, etc that are definitely worth checking out.
Stavros decided to make a little e-ink display device that showed his outlook calendar and could sit next to his main monitor. He seemed to have a decent, basic understanding of programming, but had some clever ways of getting around things he didn’t know – namely – using CoPilot and sample code to hack together what he needed. I think it’s a great read to show how you can work through problems in a very pragmatic way – without re-inventing the wheel.
In the end, he struggled through finding a good quality e-ink display, an SDK that let him display on it consistently (running into many bad SDK’s and ones that left lots of artifacts), getting calandar graphics on the device, and 3d printing the case it was mounted in.
Most interesting to me was that instead of trying to interface with his calendar app and go through the difficult work of re-creating a properly formatted/sized and good looking calendar graphics – he came up with a much more simple and easy method. He admits he wasn’t very good at C++ programming and had some false starts trying to find a software package that let him render consistently to the display. There were many that didn’t work right, left lots of lines on the screen, etc.
He then took his C++ compiler and a block of framebuffer rendering sample code. Then, with the help of CoPilot, he stumbled through a method that simply displaying the calendar in a web browser, copy the screen, download the image file over HTTP, and copy the bytes directly onto the framebuffer.
He set up a sever-side script to generate the image along with a hash of the image so the device knew when an actual update happened to the image since he didn’t want the e-ink display constantly flashing if it didn’t have a real update for the display.
A clever bit of hackery – and demonstrates how simply things can be made if you are creative.
Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) produce some pretty beautiful renderings. A little like photogrammetry, it utilizes objects placed in a multi-dimensional volume (as captured from multiple viewpoints) and then when you want to render it from a particular angle, shoots rays into the scene based on camera location and queries the volume in order to get a screen coordinate pixel color at that location.
It does suffer from some shortcomings – such as largely only working well on static scenes, has trouble when there is missing or occluded portions, and most notably renders objects that lack fine details or produces blobby geometry common to volumetric rendering techniques.
But it doesn’t stop people from trying. Zip-NeRF is an example where these Google scientists demonstrate how ideas from rendering and signal processing yield better error rates and trains dramatically faster than previous techniques.
It’s always interesting to see what new things people are trying out these days.
Disturbing rise of colon cancer rates in young people
A study published in March by the American Cancer Society noted that that in 2023, 13% of the 153,000 people in the United States diagnosed with colorectal cancer would be among people under 50 — representing an almost 10 percent increase in cases in this age group since 2020.
There is a lot of speculation as to causes: obesity, binge drinking, increase in sugary drinks, changes in gut bacteria. Eating healthier diets (fruits/vegs over processed meats), maintaining a healthy weight, stop smoking, stop drinking, and especially early colonoscopy screening can save your life.
Welcome to the “Galactic Menagerie,” a whimsical and visually stunning fan-made AI generated fake trailer that reimagines the classic Star Wars universe through the eccentric lens of Wes Anderson. This mashup brings together iconic Star Wars characters with Anderson’s trademark symmetrical compositions, pastel color palettes, and quirky humor.
I’d ride in this 2024 Lexus LM any day of the week. Full lay down seats, widescreen TV? It’s about as close to a rolling living room as I’ve ever seen – or maybe it’s a rolling movie thee-aye-tur.