Category: Blog

Kubrick on planning:

How much planning do you do before you start to shoot a scene?
As much as there are hours in the day, and days in the week. I think about a film almost continuously.

Eitan Grinspun does a lot of work on Physical Modelling – adding physical properties to three dimensional geometry in order to simulate them more effectively. Don’t fake it, make it! Via Tim Greatrex.

Oculus have made the greatest CTO hire ever – John Carmack. Cue hilarious PR battling between the companies he left. I love how he summed up his time now:

“My time division is now Oculus over Id over Armadillo. Busy busy busy!”

Hawken is a completley free to play game. We’ll be seeing more of these. I’d love to try it with an Oculus.

Astro Teller‘s talk at SXSW Interactive 2013 – all about Google [x].

“Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers have teamed up to form the Glass Collective.

We’re excited by the promise of the Glass platform. Developers are already dreaming up new experiences for Glass, and we want to help bring those ideas to life.

The Glass Collective investment syndicate will provide financing and support to entrepreneurs shaping the future through Glass.”

Wavelet Trees – an introduction.

“If you are willing to build your business on expertise, you can make a living instead of making a fortune — and occasionally the fortune comes anyway.”

So says Kevin Kelly reviewing the “The Incredible Secret Money Making Machine” by Don Lancaster. Keeping small, keeping nimble and spreading your activities seems to be a wise way to go.

I was reminded of my friend Lise Hansen of AHO telling the story of her friend Douglas Bevans. He advised never having any one skill or task or occupation that took up more than half of your time. “What would Douglas do?” is a useful tool.

“I gained a BFA in Printmaking (1970) from San Francisco Art Institute. I pursued a career as an illustrator, first in the US, and from 1985 in London, with clients such as BBC Education, EMI, Harpers magazine, OUP, and Warner Bros. Since the mid 1990s I have combined my freelance practice with part-time teaching at a number of colleges including CSM and ENSAD Paris before taking on my present role at CSM in 2002. I also lecture at the Royal College of Art. A member of Designer Bookbinders, I am a regular presence at London Artist’s Book Fair.”

Zach Gage is someone who has been doing interesting things for a while. I met him at Eyebeam at an OF knitting circle. He is the creator of Spell Tower and part of the team that produced the frankly genius Ridiculous Fishing – the latter being undoubtedly my most played game of recent times.

A pair of choice tweets from Zach:

At MetaBroadcast, we saw a few examples of Walter Bosse‘s work. They are doing some very interesting research into looking at the social activity surrounding broadcast content – and what information and insight can be derived from it.

A few months ago, the BBC screened “Carved with Love: The Genius of British Woodwork” – the highlight videos on their site are well worth a look.

YES!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_grammar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaprogramming

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_analysis

Danielle Leduc publishes the anti-preneur manifesto:

“I don’t want to be a designer, a marketer, an illustrator, a brander, a social media consultant, a multi-platform guru, an interface wizard, a writer of copy, a technological assistant, an applicator, an aesthetic king, a notable user, a profit-maximizer, a bottom-line analyzer, a meme generator, a hit tracker, a re-poster, a sponsored blogger, a starred commentator, an online retailer, a viral relayer, a handle, a font or a page. I don’t want to be linked in, tuned in, ‘liked’, incorporated, listed or programmed. 
I don’t want to be a brand, a representative, an ambassador, a bestseller or a chart-topper. I don’t want to be a human resource or part of your human capital.”

A beautiful example of why data visualisation is essential:

The Anscombe’s Quartet shows how four sets of data with identical simple summary statistics can vary considerably when graphed.

Geoffrey Hinton has joined Google.

“Last summer, I spent several months working with Google’s Knowledge team in Mountain View, working with Jeff Dean and an incredible group of scientists and engineers who have a real shot at making spectacular progress in machine learning. Together with two of my recent graduate students, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krizhevsky (who won the 2012 ImageNet competition), I am betting on Google’s team to be the epicenter of future breakthroughs. That means we’ll soon be joining Google to work with some of the smartest engineering minds to tackle some of the biggest challenges in computer science. I’ll remain part-time at the University of Toronto, where I still have a lot of excellent graduate students, but at Google I will get to see what we can do with very large-scale computation.”

Deep learning on a GooglePlex scale beckons…..

I read about Strinkgly on Forbes recently – imagine a blogging service that worked like this? A single page that went on forever – it seems it’s just being used for more website content at the moment – path to profitability I suppose.

Le Wei is at Google now – working on Plus apparently. More on the project from Golan Levin’s site.

Karen Day pointed out this Kyle Van Hemert article at Fast Company about Evgeny Morozov‘s recent piece for the Times

“For many institutions, ‘open’ has become the new ‘green.’ And in the same way that companies will ‘greenwash’ their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read ‘openness’ into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: ‘openwashing.’

Alas, ‘openwashing,’ as catchy as it sounds, only questions the authenticity of ‘open’ initiatives; it doesn’t tell us what kinds of ‘openness,’ if any, are worth pursuing. We must differentiate the many different types of ‘open.'”