Dedwarmo

ColourLovers.com is a place to look at and create color pallettes. Fun.

Arthur Benjamin: Lightning calculation and other “Mathemagic”

In this video Arthur Benjamin calculates squares of 2, 3, and 4 digit numbers faster than you can do it on a calculator. I know. I tried to keep up while watching the video. Audience members give him their birthdate and he tells them what day of the week they were born. Wait until you see what he does for his grand finale.

From the Official Google Blog regarding the recent Italian court case that found Google executives guilty of violating the privacy of a student that was bullied on a video that had been uploaded to YouTube.

European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

I’ve been involved in a conversation at Bobmo.com* about agnosticism. This is what Bob has to say about the subject:

Coined by English biologist Thomas Huxley in 1860, the word agnostic has taken several forms over the years. Agnosticism typically addresses the knowledge of God’s existence, but most agnostics don’t stop there. They often take a position on the existence of objective truth as well. One agnostic will say, “I don’t know, but you don’t know either,” or, “I don’t know, and I can’t know. And, neither can anyone else.” Others say, “I don’t know now, but maybe some day there will be more evidence and I’ll know then.”

So I have a question for anyone who is an agnostic. How do you know that agnosticism is correct?

If you say, “Well, I don’t know,” then, why are you agnostic if you have no basis for it? Or maybe you say, “In the absence of any convincing evidence, agnosticism is the best position to take.” But how do you know that agnosticism is the best position to take in the absence of any convincing evidence? Where’s your evidence for that?

It seems that, no matter how you slice it, agnosticism is a claim to knowledge.

My question for Bob is this: If there is no justification for saying, “I don’t know”, then on what basis would anyone say, “I know”? Under what circumstances is one justified in saying, “I don’t know.” Maybe the correct position to take is one of silence. If you don’t know, then maybe you should remain silent.

*A question for agnostics. Here is the link to the article itself, but to get to the comments you have to go here.

I like to fool around with Blender, the 3D modeling and animation software. For the most part, in Blender you have to create your own content by sculpting and painting things from scratch. But what if you have a bunch of scientific data that you want to visualize? Evidently you can use VTK and other computer programs that are built upon it. I haven’t used VTK myself but it seems to be widely used in the scientific community.

The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is an open source graphics toolkit. It is a platform independent graphics engine with parallel rendering support. VTK has an active development community that includes laboratories, institutions and universities from around the world. VTK has several large collaborations between Kitware and national organizations such as Sandia National Labs, Los Alamos, and Livermore National Labs, who are using VTK as the foundation for their large data visualization research efforts. – Wikipedia.org

The scientist asks not what are the currently most important questions, but “which are at present solvable?” or sometimes merely “in which can we make some small but genuine advance?” As long as the alchemists merely sought the philosopher’s stone and aimed at finding the art of making gold, all their endeavors were fruitless; it was only when people restricted themselves to seemingly less valuable questions that they created chemistry. Thus natural science appears completely to lose from sight the large and general questions.

– Ludwig Boltzman (Taken from The Mind’s Sky by Timothy Ferris)

Watch CBS News Videos Online
Watch the 60 Minutes interview of James Cameron discussing his latest movie, Avatar.

I saw Avatar for the fifth time this weekend. This time I went with my friend, Henry, who wears glasses. I’ve heard people complain about having to wear the 3-D glasses over their regular glasses and having to deal with glare so I suggested that we see it in 2-D. For the most part I didn’t miss the 3-D, but there were a several places where I would love to have seen it. One was when Jake and some Na’vi warriors climb up in the Hallelujah Mountains to catch an ikran, the pterodactyl-like creatures. In one scene the warriors have to leap to a vine hanging hundreds or thousands of feet above the ground. In 3-D this shot induces vertigo as you see Jake leap out and grab the vine while the camera hovers out and above the empty space. Because of the depth the 3-D provides you feel like you can reach out and grab the vine right along with Jake. In 2-D it’s still a great scene, but it doesn’t have has much oomph. Other times where 3-D makes a scene pop are when there is a group of people at different distances from the camera. Also when you see an outcropping covered with ikran the 3-D makes the scene look so much more real.

I have been following the progress of computer graphics since before it was in common use in the movies. I think we are finally at the point where we can mimic with CGI just about anything that you can see in real life. Since about 60 percent of the film is in CG I had a lot of eye candy to soak up. Here are a few CG shots that from Avatar that I thought were particularly well-done.

Jake digs his toes in the dirt. (It may have been done with real feet in real dirt). A bulldozer moves through the dirt and you see the dirt cling to its tracks and fall off the other side as the tracks move around.

Realistic skin is difficult enough to render, but in Avatar you see skin that is wet from rain and sweat. In one shot Jake falls down in some mud and then he attempts to wipe it off his face. Very realistic. There is a shot when he bites a fruit and the juice runs down his chin. There is a shot when Neytiri drinks water from a flower and the water drips off her chin. In another shot Neytiri is putting war paint on Jake’s face. It really looks like viscous paint is being smeared on his skin. His skin and lips respond as if they are really being touched. I don’t know if they used some kind of soft-body collision detection or if someone had to hand animate that. In either case it was well done. During a battle scene Neytiri’s skin is shiny with perspiration, but also bits of dirt and debris stick to the sweat.

I’ve seen other movies where they attempted to animate two CG characters kissing. They got it right in this movie.

Any time a helicopter flew over some foliage the plants whipped about in the prop wash. The clothing and hair on the Na’vi also rippled in the breeze realistically.

A tree falls over in one scene and you see the splintering of the wood. I can’t imagine how that was animated. As the tree falls the air is filled with splinters, dust and leaves. There are many shots where insects buzz about in the background which adds a touch of realism.

CG fire, smoke and water has gotten pretty realistic recently. One especially nice shot is when Jake reaches in a stream to pull out a stick. The water ripples nicely around his hand. There are other shots of realistic waterfalls, water dripping off leaves and waves crashing against rocks along the shore. At one point Jake jumps into a river to escape a predator. The water splashing around looks very convincing and it soaks his shirt and coats his face.

Most of these things have been done before in other movies, but never before have there been so many complex and realistic CG shots in one movie.

If you start to type in the Google search box Google will suggest popular searches that begin with the letters you typed. This is what I got when I typed the different letters of the alphabet. No I don’t know what Zillow is.

a Amazon
b Best Buy
c Craigslist
d Dictionary
e eBay
f Facebook
g Gmail
h Hotmail
i IMDb
j JC Penney
k Kohls
l Lowes
m Myspace
n Netflix
o Office Depot
p Pandora
q QVC
r Realtor
s Southwest Airlines
t Target
u USPS
v Verizon
w Walmart
x Xbox 360
y YouTube
z Zillow