Shogyo Mujo
“Shogyo Mujo” is a giant traveling art installation. It’s a projection mapped art project skull that appeared at Adobe MAX BASH, Siggraph 2015. Developed by BARTKRESA design and Josh Harker.
Japanese bishops and pastoral care in modern times
The Vatican recently sent out a questionnaire to all the Catholic bishops around the world. The questionnaire asked some direct questions about views on marriage and the family. The answers from Japan were particularly interesting. After all, Japanese Catholics represent only about 0.35 percent of the country’s population.
The most amazing observation, however, came during the question about couples cohabiting before marriage (something almost 100% common in Japan). They observed, “The pastoral practice of the Church must begin from the premise that cohabitation and civil marriage outside the church have become the norm.
In developing a pastoral orientation, it is perhaps important to recall that the only time in the gospels that Jesus clearly encounters someone in a situation of cohabitation outside of marriage (the Samaritan woman at the well) he does not focus on it,” they state. “Instead, he respectfully deals with the woman and turns her into a missionary.”
This observation was as spirit-filled a response as I could have imagined. Instead of a pastoral stance which would beat others up and taken a hard-line approach – preaching and admonishing – they took their observations straight from Christ himself. Christ called out the woman’s situation clearly and truthfully, but he treated her with respect and love as the same time.
It’s a reminder that a pastoral response calls a spade a spade, but never loses sight of the beauty and worth of every human life.
http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/japanese-bishops-vatican-mindset-doesnt-fit-asian-church
Eric Standley’s amazing laser-cut paper sculptures
Eric Standley uses hundreds of layers of laser-cut paper to create these unbelievable works of art.
Tsugargu Shamisen Girls
What do you do if you’re classically trained on the centuries old shamisen – but want to rock like the young people you are?
The Tsugargu Shamisen Girls show you.
I’ll be talking at the Intel BUZZ workshop in San Francisco
I’ll be doing the talk on Intel’s Graphics Performance Analyzer this Thursday in San Francisco! Perhaps I’ll see some of you there?
Machine Learning and you
Recently I took the Coursera Machine Learning course from Stanford and got to implement a lot of these kinds of algorithms (HIGHLY recommend the course). This guy took it a step or two further and added some clever visualizations and additional training tricks. Very good work – especially considering it was done by a seaming amateur implementer.
It’s fascinating how we can now write small neural nets like this and very quickly train our computers to do work not only as good as us, but in growing numbers of cases, better than the BEST humans in the world could do. The implications are staggering…and somewhat disconcerting. What happens when we have enough compute and enough data that our racks of machine learning systems can do all the analysis and optimization of every facet of our society? What does that leave us to do, and how does our economic system work when many of these thinking jobs go away?
While this has been argued all the way back to the industrial revolution, there is some growing work by more respected people that we are turning a tipping point (http://www.businessinsider.com/technology-is-destroying-jobs-and-it-could-spur-a-global-crisis-2015-6). Or more interestingly, do we go through another era much like the industrial revolution in which broad swaths of the population become cogs in a bigger machine until we re-adjust. Much food for thought and social rumination…
Hololens and Minecraft kill it at E3
Microsoft nails it with the Hololens on Minecraft. Great work guys!
Samsung’s Ingenious See-through Trucks
Leo Burnett, a designer for Samsung’s Argentinian corporate office, comes up with this brilliant idea to promote road safety.
Bremerhaven’s Black Hole
What happens when you mix water slides and led lights? Awesomeness. This is what:
Goonies 30th Anniversary in Astoria, OR
I took the hour trip out to Astoria, Oregon where the Goonies was filmed – 30 years ago this month. I went to all the usual sites and got my picture taken with the original Fratelli’s ORV.
