I think we forget the amazing collections of historical artifacts we have on the internet. The limitations of Covid has left me doing a lot of traveling and bucket list visits to famous places via Youtube and online streamers.
I started looking up filming locations for a favorite movie of mine – The Grand Budapest Hotel. Pre-soviet eastern block countries had amazing architecture. In my searching, it turns out Wes Anderson tried to capture the feel for the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel from old Photochrom prints.
The Photochrom Print Collection is available for free from the Library of Congress and has thousands of early prints of European and North American images from the 1890’s to 1910’s.
It makes me wonder what amazing artistic creations people can make using just the free resources we have at our fingertips today – plus some imagination.
Paper sculptures and art have become quite amazing as of late. Laser cutters have made some pretty interesting creations possible. Now there’s a new book by Gingko Press called Paperists: Infinite Possibilities in Paper Artthat covers a lot of the different methods artists are using.
Do you feel you were robbed because you were born too early to catch Pink Floyd live concerts? Brit Floyd is probably the closest you’ll ever get to experiencing them live. The sound is nearly perfect. I hope I can see them.
Staying on top of the latest shows, music, bands, plays, and events in your area often involves digging around on lots of venue sites. It’s time consuming and error prone. I definitely have missed some of my favorites when they came into town – only to hear about the show a month later.
Besides the really cool app NearHear that finds local shows within a radius of you, Portland Theater website also offers a very comprehensive list of shows so you don’t have to dig around on various venue websites only to find out the show you wanted to go to was sold out days ago.
As the story goes, Martin Newell needed a simple mathematical model of a familiar object. His wife suggested modelling their tea set since they were sitting down for tea at the time. He sketched the teapot free-hand using graph paper and a pencil. Following that, he went back to the computer laboratory and edited bézier control points on a Tektronix storage tube, again by hand.
The teapot shape contained a number of elements that made it ideal for the graphics experiments of the time: it was round, contained saddle points, had a genus greater than zero because of the hole in the handle, could project a shadow on itself, and could be displayed accurately without a surface texture.
The good news is that that now you can own your own. The original teapot was made by the German company Friesland. Apparently they were not aware of how famous their teapot had become, but restarted production – even giving it the ‘Utah’ name.
If you want to own your own Friesland Teekanne 1,4l Weiß Utah Teapot – just go to their website and order one today! The original teapot was the white 1.4L model – but other sizes and colors are available.
Update Jan 2024:
A great tragedy. It appears the Friesland factory that made the teapots was destroyed in a major fire.
On June 29, 2023, decades of German porcelain history and tradition were destroyed during a major fire on our company premises. For this reason, we are unfortunately unable to supply you with any of our old series pieces . It was simply: EVERYTHING was destroyed .
However, we are looking forward optimistically and are doing everything we can to build a new factory at the old Varel location . Parts of our popular series Jeverland white, Ecco and La Belle as well as the Walküre series Alta and NYNY are already partially available again.
I sent them an email and asked if they would have the teapots back in stock. There is no eta on when it, or any of their legacy series, will ever come back. Here was their response:
From: Service | Frieslandversand.de Date: Jan 5, 2024, 12:43 AM
Dear Mr. Fife,
[Until now] we don`t know when this year we are able to deliver the teapots. Until now we don`t have a production here after the great fire in June and we are making test at other sites in Germany for the production of these articles.
But nVidia is late to the game. Meet the king of 90’s graphics! The BitchinFast 3D 2000! There’s even a great video review of this fictional monster along with a Bungholiomarks test run. I give this guy full credit for taking this card to the max.
It even came with a great advertisement that touted it’s amazing Bungholio marks scores.
The song isn’t particularly catchy, but filmmaker Adam Chitayat collected thousands of Google Maps Street View images which he used to build a music video for the track Out Sailing.
Cassie the robot is no Usain Bolt, but did established a Guinness World Record for the fastest 100 meters by a bipedal robot. The historic time of 24.73 seconds was achieved by starting from a standing position and returning to that position after the sprint with no falls. Though staying in your lane was apparently optional.
Cassie was invented at the Oregon State University College of Engineering and produced by Agility Robotics. This achievement was accomplished through robot learning and almost a year of simulation, condensed down to a matter of weeks.
Last week, Swiss software engineer Matthias Bühlmann discovered that the popular image synthesis model Stable Diffusion could compress existing 2D images with fewer visual artifacts than JPEG or WebP at high compression ratios, though there are some important limitations.
When Stable Diffusion analyzes and “compresses” images into weight form, they reside in what researchers call “latent space,” which is a way of saying that they exist as a sort of fuzzy potential that can be realized into images once they’re decoded. With Stable Diffusion 1.4, the weights file is roughly 4GB, but it represents knowledge about hundreds of millions of images.
While most people use Stable Diffusion with text prompts, Bühlmann cut out the text encoder and instead forced his images through Stable Diffusion’s image encoder process, which takes a low-precision 512×512 image and turns it into a higher-precision 64×64 latent space representation. At this point, the image exists at a much smaller data size than the original, but it can still be expanded (decoded) back into a 512×512 image with fairly good results.
Bühlmann’s method currently comes with significant limitations. It’s not good with faces or text, and in some cases, it can inject detail features in the decoded image that were not present in the source image. (You probably don’t want your image compressor inventing details in an image that don’t exist.) Also, decoding requires the 4GB Stable Diffusion weights file and extra decoding time that are inherent with Stable Diffusion.
Some adults share things they think teens aren’t ready to hear – but it is actually some solid advice for all ages. Do you have some of your own to add?
Social media is not reality and your entire life should not revolve around it.
Everything you’re doing now as a teenager will be utterly cringe to your children.
You won’t feel different when you’re older, or have kids. You’ll just be you – it’s just weird
Today’s eyebrows are tomorrow’s clown makeup
In 15 years you’re going to think kids have gone too far and they’re going to think you’re old fashioned
Getting good at stuff will take time. Sometimes a lot of time. And sometimes you’ll spend lots of time on somethinig and you still won’t get good at it. That’s the human experience. Some things you struggle with will come very easily for other but some things they struggle with will be very easy to you. Don’t be made someone else possesses a skill you don’t, and don’t be a jerk for possessing skills many others don’t.
Nobody wants to hear whatever TikTok you’re watching. Buy some damn headphones.
Being controversial isn’t the same as being interesting.
School has a system for keeping you from falling behind. Life does not.
Just because you f*-ed something up does NOT mean you’re a f*-up
Things will likely take significantly longer to achieve than you think.
“Life is not like a video game where you just keep leveling up. Sometimes the thing you built will fall apart and you will have to repeatedly do the same thing over and over. However, don’t beat yourself up about it – this is normal. With experience you will also become more adept at facing and resolving problems, so each time the same problem repeats you will be better at solving them.” – This one I sort of agree and disagree with. If you’re on a treadmill of repeated failures, especially failing the same way, then there’s probably a pattern there that needs to change.
Not everyone can be an internet sensation, somebody has to drive the dump truck.
One day you too will be old and uncool. It’ll happen faster than you think.
Just because it’s new to you doesn’t mean it’s new.
As you get older you just keep realizing how dumb you were last year.
That heartache you’re going through? It consumes everything now but it will be nothing but a footnote in the future. You’ll rarely think about it later and when you do it won’t hurt you. It’s hard to hear that your pain isn’t the worst in the world when you’re feeling it, but it does help to know that it won’t mean as much as it does in this moment.
