3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

*isdupe>> ^geo321:

dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Resonance-VERY-well-produced-VERY-trippy-sights-and-sounds

Leaving aside Yogi and Skeeves little tiff , the start of this video does raise an interesting question in terms of our assessment of ourselves as "intelligent". Is there a line that is crossed which marks a species as intelligent?

For me, I think our intelligence comes from our ability to both understand and communicate abstract concepts, particularly things like math. Most of the research I've seen into communication with other potential intelligences focuses on the conveyance of our understanding simple mathematical concepts like arithmetic, geometry, prime numbers and so on. I think based on that, we would be able to eventually communicate with another intelligent species, even starting with something as simple as


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That demonstrates we know what the first few primes are.

I don't believe there is another animal on earth that can understand and communicate these concepts

apart from mice and dolphins obviously, but they don't want to talk to us.

That said, there may be some fundamental property of primes or some other universal mathematical pattern we simply haven't recognised yet (it may only be apparent in a different base notation or when looked at n-dimensionally) that is considered the universal equivalent of 1+1=2. In which case, we'll appear remarkably dense to other intelligences.

I've got two perspectives on some of these comments and the video, and thought I'd chime in with some (hopefully not overly longwinded) history / anecdotes:

First, I grew up and attended public school K-12 in Kansas in the 80's and 90's. Overall I am very pleased with the quality of education I received and the teachers I had. From High School, I remember having 3-4 standout excellent teachers, a whole lot of adequate / no-complaints teachers, and 3-4 teachers that I thought were sub-par.

The excellent teachers stand out in my memory because they got me more interested in subjects that I already had some interest in, OR because they made me appreciate subjects that I was otherwise pretty ambivalent about. For example, my math teacher who I studied Geometry, Advanced Algebra, Trigonometry, and AP Calculus with was fantastic. When I was in his classes, I loved learning about math. When I went to University and studied Calc 2 in a lecture hall with 400 other students and teacher-student interaction only with TAs, suddenly math wasn't anywhere near as interesting.

Some of the adequate teachers that I had were probably the favorite teachers of students with other interests. Expecting every teacher to mesh perfectly with absolutely every last one of their hundreds of students per year is probably setting the bar a little unrealistically high. That being said, even though I wasn't completely enthralled with their classes, I think that I got good value from them.

The teachers that I remember as being poor fall into two categories. First are those that taught subjects that I wasn't at all interested in and who did nothing to prompt me to change my mind. I remember hating one of my English teachers because she wasn't impressed with my lack of effort on things like poetry assignments. Looking back, I think that says much more about what I was putting into the class than the quality of that teacher. The other category had teachers that seemed lazy and ineffective, or those whose classes were complete wastes of time -- similar to those that @blankfist described. Most of those teachers were teacher/coaches who, in my point of view, were just phoning-in their teaching duties and only actively interested in the coaching. I still have a bias against sports being included in public school activities due to that type of teacher.


And I also have a perspective from the teaching side of things. I've been living in Thailand for about 4.5 years now, teaching English as a second language. I got a bachelor's degree in Computer Science but struggled finding a job when I graduated (I think I was naively setting my sights too high and too narrow, but thats another story). So, I ended up working as a farmhand on my family farm. That was OK but not really something that I was very passionate about.

Eventually through a family connection, someone approached me about traveling abroad for a year and working as an ESL teacher. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do and a good way to challenge myself, so I flew to Thailand in 2007 and started teaching. The school I connected with put me in as the teacher for kindergarten, which was crazy but fun and rewarding and a good sink or swim introduction to teaching (which I had no prior experience with or education in).

I ended up liking it so much that what was originally just going to be a 1-year experience got extended. I taught kindergarten for 2 years and 1st grade for 1 year. Then there was a big shakeup / administrative disaster at my former school and I switched into teaching High School aged students. Another challenge and something different to get used to, but I am enjoying that as much or more as the younger students.

Being a foreign, native-English-speaking ESL teacher in Thailand is a bit weird. There are lots of really *terrible* foreign teachers that are here to purely to have ready access to cheap beer and prostitutes, and who have absolutely zero interest in the actual teaching; it is just a paycheck. The average salary of a native-English speaking teacher here is about $12,000 a year, which sounds terribly low but is actually a pretty upper-middle class income by Thai standards. For the shitty teachers, it translates into a lot of beer and hookers.

The schools here see foreigners are all fairly identical, easily replaceable cogs. Someone with a master's degree in Education and a real interest in being a good teacher can easily be replaced by a drunken loser that rarely shows up for classes if they don't fall in line with the Thai way of doing things or try to change up the status quo.

I hope that I do a decent job of teaching here. I am confident that I'm way better for my students than many of the drunken backpacker alternatives, but it is dangerous to set the bar that low and get complacent. I'm sure that to a lot of my roughly 800 students this year, I am merely adequate -- not all that memorable but at least not bad either. I know that some of them get a lot out of my classes and I can see them improving in English in leaps and bounds. And I know that there are some on the other side of the coin who are at best ambivalent about me and their English classes in general. My level of motivation prompts me to try my best, but I am too lazy and don't have enough time to throw a whole lot of extra effort at each and every one of my 800 students, most of whom I see for 1 hour a week total.

Anyway, my experiences here have made me appreciate all of my excellent former teachers that much more. Plus, I've learned that anyone that thinks that a teacher in the US is sub-par ought to be thankful that they probably aren't quite as bad as a sub-par "teacher" in Thailand...

Yeah this guys ebullience is unwarranted. Voxels are fine for something like fixed geometry, but are gimped for anything involving animation or physiscs (hence the lack of it in these videos).

This tech might be fine for middleware but I don't see it revolutionising graphics engines any time soon.

Edit: I'm actually far more impressed visually by Hardware tessellation, which is tech we have now.

This video has been seconded as a duplicate; transferring votes to the original video and killing this dupe - dupeof seconded with isdupe by chicchorea.

*isdupe>> ^Hybrid:

dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Cyriak-Experiments-in-ovine-geometry

This video has been nominated as a duplicate of this video by Hybrid. If this nomination is seconded with *isdupe, the video will be killed and its votes transferred to the original.

*dupeof=http://videosift.com/video/Cyriak-Experiments-in-ovine-geometry

The cop is probably more or less okay. He'll be sore with some soft tissue damage. He'll probably need to see a chiropractor, and he might have an injury to his knees.That's assuming he had an airbag in the car--I think I heard the pop as it deployed. It'll be very painful, but probably not anything you can't recover from.

I'm more worried about the driver of the van. Vehicles these days do really well with front-end collisions, with various safety features in the car design, including impact cages and airbags that pop at greater or less speed based on the speed of the collision. Side-impact collisions are a lot more dangerous. Even if there are airbags, the geometry of the car just won't stand up as well. People hit like that tend to be a lot more likely to sustain serious injury. Probably the biggest risk, assuming the driver was wearing their seat belt, would be the driver's head striking the door window. She would have at least a concussion, possibly serious injuries to her left leg, and soft tissue damage up and down the right side of her body.

I'm a customer service associate for a major insurance company. My job is basically to take new claims from people who have been in accidents. The good news is that since I've started the job, I've learned just how safe our cars are these days. It's relatively rare even with highway accidents that people are seriously injured as long as we're talking about something like straight on damage or a collision at an angle. (A head-on collision is obviously going to be a lot more dangerous. Fortunately, the van did come in at an angle, so the cop car didn't take nearly as much force as it could have.)

Side-impact collisions are what send people to the hospital these days. Drive careful, folks!

>> ^dag:

Have you tried it within the last year? Has to be the download version.>> ^rychan:
>> ^dag:
I wouldn't say that Minecraft is dead from a gameplay perspective, just stripped down. The game can be truly scary, even for adults. The monsters are great and the game really shines in multiplayer. In the end though, it is a sandbox game that eschews structure for freedom and creativity. IMHO it's the best thing to happen in gaming for many, many years.>> ^westy:
Not actually "that" creative.
the best part of this i think is the execution of the editing and recording ultimetly this is like sumoen building a large thing in Lego. not that thats a "bad" thing but its a very procedural process and so i would argue its not that "creative" still fun and still as valid as anything else.
Its s ahsame that mine craft is largely dead and soleless when it comes to annything other than building stuff , im sure a company will taske the best building parts of mine craft and then marry it with some deeper game play , proper servival horror game play or RPG oor just something that is more sophisticated.
im sure a AAA dev some place is doing this right now. ( granted will probably be shit lol)


I actually agree with Westy. I freaking love sim games and building games. I love to start with a clean slate and build up an intricate, active universe. But isn't it true what Westy said, that there's not really anything going on under the hood in Minecraft? I mean this city is just a bunch of inactive geometry? There's no dynamic processes, no citizens, no interactions? I fail to see how this is so different from modelling in 3d studio, although I acknowledge it is somehow much more compelling.
I see that the beta has a little more gameplay with roaming monsters, but I don't find that very compelling, and that's not what's being demonstrated in this video.
I really _want_ to like Minecraft, because I feel like I'm the perfect audience, but it's just not compelling to me (yet). I guess I want a sandbox world that feels as alive as Sim City 4, but that is as mutable as MineCraft.



I have, i still feel like it's missing a soul. I'd build all that, but what would i do with it? It just feels too empty

It's close to being "the" game i want to play, but there's just not enough to do in it. I feel similar about terraria atm - terraria went down the adventure/rpg route, getting gear, killing bosses, going to dungeons - but again, there's no 'end game' to make me want to do more. (I hate saying end game, it makes me look like someone who wants hardcore raiding, but i don't - i hope you understand what i mean when i used that phrase)

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Have you tried it within the last year? Has to be the download version.>> ^rychan:

>> ^dag:
I wouldn't say that Minecraft is dead from a gameplay perspective, just stripped down. The game can be truly scary, even for adults. The monsters are great and the game really shines in multiplayer. In the end though, it is a sandbox game that eschews structure for freedom and creativity. IMHO it's the best thing to happen in gaming for many, many years.>> ^westy:
Not actually "that" creative.
the best part of this i think is the execution of the editing and recording ultimetly this is like sumoen building a large thing in Lego. not that thats a "bad" thing but its a very procedural process and so i would argue its not that "creative" still fun and still as valid as anything else.
Its s ahsame that mine craft is largely dead and soleless when it comes to annything other than building stuff , im sure a company will taske the best building parts of mine craft and then marry it with some deeper game play , proper servival horror game play or RPG oor just something that is more sophisticated.
im sure a AAA dev some place is doing this right now. ( granted will probably be shit lol)


I actually agree with Westy. I freaking love sim games and building games. I love to start with a clean slate and build up an intricate, active universe. But isn't it true what Westy said, that there's not really anything going on under the hood in Minecraft? I mean this city is just a bunch of inactive geometry? There's no dynamic processes, no citizens, no interactions? I fail to see how this is so different from modelling in 3d studio, although I acknowledge it is somehow much more compelling.
I see that the beta has a little more gameplay with roaming monsters, but I don't find that very compelling, and that's not what's being demonstrated in this video.
I really _want_ to like Minecraft, because I feel like I'm the perfect audience, but it's just not compelling to me (yet). I guess I want a sandbox world that feels as alive as Sim City 4, but that is as mutable as MineCraft.

>> ^dag:

I wouldn't say that Minecraft is dead from a gameplay perspective, just stripped down. The game can be truly scary, even for adults. The monsters are great and the game really shines in multiplayer. In the end though, it is a sandbox game that eschews structure for freedom and creativity. IMHO it's the best thing to happen in gaming for many, many years.>> ^westy:
Not actually "that" creative.
the best part of this i think is the execution of the editing and recording ultimetly this is like sumoen building a large thing in Lego. not that thats a "bad" thing but its a very procedural process and so i would argue its not that "creative" still fun and still as valid as anything else.
Its s ahsame that mine craft is largely dead and soleless when it comes to annything other than building stuff , im sure a company will taske the best building parts of mine craft and then marry it with some deeper game play , proper servival horror game play or RPG oor just something that is more sophisticated.
im sure a AAA dev some place is doing this right now. ( granted will probably be shit lol)



I actually agree with Westy. I freaking love sim games and building games. I love to start with a clean slate and build up an intricate, active universe. But isn't it true what Westy said, that there's not really anything going on under the hood in Minecraft? I mean this city is just a bunch of inactive geometry? There's no dynamic processes, no citizens, no interactions? I fail to see how this is so different from modelling in 3d studio, although I acknowledge it is somehow much more compelling.

I see that the beta has a little more gameplay with roaming monsters, but I don't find that very compelling, and that's not what's being demonstrated in this video.

I really _want_ to like Minecraft, because I feel like I'm the perfect audience, but it's just not compelling to me (yet). I guess I want a sandbox world that feels as alive as Sim City 4, but that is as mutable as MineCraft.

>> ^mxxcon:

Description says IL-76MD, but video title says TU-154..so which one is it?

From 0:15 to 0:18, you can roughly make out wing geometry and position in relation to the fuselage, despite the missing tail section. It's definatly not a Tu-154.

It's Cyriak... Always randomly genius.

In reply to this comment by eric3579:
Geo, you're the BEST!

In reply to this comment by geo321:
*promote