I'm not joking. I've gotten into heated debates on multiple occasions with people on Google+ who honestly believe there is no way the Earth is not flat. At first, I couldn't believe they weren't fucking with me, but they were SERIOUS. Terrifyingly so.

You go and look at their other posts, and there are whole communities filled with certifiably crazy people talking about some seriously demented theories. NASA photos from ISS are simulated; the round earth theory is a sophisticated psy-op meant to enslave our minds; the entire universe is flat, rotates around the Earth, and gravity is somehow a lie, and every photo and video showing a round Earth is a fake.

These people are breeding, dude. In 2016. I'm terrified.

I like how the glue apparently also increases gravity, so even the non-sticky parts of people get dragged down.

A glacier is basically a slow moving frozen river. Of course it can't flow backwards. Gravity continues to work even below the freezing point.

When someone says something like "we're exploiting parallel universes", what they mean is that one of the many theories that can be used to describe quantum behaviour such as entanglement is to do with parallel universes.

That doesn't mean there aren't other theories, it doesn't mean there are parallel universes, it's just one of the few ways we can make it make sense is if it exists and carries information in a dimension that is not tangible to us.

When Archimedes invented his screw, using gravity to drive water uphill, he could have said that he's using an invisible multi-dimensional goblin to move the water; well that's one theory and its irrefutable until Newton makes an appearance. And even then you can still say "yeah but what we know of gravity is still a multidimensional goblin."

Having said that, it has as much likelihood of being correct as any other theory in its infancy.

"As flawed as our science may be, it is far and away more reliable than any other way of 'knowing' that we have."

I'm going to be polite and assume you have narcolepsy and just happen to fall asleep during the bits that challenge your own viewpoint.

The theory about global warming may yet prove to be untrue - that i cannot deny; some other as yet unknown factor may be found. But the likelihood that thousands of scientists have p-hacked and fudged their way to a false positive in this case is more like 10 sigma.

In the past I have always told you - do not listen to 'a' scientist because one scientist could be a liar. Listen to many, many scientists.

Global warming isn't a pop-science article one small group put together, nor is this video the only argument you need to deny the theories of gravity, relativity or the spherical earth. Perhaps the tinfoil hat was rustling during the important final part of the video but if the alternative method of deduction is 'some crap bob heard on youtube' then I think i'll take my chances with the scientists.

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So the lowest spec new Model S costs about $66000 in the US, and a quick google reveals that Gravity has "100-200" employees.

Even assuming the most employees and the cheapest Tesla, that's still $330 per employee (and probably more).

When was the last time you spent $330 on a gift for your boss? Never, that's when.

*promote reaping the rewards of being a decent human being.

Gravity Payments Team Surprises CEO, Dan Price, With A Tesla has been added as a related post - related requested by Mordhaus on that post.

also reminds me of how gravity forms the chaos of the cosmos into defined, orderly, separate planetary bodies. the swirl of chaotic matter violently smashing into each other, slowly grinding down anything caught in the middle of the cosmic clash.

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This only applies to the metric system. For the empirical system, it gets even more confusing. Here's a simple quote from NASA's Pre-Jesus era website:

The effective acceleration of gravity at the poles is 980.665 cm/sec/sec while at the equator it is 3.39 cm/sec/sec less due to the centrifugal force. If you weighed 100 pounds at the north pole on a spring scale, at the equator you would weigh 99.65 pounds, or 5.5 ounces less.

Whenever we talk about weight in pounds, we need to define where with respect to the center of our little bluey.

ok, i'll do my best:

"It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind."

this is called a sim, and yes it's a type of procedural animation but it doesn't replace some kind of "classical" method of animating. sims are used for all kinds of things: particles, cloth, fur/hair/feathers, crowds, fluid, rigid body destruction, etc, etc. the artists who do this are not animators, they're FX artists and it isn't as simple as plugging in "45 mph wind from the east". not even close. for something seemingly that simple you're dialing in things like direction, turbulence, gravity, plus the cloth properties. once you have your settings, you sim it, which can take days on a render farm for complex sims. if that sim is approved then it goes to lighting, gets put into the scene, has textures/materials/shaders applied, and then gets rendered, which can take another several days on a render farm depending on the complexity. these sims are the only way to get realistic animations for these types of materials. and there are generally many versions made at this stage to get the sim right, fix broken frames, fix intersecting, get the lighting and textures/materials/shaders working right, etc. THEN it goes to the compositing dept for a couple dozen more versions.




"As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video."

regular animation is like stop motion except it's not every frame (it's interpolated between keyframes) and is for character animation.

anim and FX are 2 different departments and often use 2 different software packages.

mocap is also not handled by the anim dept. it would be done by match move and/or tech anim.




"You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit."

no one in there right mind would do this, it's completely impractical, and would look like complete shit.




"It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play."

the FX people are way more nerds and technical than anim people. you need to be technically savvy for every dept. but the real nerds and really technically savvy people work on pipeline who were probably heavily involved in this project building custom toolsets for it.




"Really kind of lazy way of animating."

no, it's fucking hard, requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of people, a lot of cpu horsepower, is used all the time to get high quality animations, is a collection of several departments other than animation, and is used in conjunction with animation.

The entire arm seems to twist and fails at the joint of the arm on the camera which seems offset from the center of gravity of the weight and camera. Probably the cutting and snapping of a 1/4th steel bolt or something. Camera-weight need to be completely leveled flush (+/- 0.6°) by the awesome weights as a closed object system. I believe correcting this torsion by putting that universal joint center in line with the center of gravity of the camera-weight would prevent that torsion. This would mean that the joint center would have to be somewhere central in that column tube thingy. The over extension and over snapping can only be fixed with built-in stops, I dunno.

One sample "weird chicken behavior" is psychotically aggressive bantam (miniature) roosters.

Too small and ill equipped (not much spur, etc.) to do any damage to a human, but they *act* like they think they are velociraptors or something. Bring food in, fill their water, get vaguely close to them ... they attack your feet. My dad taught me to put my shoe between their legs and lift/kick them into a wall -- pretty hard. Stuns / dazes them for a minute or so -- long enough to fill their feed or whatever. But stay longer than that and they'll be right back to attacking your feet.


On the female side, hens sometimes choose very bizarre locations to lay their eggs. We had a metal cylindrical feeder thing with a tray at the bottom -- fill cracked corn or whatever into the cylinder (open on top), and it will gravity flow down as they eat some out of the bottom tray. We had one hen that liked to jump in the top of that cylinder (maybe 10 inch diameter) and then lay eggs on top of the food in there. Extremely tight fit, no room to move -- like putting your arm in a Pringles can. Sometimes she got stuck if the surface of the food was too far down.

I've even seen a hen that sat on the surface of a bough in a cedar tree. Enough branch and cedar foliage to hold up the hen's body, but then we found an egg right under her on the ground -- not dense enough material to actually keep the egg from falling through. The egg was broken, but the hen just stubbornly sat in that tree for a day or two, not realizing what had happened.