viewtransform

They are also good at arm-wrestling https://youtu.be/1jyyBkohi3Y?t=12

For those who don't get this - it is a clever reference to Euler's Twelve Pentagon theorem : "any closed polyhedron composed no polygons other than hexagons and pentagons and having no holes must have exactly 12 pentagons."

This one I discovered in a local history book in Utah. It is a coin from India 1830 that was found buried in Southern Utah as part of a Spanish cache. Apparently Spanish priests during that time were amassing good sums of gold from their native american converts and would bury their loot.

https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id=449253

The scale is deceptive. Take a look at the report on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xa_Q1R7mGs&t=132s and you will see a thick concrete spillway with 1.5" rebar. All that was ripped off by the force of the water!

One tactic is to insert a challenge that had to be overcome, the conflicts that arose in the solution and then the final resolution.

This is standard fare in Nova documentaries where the topic can often be fairly dull. eg: documentary is about dinosaurs, they find a dinosaur fossil, extract it from the surrounding rock and take it back for cleaning and research. Pretty dull stuff.

But if you blow up some minor crisis: Scientists are extracting the large fossil but oh my, the plaster-cast looks like it may break (crisis). What can they do ? They gather in a room to decide, there are conflicting opinions (conflict). Finally one person makes a decision - they will wrap the plaster-cast in a wooden cage and use a fork lift. But will it work !? (drama). Tension builds as the forklift truck raises the plaster-cast - and, sigh of relief, it works. The fossil is safe (resolution).

The above scene is completely unnecessary for the documentary but inserting it grabs the viewers attention.

This formula works when giving fairly dull presentations - find something that blocked you in your research, explain the options you had and the choices you had to make and how you finally overcame that minor crisis.

Knowing this formula will, unfortunately, ruin your Nova viewing experience since they use this technique every time.

The downside for consumers is that once you know the patterns that storytellers follow, it becomes one of those 'can't unsee it' things that just stand out in movies. It's only the few good movies that manage to draw you into the story despite the obvious story telling pattern.

There's a video of a large mirror placed in a jungle and the reaction of various animals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaMylwohL14

Also previously on HN this same topic was discussed https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7751593

I highly recommend these youtube videos by 3Blue1Brown https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZHQObOWTQDPD3MizzM2x....

Each short lecture had a 'Why didn't they tell me that in college!' kind of insight. Transformations, determinants, dot products, cross products everything made sense in a visual way.

There has been standardization in many areas since the days of Toy Story: Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Nuke are now standards in the industry.

It took a while for forward thinking technical managers to convince studio executives that open-sourcing some internal tools and data formats would benefit the studio by making it a standard within the industry. OpenEXR (image format, ILM), Alembic(data format, Imageworks), OpenSubdiv(subdivison surfaces, Pixar), Ptex(texture mapping, Disney) are examples that were quickly adopted across studios. It helps that artists and engineers tend to move across studios bringing with them ideas about what worked best at the previous studio.

In general, the software teams at the studios fall under the line item of "Overhead" in a producers financial spreadsheet. There is pressure to reduce this overhead by adopting standardized tools and not reinventing things in-house.

It has more to do with risk management coming out of the finance dept.

The studio knows that a sequel will have a guaranteed $ minimum return just because it is a sequel. Hence they can estimate how much to sink into production to guarantee a profit. Then they green light the movie production for that budget.

Same goes for the cast. The studio finance dept can look at previous years data and predict that $ million will be guaranteed to be made just because the movie stars Jennifer Aniston or Adam Sandler. Irrespective of the what the movie is about. Just because people see the name and wander into the theatre while on a date or buy the DVD for $15.99 at the grocery store. This provides a target production budget for green lighting the movie. Then they hire a director and try to figure what the story will be about.

The China market also affects cast and story. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8R-FQTY4KJk

Sony Imageworks had a reusable digital library for the buildings in Manhattan. The fire from GhostRider also saw reuse. These models are tied to the production pipeline at Sony: the shaders, data formats, texture pipeline, effects pipeline etc. A reusable backlot company does not exist because a standard studio production pipeline does not exist.

When they compare the sequenced genomes of two species, say mouse and human, do they compare the entire genomes or just the known coding regions ? Are there similar regions in mouse and human that we have no clue what they are about ?

This seems to work in Firefox. Disables notifications for all sites.

  about:config 
  dom.webnotifications.enabled => false

AMD has a new virtualization solution which provides SR-IOV hardware based partitioning on their AMD FirePro S7150 or S7150 x2 gpu cards. http://www.amd.com/en-us/solutions/professional/virtualizati...

This video explains what you get https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKBthlKTtvQ

I got fed up with delicious and moved to pinboard.in several months ago. I am very pleased with the service $11/year and will continue to support the developer.

Ankor Wat was built by a local king.

No Indian empire invaded or controlled SE Asia. The influence of Buddhism and Hinduism in Bali and Cambodia is testament to the influence of Indian philosophy and belief not might.

If the guy was from India(especially southern states and West Bengal) be aware that shaking the head side to side means that he was agreeing with you or indicating that he was following you.