Makes me realize how much we take technology and instant access to information for granted.

Imagine having to search index cards and then go and physically get the book and see if the information you want is in there. If not go back and start again!

Public libraries have only been around since around mid 1800's, so before then knowledge was only available to the very few educated/privileged people.

My father got a Masters degree in Library Science back in the 1950s, I wonder if the computer down at the library could tell me if the degree is still even offered.

3 hours later. " Here's your printed copy. Want me to staple these 3 pages together for you?"
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Success rate of angioplasty
Angioplasty is successful in opening coronary arteries in well over 90% of patients.

The bad news is...

Up to 30% to 40% of patients with successful coronary angioplasty will develop recurrent narrowing at the site of balloon inflation.
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I suggest finding a different library for a 2nd opinion.

Wish he could have made it inside the library. There's a yellow line on the floor indicating the border that runs through the building.

Astonished @bobknight33 posted a video about Trump using more stolen data to further manipulate voters. Kudos.

This whole debacle is a prime example of why I won't ever join Facebook or other similar social media. It's been clear from day one they are not going to keep your data safe. Posting your life there is like writing everything you do and think in your diary that you then leave open in the public library every day, assuming the librarian is going to keep it private. Getting your information there is like wading into a mob of angry people and believing what you overhear them scream at each other. I just do not see the appeal, but I am pretty anti-social.

I've never read Rand, but today's forgotten word of the day seemed apropos...

Chrematistics: the science of wealth. From the Greek chremata, wealth. -John Ridpath's home reference library, 1898

In short-Aristotle established a difference between economics and chrematistics that would be foundational in medieval thought.[1] For Aristotle, the accumulation of money itself is an unnatural activity that dehumanizes those who practice it. Trade Exchanges, money for goods, and usury creates money from money, but do not produce useful goods.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrematistics

I imagine Rand was not a believer in chrematistics.

"I started "coding" at 8 by typing out programs from an adventure game programming book, in BASIC (think old Infocom games, like Wishbringer/Zork, etc). "

Me too! I remember typing out pages and pages of BASIC on my C64 from a magazine... ugh. Then I made my own adventure game (ripping off Aliens) with a whole bunch of gotos for each "room".... the horror!

"The challenge in today's programming environment is the rapid pace of change. It's so f'n hard to keep up with every new toolkit, platform, library, programming language enhancements, etc."

Pfsh... how hard can it possibly be?

This is so true...

Programming without the internet was tough. I remember my early years of programming in ASM and C/C++. The only internet access was via BBSes and Trumpet Winsock. Your only source of real help was from Usenet groups and questionable help files. There was no such thing as Intelli-sense (as we know it now) or auto-complete; you pretty much had to memorize the parameters for all Win32 API calls and the STL for C++ was brutal to use. Programming nowadays is relatively easy in comparison - pretty much anyone can code thanks to the internet and fantastic online resources. Heck, my 7 yr old daughter is learning to write code using a Scratch-derived visual programming language and Cosmo (look it up, it's awesome). I started "coding" at 8 by typing out programs from an adventure game programming book, in BASIC (think old Infocom games, like Wishbringer/Zork, etc).

The challenge in today's programming environment is the rapid pace of change. It's so f'n hard to keep up with every new toolkit, platform, library, programming language enhancements, etc.

And compared to building $35 trillion worth of schools, hospitals and libraries since ww2 how much has it helped the world - or the still angry american people and their collapsing infrastructure, food banks?

The funny thing was that after the genesis, they almost always neglected to have a solid library of games available for their hardware. The game gear was incredibly more capable than the gameboy, but they didn't support it with titles. Same as the nomad. If they could have managed to swing one of their portables into being a viable nintendo competitor, they might still be around.

https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/keep-it-simple-and-take-credit/

"Implementing these kinds of policies are also no road to electoral success. Peoples’ lives are hard enough without tax credits and savings accounts and eligibility forms and government phone calls that determine whether one’s household income puts one in the bracket for this or that plan or benefit or subsidy and on and on. No voter is thanking anyone who puts them on this road, even if there’s a small pot of money at the end of it.

And forget the annoyance—the amount of immense mental energy and social capital required to keep track of, comprehend the eligibility requirements of, and then successfully apply for these benefits is a de facto regressive tax on people whose lives are too materially difficult to deal with arcane bureaucratic bullshit. That is, those people that need the help the most.

So what to do? No more savings accounts, no more cleverly hidden help that people won’t even notice, no more tax-preferenced, means-tested, government-monitored, website-reliant, bronze/gold/platinum-benefits-so-long-as-you-apply-during-open-enrollment. Just give people the stuff they need.

This shouldn’t even be a liberal-socialist divide, although it seems to have become one in recent years. When society decided citizens should be able to read, we didn’t provide tax credits for books, we created public libraries. When we decided peoples’ houses shouldn’t burn down, we didn’t provide savings accounts for private fire insurance, we hired firefighters and built fire stations. If the broad left takes power again, enough with too-clever-by-half social engineering. Help people and take credit."

As Lambert Strether of Corrente says: universal, concrete, material benefits.

He definitely put years into it. I first tried reading it cold, with no prep. I read the first 3 pages over and over and gave up, it made no sense. A few years later I read a book about it which was a huge help. Then I found an entire section at the Connecticut College library dedicated to it.

I'm still finding "hidden tracks" in it after reading it and reading about it for 25 years. Like how the first 3 chapters parallel the last 3 chapters. How Bloom's path at a certain point in the city resembles a question mark. The barmaid Sirens, the drunken lout Cyclops character, and all the other Odyssey parallels.

I visited the Martello tower from Chapter one when i went to Dublin, that was so cool to be there. I never did find Nelson's Pillar though. ;-)

what you saw was a mesh with a skin shader rendering in real-time so that's how fast it renders. didn't look terribly hi-res, the real advancement here is the quality of the skin shader(for realtime) and the fidelity of the facial rig, having proper face target shapes all blending together to get complex movements with skin compression/stretching/wrinkling at this level have historically been out of reach for anything but pre-rendered cgi.

They can probably drop libraries of mocap data on this with face markers that match those manipulation points you see in the video, and animators can use them to animate, or clean up/change the motion capture data.

and the skin textures/pore detail/face model are not a technological achievement as much as the work of a skilled artist, and the deformations are the result of someone who really knows their anatomy.

since there is no animation in this video, no performance, it's hard to judge how realistic it feels. the real trick is always seeing it animated.