Back in the day, I had to go to my data center when it was around 100 degrees out side so I was of course in shorts, t-shirt and sandals. I was there for 18 hours. Temperature inside was like 50 degrees. Yeah, that doesn't seem cold, but after 18 hours I felt like I had hypothermia.

Netscape engineers are weenies!

Inspired by the tapestry on pg 560 of Skylark III I wanted to build a art piece that contained thousands of suspended beads -- as you walked around it, the beads would align into images that could only be seen from that one spot; it would be a random (although attractive) array of colors otherwise.

This work here seems similar, although infinitely more practical and realizable. Very nice work.

They are looking for eye donations. Clearly you would be happy with just one.

I'd like to fly drones over a, say, 100x100 meter area with centimeter precision, possibly indoors, for filmmaking. GPS is clearly not going to work, even outdoors. Time Domain sells a system with 5 cm resolution, using UWB technology -- but is there anything better than that?

It's a pretty common idea, really. Wikipedia entry.

There are two cases where triple buffering makes sense:

1) If it takes a substantial amount of time to clear the image. Recall that in double buffering, you are displaying one image while drawing another. When drawing the image, the first thing that is often done is clearing the image to a background color (and depth). On some devices, this took a substantial amount of the frame-time, and adding more memory was cheaper than making the "clear" faster.

2) If it takes more than one, but less than two frame times to draw the image, you can have interleaved pipelines. You are viewing framebuffer 0, mostly completed drawing the image in framebuffer 1, and just starting drawing (with a different set of hardware) into framebuffer 2. When you are done drawing, display framebuffer 1, clear framebuffer 0 and begin drawing, and finish drawing framebuffer 2. Note that this kind of triple-buffering decouples update from latency -- you can get very smooth playback at, say, 120 Hz, but the latency is still 1/60th of a second a best.

Both of these were done when I worked at Silicon Graphics in the early 90's, on machines several orders of magnitude larger than the nexus 7.

I was really surprised to see that this Phantom Eye has a cable-braced wing, that it's not a cantilever wing like every other large-span plane built in the last 80 years. Granted, it makes a lot of sense structurally -- long span cantilever wings have to be built very strong at the root, as the bending stresses are enormous -- but still, it's a surprise to see.

Boeing's Sugar Volt is a proposed hybrid electric/diesel commuter plane with a strut-braced wing -- so Boeing is apparently thinking outside the box on a number of concepts.

I have tremendous respect for Mr Musk and his team at SpaceX. To have designed and built the Falcon 9 and the Dragon, and to have them work perfectly every time, in the short time they had, is an amazing achievement.

On the other hand, this really isn't the first "privately built" spacecraft. Almost all of the "NASA" rockets and spacecraft were built by independent contractors. NASA did a lot of the design work on the Saturn rockets and the spacecraft, but the Redstone, Atlas, and Titan rockets were all designed by private contractors for the military. SpaceX has some advantage in that it's doing everything under one roof (literally).

It is impressive to see that hatch open -- showing the depths of the cooperation between NASA and SpaceX. NASA has to have been working on this almost as hard as SpaceX over the past year to develop the procedures for the rendezvous, capture, and berthing of the Dragon. The opening of that hatch might not be as historic as the Apollo-Soyuz docking of the '70s but it's right up there.

When movies were first made, they were single shots. A train approaching a station, something like that. Audiences oohed and ahhed.

But, the first time a cut was introduced, the audience was completely flummoxed. They had no idea what they were seeing. It's hard to believe that now, but we've probably seen 100,000 cuts by the time we are 5 now, and our brains are rewired to accept it.

I used to fly my lightplane back and forth from my home in the San Francisco Bay Area to my Los Angeles office on the fourth floor of a building in Hollywood.

There was an antenna across the street that looked exactly like the profile of an airplane heading toward us. Whenever I was walking down the hall and would glance out the window, I would see that and immediately, uncontrollably, startle. When you see a plane that close you literally have a second or two to make a decision, and it becomes a reflex to act immediately. Now, walking down the hall of a building no reaction is actually called for; but it didn't stop me from jumping!

The bathyscape Trieste used a similar electromagnet-holding-shot system that Cameron's sub uses. They had a bit of a surprise after many successful dives.

It seemed that the steel shot that they obtained in Europe had a substantial amount of impurities in it; and the system worked just fine. When they filled the hoppers with American shot, though, it was pure enough that the electromagnets didn't just hold the shot, it magnetized it! Even when the electromagnets were turned off, the shot stayed in the hopper.

If I recall correctly (and I read about this 40 years ago!) they were able to dump the entire shot canister to get back to the surface.

As a part-time stereographer (Transformers III), I have spent a bit of time on this.

I agree that stereo is best used in intimate settings, at the distances that we have evolved to use 3D in real life. 3D is there so that you can hit somebody with a club accurately, so that you can pick up a rock accurately -- it's for things within a few arm's length away at most. Rather than do some giant spectacle in 3D; it would be much better suited to "My Dinner with Andre" or something like that -- it could really put you into the scene.

As you say, much porn is shot exactly this way. The people I've talked to in that industry say that 3D is TMI, though -- that their customers do not find it appealing to be really "in the world" with the performers -- that the 2D abstraction is a useful distancing mechanism.

So -- there hasn't been a big push into 3D porn yet. And, yeah, there isn't much of an installed base of 3D TVs or BluRay players yet either.

HD is another thing that one would have thought would be great for porn, but again, the people in the industry say that it reveals more flaws than it gains in beauty...

The company DDD has built hardware to do this; it "works", after a fashion. It is, indeed, incorporated into a number of recent 3D TVs.

Basically, there are a number of algorithms in the box, and it chooses the one that is most appropriate for a given sequence. If the system sees blue in the top of the frame, it assumes that it is sky, and puts it in the back. If the camera is trucking from one side to the other to generate parallax, it uses that to generate depth. If I recall correctly, there are some 25 different algorithms using motion, color, brightness, etc -- and it indeed does sort of work.

The depth map that is generated is quite coarse (3D conversion can look very good indeed. I was the stereo supervisor for 1/3 of Transformers III, which had both photographed and simulated 3D, and I felt that they were of comparable quality. It was a very non-real-time process, of course!

Delay all the signals by on the order of a few microseconds. Yes, the time would be wrong, but there aren't atomic clocks in those drones. Yet.