December 2009
“I suppose that’s a major theme of this decade that has just been: the failure of...”
– ck/ck: The Sound Of My Head Banging Against The Wall (via marco)
The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ →
For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage.
Waterworld -3quarksdaily →
At more than six times our own planet’s mass, it’s a “super-Earth,” but this new world’s relatively low density means it’s likely made mostly of water. Though it orbits uncomfortably close to its star, the planet’s water may be kept liquid at 200° C by a dense, highly pressurized atmosphere. Not exactly a tropical paradise (though Dennis Overbye’s New York Times headline describes it as...
“ There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to...”
– S.S Van Dine’s Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories
“Great movie. IMAX in Burbank. Smaller screen but great picture. Like to bang one...”
– Twitter / Danny DeVito’s review of Avatar.
“Deep down, men are convinced that female sexuality is far more exalted and...”
– Jelto Drenth, The Origin Of The World via
Holonomic brain theory - Wikipedia →
(I)f you get into your potential mode, then new things can happen. But usually free will is conceived of in terms of how many constraints are operating, and we have in statistics a notion of degrees of freedom. I think our will essentially is constrained, more or less. We have so many degrees of freedom, and the more degrees of freedom we have, the more we feel free, and we have freedom of...
“One of American feminism’s greatest failures is the exclusion of women of color,...”
– Catherine Traywick
Charles Stross on upgrading to Windows 7 →
Fifty hours and yes, I now have a Vaio P running Windows 7, fully patched and updated and mercifully free of re-installed Sony bloatware. The actual Vista to Windows 7 upgrade took around 12 hours of wall-clock time, of which about 2-3 hours was preparation (uninstalling incompatible apps and drivers), 7 hours was execution, and the rest cleanup and post-install. The remaining 38 hours was disk...
Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up |... →
How did the researchers cope with all this unexpected data? How did they deal with so much failure? Dunbar realized that the vast majority of people in the lab followed the same basic strategy. First, they would blame the method. The surprising finding was classified as a mere mistake; perhaps a machine malfunctioned or an enzyme had gone stale. “The scientists were trying to explain away what...
Vice Magazine's interview with David Simon →
marco:
This is the longest interview we’ve ever run by a long shot, but come on. It’s the guy who made The Wire. You’re lucky the entire issue isn’t about him.
Wired Explains: How 3-D Movie Projection Works →
Dolby’s 3-D system, used for some Avatar screenings, is a little different. It makes use of an exclusive filtration wheel (above) installed inside the projector in front of a 6.5-kilowatt bulb. The wheel is divided into two parts, each one filtering the projector light into different wavelengths for red, green and blue. The wheel spins rapidly — about three times per frame — so it doesn’t...