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.
Is Intel’s fab strategy a good idea? AMD exec thinks not
I am putting this up as a different take on Intel’s recent strategy. I found the comment interesting since it’s a company that has gone the completely opposite direction. Time will tell who is right. 🙂
Asked at the Canalys EMEA Forum 2023 if Intel can succeed [on it’s fab-focused strategy], Darren Grasby, exec VP for strategic partnerships and president of AMD EMEA, replied emphatically: “Of course not.”
He hinted that the decision to embrace contract manufacturing could be a turn that Intel might come to regret.
“Intel has gone down these paths,” he said, “and if you think about the journey of AMD we had our own fabs many years ago and we chose to go fabless, and it was the turning point of the company that allowed us to invest those R&D dollars into the roadmap, and they’re the roadmaps that are bringing that product and leading edge technology to market today.”
Hidreley Diao let curiosity get the best of him and he ask AI to render many animated household names in flesh and blood. He used Photoshop, FaceApp, Gradiente and Remini to create somewhat realistic images of well-known cartoon characters.
Animator Nikita Diakur thought it would be safer to have a digital stand-in do a backflip after he failed to do a backflip in real life. Maximilian Schneider helped him use machine learning tech to create a photorealistic avatar of himself, use a voice simulator trained for 15 minutes on his actual voice, wire the voice to the mesh on his face, and a few other techniques from the paper Deep Mimic. He then tried to train the avatar.
It’s an interesting way to tell a story – especially when he puts the avatar into his tiny apartment and proceeds to virtually receive what would be numerous serious head traumas, bone breaking collisions, and likely tons of broken furniture.
A local paper, the Journal Courier, did a pretty interesting piece on the increasing drug problems on the Oregon coast. It turns out, the CJNG cartel from Mexico has been doing a heavy drug trade in more and more rural and coastal Oregon towns – even leaving a grisly warning for those who might talk.
Say hello to Gaussian splatting. It allows high quality, realtime rendering of scenes captured from multiple photos or videos.
Gaussian Splatting is a rendering technique that can produce extremely high quality rendering at very high frame rates. It uses a novel new technique who’s closest cousin is probably photogrammetry. Photogrammetry has been around for awhile (taking many 2D pictures of an object from many different directions and then re-building a 3D object). 3D Gaussian Splatting takes this much further.
Gaussian Splatting starts with lots of pictures like photogrammetry, but it then converts the data into a point cloud. The points become gaussians with are then used by the rendering routine.
Take a collection of photographs or extremely high quality renderings from a number of different camera positions all around the environment. The individual points from each of the photos becomes gaussians in 3D space.
The gaussians are not correct for rendering, so you must run a training pass over them much like a 1 layer neural net – but with special properties like densification and pruning.
From your camera position, projecting the gaussian points back into the 2D plane based on camera
Sort by depth
Iterate over each gaussian for a given pixel and sum the contribution.
This trained set can then be rendered from any angle.
Update 11/2023: There’s also a way of handling animated objects via 4D Gaussian splatting.
Over four decades more than $9 billion in tax dollars were spent on fish conservation in the Columbia River basin.
Research headed by William Jaeger from the OSU College of Agricultural Sciences analyzed 50 years of data to answer the basic question: Is there any evidence of an overall boost in wild fish abundance that can be linked to the totality of the recovery efforts?
The study from Oregon State University shows that all these efforts have not resulted in a notable increase in wild salmon and steelhead populations in the Columbia River Basin. In fact, of all the many different conservation efforts, all the salmon and steelhead population growth can be attributed to one source: hatcheries.
The actual impact of all of these [individual conservation] efforts has always been poorly understood. One of the issues is that most studies evaluating restoration efforts have examined individual projects for specific species, life stages, or geographic areas, which limits the ability to make broad inferences at the basin level.
The role of hatcheries in recovery plans is controversial for many reasons, but results do indicate that hatchery production combined with restoration spending is associated with increases in returning adult fish. However, we found that adult returns attributable to spending and hatchery releases combined do not exceed what we can attribute to hatcheries alone.
It’s another example in Oregon’s sadly long list of feel-good measures and huge tax spending programs that failed to provide the promised results. This is very disappointing not only because of the wasted money, but because a great number of the conservation groups that lobbied for these programs have told us their science showed the expensive efforts would improve fish populations. It turns out they were wrong about both their science and policies.
Traditionally, AI narrators and voices have limitations. Early generated voices were barely good enough for simple one phrase statements. For longer text, they tend to be very flat/monotone and have bad pacing to the point of being very painful to listen too for any extended period of time. While this is still somewhat the case, this version is much improved.
I personally love combining my workouts/hikes/drives with audiobooks – and having a new free source of good material is great.
The book selection obviously are works in the public domain, but that includes lots of classics – such as some of my favorites: Edwardian and Victorian ghost stories.
