Japan is planning to film the 2020 Olympics in 8k@120fps and the cameras have been around for 3-4 years now. Multiple companies are working on 16k VR prototypes. 4k is generally pointless unless as I said you simply want "productive" realestate, or sit very close to the display. Because VR displays are so close to your eye the required resolution to match visual acuity is around 16k. My point wasn't anything to do with VR or games but rather the effective viewing distance from the screen(s).

"At 6 meters or 20 feet, a human eye with that performance is able to separate contours that are approximately 1.75 mm apart"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity
6meters isn't a particular helpful distance for this argument but I'm sure you can do the math. 65" 4k display with 0.37mm pixel pitch would require a much closer distance to resolve the image properly. There is an advantage over 1080p but at normal viewing distances you won't be seeing all the detail of 4k.

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*related http://videosift.com/video/Behrokh-Khoshnevis-Contour-Crafting

This is the logical conclusion to years of blind contour focus and application of product illustration concepts. Great stuff!

I know a couple artists that do exactly this, but I've never observed the method using markers from start to finish.

All Contour lenses should have a permanent overlay that says Watch on Mute.

"The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn't know where it was or where it led to." --E.B. White

Little known fact: many irregular verbs started out as regular ones, and over time changed to irregular. One example is "drive." It used to be drive/drived/drived. Then, in what was to become Canada and the U.S., people started saying drive/drove/driven. English who visited the colonies were so distressed at this that they raised alarms about the deterioration of the language. One included, "What's next? 'dive/dove/diven'?" At the time, "dive" was also a fully regular "~ed" verb, and in time, it too changed to "dive/dove", but not "diven". Is our language now in a fallen state?

In a population, young people, typically, are the language innovators. Almost all permanent change to language comes originally from teenagers. So now some young people are saying "text/text/text". Looking at other verbs which follow the pattern --cut/cut/cut, cost/cost/cost, put/put/put, hit/hit/hit-- it seems there's a pattern: they all end in "t". Seems like the language is continuing to evolve in the same way it always has. Whether this language innovation will stick has yet to be seen.

But language will change from the way you learned to speak it. There is no doubt about that. You can accept it, or you can get stressed, but it's happening.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

Fascinating, but not very plausible.. to make this, you'd have to collect several million earthlike planets from all over the galaxy, somehow tow them to this star, bring them all into the same, stable orbit, and then somehow splice them together, sort of like a stone arch falling into place. How you could keep gravity from pulling them together to form gas-giants or even small stars is yet another matter. overall, with superb planet-towing spaceships and all, I'd estimated the task to take several hundred million years and probably fail. I'd think I'd settle for populating the galaxy first.


I've read the whole series, many times and according to Niven the Ringworld was constructed as a filled shell. Planets, planetoids and asteroid belts from neighboring systems were broken down and through a never explained process, transmuted into a unique alloy called Scrith. That shell was then contoured like a bas-relief, bulges for oceans, depressions for mountains and filled with earth, water, oxygen, plants etc.. Still a massive undertaking to be sure, esp. at sub-light speeds but not as bad as assembling a giant jigsaw.

Sub-light speed technology is assumed as any civilization capable of FTL travel would find it far easier to terraform and inhabit existing worlds.

>> ^westy:

I see one of the issues with this is that it dose not follow the contour of the ground , u need something that to an exstent follows th elasy of the land , otherwize u are going to have do buld very flat foundatoins for it.


Actually i see that as a positive thing, sure it has to be flexible enough to bend a little, but seeing as where i live roads tend to get cracks, bumps and holes in them even after a year since re-pavement having something that resists that a little can only be good.

In order for this to be viable it essentially has to be manufactured on site, the panels and electronics could be printed onto large mats and then rolled out on the foundation while the actual road surface get put on top of this, though how this is done without setting tings on fire is a whole other deal.

Not only does it have to follow contours of the land, but these panels would have to be able to deal with subsidence of the layers of earth under the foundation due to constant rolling point loads from trucks (since cars weigh nothing compared to a fully loaded truck). Asphalt/bitumen can elastically deform and still be a via road surface (i'm sure everyone's noticed 'channels' in the road). Couple that with the need to remove surface run-off water when it rains. True you could make the top road surface bumpy, but once those bumps are worn down you cant re-surface without replacing a whole panel.

On top of that, what happens if the micro-processors suddenly crap out, or some of the LEDs blow. In the first case, any road markings would suddenly disappear, or conversely the road would suddenly light up blinding drivers. In the second case, you'd either have to replace a full panel, or have "acceptable defects" where a certain number of LEDS can blow and the panel won't be compromised.

If they manage to get this to work, kudos to them, but i just can't see it happening with what they've been showing. Would seem to be easier to harness the thermal energy of roads rather than solar energy acting on the roads.

I see one of the issues with this is that it dose not follow the contour of the ground , u need something that to an exstent follows th elasy of the land , otherwize u are going to have do buld very flat foundatoins for it.

Bird Aerodynamics
or why Herons, Cranes and Egrets don't extend their necks when flying.


There is a point where the length of the neck is no longer aerodynamic and the sharply pointed beak is better kept right in front of the body. They would not get any "lift" from their narrow, pointed beaks but, that shape does pierce the air quite nicely. Just like the nose of a jet aircraft.

Ducks and geese fly with their necks outstretched.
The flat bills of ducks and geese aid in acquiring "lift". I'm willing to bet that they can actually rest their "chins" on the wind as they fly. They now design highly efficient aircraft that utilize the canard (fr. duck) profile that features a small wing way out in front.

All flying birds also get lift from the way air flows easily over their straight backs but, pushes their rounder undersides upward as they propel themselves through the air with their wings.

Want more? lol
The pointed, elongated cone shape of the Heron's beak pierces the air and makes a cone shaped vacuum that is widened even further by the shape of the front of the bird. As the air is forced around the bird, frontal drag is reduced. If the neck was extended, this effect would be lost and the vacuum would collapse right behind it's head, in front of the bird's body, and the air would rush back in, the bird's body would fly into turbulence.

The wide, flat bills of ducks and geese create a wedge shaped vacuum as the birds propel themselves through the air. If you have ever noticed, their wings beats have a very short up and down travel distance, staying just on the edge of the vacuum wedge that their bills have created. Even the geese flock formations are based on creating an even larger wedge shaped vacuum for all of them to travel within.

The vacuums that birds create not only reduce drag, they create thrust. That is how the shape of a Peregrine Falcon enables it to exceed the pull of gravity ("freefall or "terminal velocity") without flapping it's wings. In a dive, the Peregrine's form, past it's head, becomes a very long cone shape. The vacuum that it's head creates while moving through the air, collapses behind it's head and the air starts rushing back in around the contoured shape of the bird, from front to back, propelling the bird forward. Same design as fish. If you've ever tried to tighten your grip on the tapered back end of a fish, you know that it shoots forward out of your grasp. And, the tighter you try to squeeze, the faster it goes. Lost a couple of good ones that way.

so you take a regular CNC machine, replace a chunk of metal w/ a sheep, replace a drillbit w/ a cutter and load up file 'sheep_trim_v3.txt'
it'll follow a pre-programmed contour and motions.
if your sheep is a bit fatter, tough luck

I'm with you about the punctuation and quotes rule. I don't like it either, and wouldn't bother mentioning it except it was the right thread, and I mostly only pick on the grammar of those who pick on the grammar of others.

I didn't mean to suggest the usage of "whom" was willy-nilly. Rather, that it is rarely mandatory. In the first example I gave above, you must use "whom." In any other example I can think of where you could use "whom," you can also use "who." And clearly, "whom" can never represent the subject of a sentence, only an object.

The fact that the majority follows this rule is the very reason it's correct usage. Rules derive from standard usage, describing the way it's commonly used. This is called "descriptive grammar," and is the study of linguistics. If you do it the other way around, teaching native and non-native speakers how to speak "correctly" based on a set of rules passed down that are either outdated or were never reflective of the common usage of the language to begin with, that's called "prescriptive grammar," and serves no purpose. In fact, it's a waste of energy because no benefit comes from it.

E.B. White said it well:

The living language is like a cowpath: it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs. From daily use, the path undergoes change. A cow is under no obligation to stay in the narrow path she helped make, following the contour of the land, but she often profits by staying with it and she would be handicapped if she didn’t know where it was or where it led to.

From NASA's site (where they also have a high-res MPEG-4):

This animation progresses at a rate of six frames per day from January 1, 2007 through the minimum extent which occurred on September 14, 2007. The false color of the sea ice, derived from the AMSR-E 6.25 km 89 GHz brightness temperature, highlights the fissures or divergence areas in the sea ice cover by warm brightness temperatures (in blue) while cold brightness temperatures, shown in brighter white, represent consolidated sea ice. The sea ice edge is defined by the 15% ice concentration contour in the three-day moving average of the AMSR-E 12.5 km sea ice concentration data while ice extent is the sum of all pixels with at least 15% ice.