This is exactly what every sci-fi movie should aspire to be. This is where Lucas and Spielberg began, but sadly they got lost along the way in CG land, like everyone else. – Hat Tip to Nathan
Perfectly stated. Story and character still come first, even in sci-fi.
(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)
Think managing your finances has to be complicated? Wonkblog contributor (and UC Chicago social scientist) Harold Pollack doesn’t.
After a talk with personal finance expert Helaine Olen, Pollack managed to write down pretty much everything you need to know on a 4×6 index card. And it would probably fit on a 3×5 index card if you really crammed (that last point, for instance, is probably not strictly necessary for managing your money).
He explains:
The card came out of an RBC chat I had with Helaine Olen regarding what I view as the financial industry’s basic dilemma: The best investment advice fits on an index card. A commenter, Alex M, asked for the actual index card. Although I was originally speaking in metaphor, I grabbed a pen and one of my daughter’s note cards, scribbled this out in »
Why Wu-Tang Will Release Just One Copy Of Its Secret Album
Why Wu-Tang Will Release Just One Copy Of Its Secret Album
Wu-Tang’s aim is to use the album as a springboard for the reconsideration of music as art, hoping that the approach will help restore recorded music to a place alongside visual art—and change the music business in the process.
“The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years,” says RZA. “And yet its doesn’t receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it’s been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.”
Pomodoro Technique
There are five basic steps to implementing the technique:
1. Decide on the task to be done
2. Set the pomodoro timer to n minutes (traditionally 25)
3. Work on the task until the timer rings; record with an x
4. Take a short break (3-5 minutes)
5. Every four “pomodori” take a longer break (15–30 minutes)
Working better through technology. [source]
This Is What a Facial Detection Algorithm Looks Like in 3D
Once the heady stuff of films like Minority Report, facial recognition algorithms are now a part of so many technologies that it’s hard to keep track of them. iPhones, iPhoto, and Facebook all try to detect bodies and faces with biometric software. Just last week, Facebook announced that its proprietary algorithm correctly identified faces 97.25 percent of the time—meaning it works almost as well as humans do.
But when these mathematical engines hunt for a face in a video, just what do they look for? How does software see a face?
The artist and writer Zach Blas has tried to show just what programs see with his project Face Cages. He’s constructed, literally, face cages—metallic sculptures that fit, painfully, onto a user’s face—that represent the shapes and polygons that algorithms use »
Larry Page: true believer in the future.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
Clever Boat Names [via]
Previously: Unfortunate Sign Burn Outs
The most expensive stupid joke you’ll ever make.
As stupid as these are, they still make me laugh.
Testing Art
The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.
– Stanley Kubrick (via jamesgrantbrown)
When Pharell Williams released his “Happy” single followed by the stunningly beautiful “24 hours of Happy“, who could have expected it to have influenced hundreds of covers from virtually all corners of the world? Well, people in the Middle East and North Africa were no exception.
The “Happy” Videos of Middle East and North Africa
The internet!
What upsets me isn’t that we created this centralized version of the Internet based on permanent surveillance.
What upsets me, what really gets my goat, is that we did it because it was the easiest thing to do. There was no design, forethought, or analysis involved. No one said “hey, this sounds like a great world to live in, let’s make it”. It happened because we couldn’t be bothered.
Making things ephemeral is hard.
Making things distributed is hard.
Making things anonymous is hard.
Coming up with a sane business model is really hard—I get tired just thinking about it.
So let’s take people’s data, throw it on a server, link it to their Facebook profiles, keep it forever, and if we can’t raise another round of venture funding we’ll just slap Google ads on the thing.
“High five, Chad!”
“High five, bro!”
That is the design process that »
In the midst of [Claude] Shannon’s career, some lawyers in the patent department at Bell Labs decided to study whether there was an organizing principle that could explain why certain individuals at the Labs were more productive than others. They discerned only one common thread: Workers with the most patents often shared lunch or breakfast with a Bell Labs electrical engineer named Harry Nyquist. It wasn’t the case that Nyquist gave them specific ideas. Rather, as one scientist recalled, “he drew people out, got them thinking.” More than anything Nyquist asked good questions.
The Idea Factory | Jon Gertner
Given a complex endeavor, good questions beat good answers any day of the week.
(via justin-singer)
Hot Topic: Lady Gaga’s SXSW Keynote and Selling Out.
Hot Topic: Lady Gaga’s SXSW Keynote and Selling Out.
My first trip to SXSW (‘South by Southwest’ for the uninitiated) was in 2004, when I was invited by the organizers. Ten years ago, the festival was a bustling confluence of independent film, indie rock and fringe hip-hop, and a burgeoning interactive / new media sector. It was grassroots, all…
A lot of wisdom in here about what it means to be an artist in the crazy world we live in.
I Used Unsecured Webcams to Take Photos of Peoples the Insides of People’s Homes and Offices
This is why you don’t trust companies like Verizon or Comcast who use proprietary software to setup “security” cameras in your house.
TURKEY DEMONSTRATIONS AND WATER CANNONS: rkish riot police fired tear gas on March 11 at protesters massed outside a hospital after the death of a teenage boy wounded during anti-government protests last year and left comatose. Berkin Elvan, 15, who has been in a coma since June 2013 after being struck in the head by a gas canister during a police crackdown on protesters, died on March 11, his family announced via Twitter.
GURCAN OZTURK/AFP/Getty Images (Top two photos) , BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images,
FYI, Turkey is still going through some serious issues, even if it’s not covered all that much.
No Flag No Foul
their lack of insignia allowed Russian President Vladimir Putin to deny his troops were occupying Crimea. His Minister of Defense, Sergei Shoigu, has said he has no idea where they got all that Russian hardware. Aksyonov, the new Crimean Prime Minister, tells TIME that local “self-defense forces” seized it all from Ukrainian bases and then attached Russian military license plates that they somehow purchased.
It seems we’re to have a Russian occupation without a flag on it.