Tadeu

handa:

Artful Incorporation of Architecture into the Nature | Cruzine

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preludetowind:

John Lasseter honors Hayao Miyazaki at the 2014 Governors Awards [ x ]

becausebirds:

What is this?

An anonymous reader writes "A scientific study by Maggie Simpson, Edna Krabappel, and Kim Jong Fun has been accepted by two journals. Of course, none of these fictional characters actually wrote the paper, titled "Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations." Rather, it's a nonsensical text, submitted by engineer Alex Smolyanitsky in an effort to expose scientific journals — the Journal of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Have a Christmas, everyone. (image via not_a_rhino)

DJ Riko writes, "It's time once again for Merry Mixmas, a free Christmas music mix that is a holiday tradition dating back to 2002. This year's collection features some truly magnificent songs, with numbers new and old by performers big and small." Read the rest

swolizard:

Neil deGrasse Tyson for galactic chancellor representative in the milky way galaxy for Earth

New submitter stephenpeters writes The AdNauseam browser extension claims to click on each ad you have blocked with AdBlock in an attempt to obfuscate your browsing data. Officially launched mid November at the Digital Labour conference in New York, the authors hope this extension will register with advertisers as a protest against their pervasive monitoring of users online activities. It will be interesting to see how automated ad click browser extensions will affect the online ad arms race. Especially as French publishers are currently planning to sue Eyeo GmbH, the publishers of Adblock. This might obfuscate the meaning of the clicks, but what if it just encourages the ad sellers to claim even higher click-through rates as a selling point?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After much speculation and a ton of unconfirmed reports, Marvel has finally officially announced that Benedict Cumberbatch will play Doctor Strange. We first got word that the Sherlock/Star Trek Into Darkness star was in talks to play the Sorcerer Supreme back in October. Cumberbatch got involved after Joaquin Phoenix dropped out. It seemed like each day brought a new rumor about a potentialDoctor Strange lead. Names like Ethan Hawke, Jared Leto, Ewan McGregor, Matthew McConaughey, Colin Farrell, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Oscar Isaac were all floated as well. Days later Marvel announced a November 4th 2016 release date for Scott Derrickson-directed adaptation but did not make any casting announcements. And today Marvel confirms its a done deal – Benedict Cumberbatch will play Doctor Strange. Read the full Benedict Cumberbatch Doctor Strange press release after the jump.

Benedict Cumberbatch to Play Doctor Strange

The celebrated actor to become the Sorcerer Supreme!

Benedict Cumberbatch has entered the world of the mystic arts.

The actor will star in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange,” scheduled to hit theaters November 4, 2016. The film, directed by Scott Derrickson with Jon Spaihts writing the screenplay, will follow the story of neurosurgeon Doctor Stephen Strange who, after a horrific car accident, discovers the hidden world of magic and alternate dimensions.

“Stephen Strange’s story requires an actor capable of great depth and sincerity,” said Producer Kevin Feige. “In 2016, Benedict will show audiences what makes Doctor Strange such a unique and compelling character.”

Cumberbatch rose to international prominence with his critically acclaimed turn as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous creation in “Sherlock,” currently preparing its fourth season. The series’ most recent season earned Cumberbatch the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie in 2014, after winning the BAFTA/LA Britannia Award for British Artist of the Year in 2013.

Cumberbatch most recently starred in “The Imitation Game,” playing famed mathematician and logician Alan Turing, and will soon be seen in “The Hobbit: The Army of the Five Armies” as Smaug and the Necromancer. For the role of Smaug, Cumberbatch stepped into the world of motion capture to bring the dragon to life. He will next be seen in Scott Cooper’s film “Black Mass,” the story of Whitey Bulger coming to theaters next September, where he stars opposite Johnny Depp and Joel Edgerton.

The star’s other credits include the Academy Award-winning “12 Years a Slave,” “War Horse,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “August: Osage County,” “Star Trek Into Darkness,” “The Fifth Estate,” and “Parade’s End.” Benedict will be returning to the stage this summer in Hamlet at the Barbican with Lyndsey Turner directing. His last stage performance in Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein opposite Jonny Lee Miller awarded him the Olivier.

With “Doctor Strange,” Cumberbatch is just the latest actor to join the bold Phase 3 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, introducing new heroes and continuing the adventures of fan favorites across multiple films. 

Source: Marvel

The post Benedict Cumberbatch Confirmed To Play ‘Doctor Strange’ appeared first on /Film.

JoeyRox writes: The publicized goal of Tesla's "gigafactory" is to make electric cars more affordable. However, that benefit may soon be eclipsed by the gigafactory's impact on roof-top solar power storage costs, putting the business model of utilities in peril. "The mortal threat that ever cheaper on-site renewables pose" comes from systems that include storage, said physicist Amory Lovins. "That is an unregulated product you can buy at Home Depot that leaves the old business model with no place to hide."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(via robotindisguise)

ANNOUNCEMENT: We will cease taking Augie preorders on December 15.

We know that in order to truly enjoy your feeds, you have to be able to organize them. That’s why we’ve introduced a bunch of enhanced tools to help you create, reorder, and prioritize your feeds and folders. 

You can find these tools on the new Subscriptions management page. Click on your user name in the upper right hand corner to get there. Among all of the functions there, you can now sort feeds and folders alphabetically or however you like to read them.

We hope you enjoy the improved subscription management page features, including alphabetizing your feeds and moving feeds to a folder. Let us know what you think about them. In the meantime, we’ll continue to fine-tune your experience to make it even easier to get your fix of all your favorite feeds. 

Because ‘buffet’ is a French word!! Do you get it??

One time I was at a buffet and there was this platter of shrimp– a real pile of them, probably about a hundred– and this one family picked the whole thing up and took it back to their table where they all sat around it and… I can’t find the words to describe how they did it, but they did not stand up again until it was gone.

This was their appetizer.

This is yet again another topic suggested by Chris: “All you can eat buffet”

Those are the topics of the job market paper (pdf) from Frank Schilbach of Harvard:

High levels of alcohol consumption are more common among the poor. This could have economic consequences beyond mere income effects because alcohol impairs mental processes and decision-making. Since alcohol is thought to induce myopia, this paper tests for impacts on self-control and on savings behavior. In a three-week field experiment with low-income workers in India, I provided 229 individuals with a high-return savings opportunity and randomized incentives for sobriety among them. The incentives significantly reduced daytime drinking as measured by decreased breathalyzer scores. This in turn increased savings by approximately 60 percent. No more than half of this effect is explained by changes in income net of alcohol expenditures. In addition, consistent with enhanced self-control due to lower inebriation levels, incentivizing sobriety reduced the impact of a savings commitment device. Finally, alcohol consumption itself is prone to self-control problems: over half of the study participants were willing to sacrifce money to receive incentives to be sober, exhibiting demand for commitment to increase their sobriety. These findings suggest that heavy alcohol consumption is not just a result of self-control problems, but also creates self-control problems in other areas, potentially even exacerbating poverty by reducing savings.

I saw the pointer from Sendhil Mullainathan on Twitter.

Can computers learn to paint like Van Gogh? To some extent—definitely yes! For that, akin to human imitation artists, an algorithm should first be fed the original artists’ creations, and then it will be able to generate a machine take on them. How well? Please judge for yourself.

Second prize in the ZEISS photography competition

Recently the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge announced the winners of the annual photography competition, “The Art of Engineering: Images from the Frontiers of Technology.” The second prize went to Yarin Gal, a PhD student in the Machine Learning group, for his extrapolation of Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night, shown above. Readers can view this and similar computer-extended images at Gal’s website Extrapolated Art. An inpainting algorithm called PatchMatch was used to create the machine art, and in this post I will show how one can obtain similar effects using the Wolfram Language.

The term “digital inpainting” was first introduced in the “Image Inpainting” article at the SIGGRAPH 2000 conference. The main goal of inpainting is to restore damaged parts in an image. However, it is also widely used to remove or replace selected objects.

In the Wolfram Language, Inpaint is a built-in function. The region to be inpainted (or retouched) can be given as an image, a graphics object, or a matrix.

There are five different algorithms available in Inpaint that one can select using the Method option: “Diffusion,” “TotalVariation,” “FastMarching,” “NavierStokes,” and “TextureSynthesis” (default setting). “TextureSynthesis,” in contrast to other algorithms, does not operate separately on each color channel and it does not introduce any new pixel values. In other words, each inpainted pixel value is taken from the parts of the input image that correspond to zero elements in the region argument. In the example below, it is clearly visible that these properties of the “TextureSynthesis” algorithm make it the method of choice for removing large objects from an image.

The “TextureSynthesis” method is based on the algorithm described in “Image Texture Tools,” a PhD thesis by P. Harrison. This algorithm is an enhanced best-fit approach introduced in 1981 by D. Garber in “Computational Models for Texture Analysis and Texture Synthesis.” Parameters for the “TextureSynthesis” algorithm can be specified via two suboptions: “NeighborCount” (default: 30) and “MaxSamples” (default: 300). The first parameter defines the number of nearby pixels used for texture comparison, and the second parameter specifies the maximum number of samples used to find the best-fit texture.

Let’s go back to the extrapolation of Van Gogh’s painting. First, I import the painting and remove the border.

Next, I need to extend the image by padding it with white pixels to generate the inpainting region.

Now I can extrapolate the painting using the “TextureSynthesis” method.

Not too bad. Different effects can be obtained by changing the values of the “NeighborCount” and “MaxSamples” suboptions.

Our readers should experiment with other parameter values and artworks.*

This, perhaps, would make an original gift for the upcoming holidays. A personal artwork or a photo would make a great project. Or just imagine surprising your child by showing him an improvisation of his own drawing, like the one above of a craft by a fourteen-year-old girl. It’s up to your imagination. Feel free to post your experiments on Wolfram Community!

Download this post as a Computable Document Format (CDF) file.

*If you don’t already have Wolfram Language software, you can try it for free via Wolfram Programming Cloud or a trial of Mathematica.

[David Schneider] was reading about recent discoveries of exoplanets. Simply put these are planets orbiting stars other than the sun. The rigs used by the research scientists include massive telescopes, but the fact that they’re using CCD sensors led [David] to wonder if a version of this could be done on the cheap in the backyard. The answer is yes. By capturing and processing data from a barn door tracker he was able to verify a known exoplanet.

Barn Door trackers are devices used to move a camera to compensate for the turning of the earth. This is necessary when taking images throughout the night, as the stars will not remain “stationary” to the camera’s frame without it. The good news is that they’re simple to build, we’ve seen a few over the years.

Other than having to wait until his part of the earth was pointed in the correct direction (on a clear night) at the same time as an exoplanet transit, [David] was ready to harvest all the data he needed. This part gets interesting really quickly. The camera needed to catch the planet passing in between the earth and the star it revolves around (called a transit). The data to prove this happened is really subtle. To uncover it [David] needed to control the data set for atmospheric changes by referencing several other stars. From there he focused on the data for the transit target and compared points across the entire set of captured images. The result is a dip in brightness that matches the specifications of the original discovery.

[David] explains the entire process in the clip after the break.

Filed under: digital cameras hacks, slider

The AmazingScience YouTube channel demonstrates how to build a ridiculously simple electric “train” with the help of a few magnets, a battery, and a copper coil. You can also use the same materials to build a little spinning motor-like contraption. (via Twisted Sifter)

becausebirds:

So my gifs got captioned. I had to share. Thanks, runl.tumblr

First time accepted submitter neoritter writes "The Korean pop star PSY's viral music video "Gangnam Style" has reached the limit of YouTube's view counter. According to YouTube's Google+ account, "We never thought a video would be watched in numbers greater than a 32-bit integer (=2,147,483,647 views), but that was before we met PSY. 'Gangnam Style' has been viewed so many times we had to upgrade to a 64-bit integer (9,223,372,036,854,775,808)!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

via blog:)stanis.ru

via http://thisisnthappiness.com/page/2

upthewitchypunx:

good advice.