Ocean’s 11 is an amazing movie – one of my favorites. It has a fantastic style and creates a unique feel and atmosphere. Besides the fun, unique, energetic soundtrack by David Holmes, it has a really slick visual style that really accentuates the characters. CinemaStix shows how Steven Soderbergh uses a series of seemingly simple shot and cut decisions to enhance the actors’ unique energy to create the rhythm of the movie.
It’s surprising how much of a movie’s feel comes from simple choices in how it is cut (or not cut) . I can appreciate it because I know that a ton of the feel of my landscape photos comes during the post and editing phase.
Quantum Solar System (QSS) features miniature replica planets that float and orbit around the Sun using magnetic levitation technology.
Some of the neat features:
The positions of the planets are in real time, synchronized with NASA.
You can position the planets at any date: Past, Present or Future. For example, you could observe the position of the planets at any historical date in the past or in any astronomical event of the future.
You can observe the evolution of the orbits in a shortened time. Ex: you can convert 6 days into 1 second to speed up the movement of the planets.
If you want to relax watching the movement of the planets, you can move all the planets at the same time and at the same speed, in this way all the planets move maintaining their position relative to each other, it is as if the platform rotated on itself.
The Sun is a lamp. Sunlight will illuminate the planets.
One of the big reasons for Google and others web services to develop their own custom chips is that general purpose CPUs are flexible but typically need a lot of power. That power costs a lot of money in electricity bills and cooling costs in huge data centers. So, why buy chips with lots of stuff you don’t need when you can build your own – and save millions of dollars a year in a data center with lower cooling and power costs?
In just a 6 years, Google has managed to design and build 4 ever increasingly capable AI data center chips. They had somewhat humble beginnings – but they are becoming increasingly powerful. Now they have just published information about TPU version 4.
a nearly 10x leap forward in scaling ML system performance over TPU v3
boosting energy efficiency ~2-3x compared to contemporary ML DSAs, and
reducing CO2e as much as ~20x over these DSAs in typical on-premise data centers
Even crazier, it’s the first system to use purely optical switching.
TPU v4 is the first supercomputer to deploy a reconfigurable OCS (optical circuit switching). OCSes dynamically reconfigure their interconnect topology and are much cheaper, lower power, and faster than Infiniband. The figure below shows how an OCS works, using two MEMs arrays. No optical to electrical to optical conversion or power-hungry network packet switches are required, saving power.
Bring anyplace in the world into your game in about 5 minutes – including the 3D buildings. Using the Cesium plugin, you can bring Google Maps data into Unreal Engine in just a few minutes.
This guy is a little over-energetic, but it’s pretty clear instructions on how to do it as well as improve the look and feel of the import.
This is probably the best arrangement of the song “Pure Imagination” sung by Gene Wilder in the 1971 movie Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. Here it is performed in 2017 as the morning wake-up call for the Jersey Surf professional marching band. The sublime harmonics of the euphoniums, balance of the horns, and acoustics is absolutely magical. If I was woken up to this, I would think I was waking up in heaven.
Man, this thing has taken off. There were videos taken from both sides as it turns out. Left side and Right side (original). This person combines the two so you get them in stereo!
Update Nov 2023:
Here’s another version that was taken in 2023. The trumpet chokes a bit, but the rest is perfect.
