Counter-rotating propellers sparked my curiosity when I first saw them on a British Seafire Mk46 at a flight show in the early nineties.

So my amateur's answer would be that it's about the problem of turning the engine's power into thrust. With increasing power, you can either increase the propeller's RPM or its area. So you either a) spin it faster, b) increase its diameter, c) use a more favourable blade geometry, d) add more blades.

a) and b) both lead to blade tips moving faster, and once they approach the speed of sound, wave drag sets in and ruins your day. b) also runs into issues in terms of ground clearance. Thus the Kim Jong-un blades on planes like the An-70: short and fat.

c) is rather difficult to do in terms of manufacture -- that's why more pronounced blade shapes are a relatively recent development.

d) on a single propeller decreases the efficiency of each blade as it passes through the previous blade's vortex. That's why, for instance, German planes in WW2 almost exclusively relied on 3-bladed propellers with increasing blade size, whereas Supermarine went to four and even 5 blades rather quickly. You can work the issue to a certain degree by modifying the blade geometry, thus the 8 blade props on a modern A400M.

Adding more blades by adding another propeller gets around d), although the aft prop still loses efficiency compared to the front prop. On the other hand, counter-rotating props massively reduces problems with torque, which can be rather horrendous for single engine prop planes. The Bf 109, for instance, is (in)famous for being difficult during take-off as it pulls to the side quite violently.

haha, that things just a tad bit more aggressive. Saddly it looks like someone made a automated gun aiming rig and decided to dress it up by plopping an egg shaped styrofoam mock up in the center of it rather then actually build the guns into the egg shaped object like you are supposed to. They didn't even bother with building the same ai as the robots into the gun firing routine (complete with sound effects beeps). The whole portal thing was a complete afterthought.

Oh ya, I miss-read your post. I think this fidelity is probably doable in games now, or maybe soon since games like Star Citizen are able to load SO MUCH geometry into a scene. Sounds like they are optimizing quite a bit by using vertex offsets for the face shapes instead of having to load all the extra geo as target shapes.

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.

*promote for those who are being ushered in to the Star Trek universe with discovery. It is an iconic franchise that helped shape society.

I had no clue that this shaped 80's music. It is from my favorite Peter Gabriel album.

Looking at this, and the accolades given to Curiosity, I wonder why people get so bent out of shape when I go off road on park land.

What a great teaching aid.
Not everyone is able to drop and give 20 pushups in a timely fashion so not only is a person singled out for not knowing the answer but for not being able to do the required physical task as well.
The blonde woman doesn't exactly look in tip top shape herself.

They both should have been canned.
That is after they were both required to run 4 miles first.

He was lucky, you can see he went up and over the hood, so instead of a direct impact on him, the bike took the brunt of the damage. If it had been a truck or something he'd be in bad shape.

15:05-15:30: you tell Mr and Mrs Front-Porch that your loonie of 1871 cannot be compared to your loonie of 2013 (year of this interview). You went off the gold standard in '33, you abandoned the peg in '70, and your currency has been free-floating ever since. Yes, the ratio of debt to GDP has some importance, but so does the nature of your currency. Just look at Greece and Japan, where the former uses a foreign currency and the latter uses its own, sovereign, free-floating currency.

Pay back the national debt -- have you thought that through?

First, the Bank of Canada is the monopolist currency issuer for the loonie, so explain to me in detail just how the issuer of the currency is supposed to borrow the currency from someone else? If you're the issuer of the currency, you spend it into existence, and use taxation as a means to create demand for your currency, and to free resources for the government to acquire, because you can only ever buy what is for sale.

Second, every government bond is someone else's asset. An interest-bearing asset. A very safe asset, in the case of Canada, the US, the UK, Japan, etc. "Paying back the debt" means putting a bullet into just about every pension fund in the world that doesn't rely exlusively on private equity or other sorts of volatile toilet paper.

There's a distributional issue with these bonds (they are concentrated in the hands of the non-working class, aka the rich), no doubt about it. But most of the other issues are strictly political, not economical.

What if the interest rate rises 1%? The central bank can lower the interest rate to whatever it damn well pleases, because nobody can ever outbid the currency issuer in its own currency. Remember, the central banks were the banks of the treasuries. The whole notion of an independent central bank was introduced to stop these pesky leftists from spending resources on plebs. That's why central banks were often removed from democratic control and handed over to conservative bankers. If the Treasury wants an interest rate of 2% on its bonds, it tells its central bank to buy any excess that haven't been auctioned off at this rate. End of story.

What if the market stops buying government bonds? Then the central bank buys the whole lot. However, government bonds are safe assets, and regulations demand a certain percentage of safe assets in certain portfolios, so there is always demand for the bonds. Just look at the German Bundesanleihen. You get negative real rates on 10 year bonds, and they are still in very high demand. It's a safe asset in a world of shitty private equity vaporware.

But, but.... inflation! Right, the hyperinflation of 2006 is still right around the corner. Just like Japan hasn't been stuck near deflation for two decades, and all the QE by the BoE and the ECB has thrown both the UK and the Eurozone into double-digit inflation territory. Not! None of these economies are running near maximum capacity/full employment, and very little actual spending (the scary, scary "fiscal policy") has been done.

But I'm going off track here, so.... yeah, you can pay back your public debt. Just be very aware of what exactly that entails.

As for the poster-child Latvia: >10% of the population left the country.

Here's a different poster-child instead, with the hindsight of another 4 years of austerity in Europe after this interview: Portugal. The Portuguese government told Master of Coin Schäube to take a hike, and they are now in better shape than the countries who just keep on slashing.

On a different note: Marx was wrong about the proletariat. Treating them like shit doesn't make them rebellious, it makes them lethargic. Otherwise goons like Mario Rajoy would have had their comeuppance by now.

PS: Blyth's book on Austerity is an absolute must-read for anyone interested in its history or its current effects in particularly the Eurozone.

Wow. I didn't realize the difference in prison populations since the 70's was so large. That is completely insane.
I think it speaks volumes that GW sells his paintings for charity and gives the money to the Carter Center. Carter is the only president in my lifetime that I have respect for or feel was honestly working in America's best interests rather than his own. Had we followed his policies instead of scrapping them with Regan, I believe our country would be in incredibly better shape, as would much of the rest of the planet.

The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran Parody) has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.

The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran Parody) has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.

The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran Parody) has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.

The Molecular Shape of You (Ed Sheeran Parody) has been added as a related post - related requested by eric3579 on that post.