Month: August 2014

Libya Blew Billions

Another failed state in the making.

“Libya is a monkey box. You see the chairman of the National Council or whatever it’s called appearing on television wearing slippers and holding a Kalashnikov. They have no idea what they have, and what they have, they steal.” The game of wildly overstating the personal wealth of Middle Eastern dictators, and then stealing national assets under cover of civil conflict and social chaos, is one that Western governments and financial institutions and their co-conspirators in Arab countries play hand-in-glove. “They said Hosni Mubarak and his family were worth over $20B. The real number turned out to be a few 10s of millions. Meanwhile, when Mubarak was removed from office, the foreign currency reserves and national investments of Egypt were $54B. Now they are below 0. You tell me where that money went.”

Cybermatrix 100

the next ouya, paging Cory Altheide

the cybermatrix 100 has the ability to make games, movies and music in cyberspace, and has the main console, the rom attatchment, the cyberportal, cyberbooth, cyber controller, for navigating the explorer of the cyber os, cyberstove, galaxy attachment for making your own devices, and has 2 cyberterminals: the private cyberterminal for games, and the public cyberterminal for socialization. you can make these medias using the cyber os proprietary engine. it also will come with 2 proprietary games: cybermatrix underground, and cybermatrix sports.

turning 2D into 3D

We present a method that enables users to perform the full range of 3D manipulations, including scaling, rotation, translation, and nonrigid deformations, to an object in a photograph. As 3D manipulations often reveal parts of the object that are hidden in the original photograph, our approach uses publicly available 3D models to guide the completion of the geometry and appearance of the revealed areas of the object. The completion process leverages the structure and symmetry in the stock 3D model to factor out the effects of illumination, and to complete the appearance of the object. We demonstrate our system by producing object manipulations that would be impossible in traditional 2D photo-editing programs, such as turning a car over, making a paper-crane flap its wings, or manipulating airplanes in a historical photograph to change its story.