Tag: images

Skeuomorphic hell

Alone, each plugin is hideous in its own unique way. A panel of 3D knobs here, a pixelated oscilloscope there. But when a project really gets cooking, one can amass 8 or 10 of these interfaces overlapping each other on the screen at once, and that’s when skeuomorph hell really comes into focus. I don’t know why audio software has looked like this for the better part of 20 years, but I’d like to honor these sins of UI with a tour of some of the most egregious examples.

Burning Man 2017

Each year, Burning Man participants travel to the playa of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to form a temporary city—a self-reliant community populated by performers, artists, free spirits, and more. 70k people from all over the world came to the 31st annual Burning Man to dance, express themselves, and take in the spectacle, themed this year as “Radical Ritual.”

1000x faster Metal Printing

The challenge with all these claims is that there’s no standard measure for printing speed, making these hard to compare. The best seems to be kg / h.

The SPEE3D printer has the potential to turn 3D metal printing, which currently is just making prototypes of parts, into a tool for manufacturing actual parts for use. It is up to 1000x quicker than conventional 3D metal printers.

Copper Rocket Nozzle
Print Time: 199 minutes
Weight: 17.9KG
Cost: $716
Speed: 5.4 kg / h

This 265mm x 300mm high, aerospace rocket nozzle liner was printed in pure copper on the WarpSPEE3D. Parts like these are typically machined out of solid wrought copper, a process that takes weeks and costs 10s of 1000s of $. The lead time for producing these parts is also typically around 6 months.

2022-03-20: Seurat uses a pixelization type approach to speed things up.

With the equivalent of 2.4m pixels projected in each square, the machine can print parts with layers just 25 microns thick at a rate of 3kg an hour. This is 10X faster than a typical L-BPF machine at such a fine resolution. Production versions of the Seurat Large-Area Pulsed Laser Powder Bed Fusion printer are now being built, and future generations of the machine should end up being 100x faster.

Area printing will be competitive with mass-production factory processes, such as machining, stamping and casting. By 2030 it will be possible to produce silverware for $25 a kilo. “That means we could actually print silverware cheaper than you could stamp them out”.

2023-05-13: Seurat lands a big customer

The part Seurat will produce for Siemens Energy is a turbine sealing segment made from a nickel-based alloy — it’s a component the company hadn’t previously considered as a candidate for 3D printing.

Over the 6-year length of the contract, Seurat will produce 59 tons of the sealing segments and related components. The big benefit is the potential cost savings, but the approach also reduces the emissions associated with producing the part, because Seurat’s technology is powered with solar and wind electricity that the company sources locally. The equation Seurat uses to talk about this is 1 metric ton of emissions reductions for every ton of components made. The approach also dramatically reduces the feedstock needed for production, which cuts down on scrap.

Dust size cameras

The pill-sized cameras in today’s mobile phones may seem miraculously tiny, given that a decade ago the smallest cameras available for retail sale were the size of a pack of cards. Ali Hajimiri of the California Institute of Technology will make far smaller cameras. His team plan to replace them with truly minuscule devices that spurn every aspect of current photographic technology. Not only do Dr Hajimiri’s cameras have no moving parts, they also lack lenses and mirrors—in other words, they have no conventional optics. That does away with the focal depth required by today’s cameras, enabling the new devices to be flat.

Uzbekistan

It’s everybody’s favorite vacation getaway: Uzbekistan! I knew almost nothing of Uzbekistan before my visit there so everyday was a cascade of surprises. While Americans think of Central Asia as the most remote places possible, people in Uzbekistan see themselves as at the center of the universe. They’ve been farming there for 6000 years, and everyone has passed through over the centuries. I was so delighted I could as well.

Roman Empire subway map

Explore the Peutinger Map presents The Peutinger Map in different ways, including with overlays and lists of geographical features. But what’s The Peutinger Map? Also known as Tabula Peutingeriana, it is a Medieval copy of highly stylized 4th Century map of the Roman road network, extending to India. Jacob Ford explains why it is often compared to modern public transit maps and then redraws 1 section as a New York Metro map.

Non-african mummies

We found the ancient Egyptian samples falling distinct from modern Egyptians, and closer towards Near Eastern and European samples (Fig. 4a, Supplementary Fig. 3, Supplementary Table 5). In contrast, modern Egyptians are shifted towards sub-Saharan African populations. Model-based clustering using ADMIXTURE37 (Fig. 4b, Supplementary Fig. 4) further supports these results and reveals that the 3 ancient Egyptians differ from modern Egyptians by a relatively larger Near Eastern genetic component, in particular a component found in Neolithic Levantine ancient individuals36 (Fig. 4b). In contrast, a substantially larger sub-Saharan African component, found primarily in West-African Yoruba, is seen in modern Egyptians compared to the ancient samples.

2021-11-05: Mummification is also older than previously thought:

The preserved body of a high-ranking nobleman called Khuwy, discovered in 2019, has been found to be far older than assumed and is, in fact, 1 of the oldest Egyptian mummies ever discovered. It has been dated to the Old Kingdom, proving that mummification techniques 4 ka BP were highly advanced. The sophistication of the body’s mummification process and the materials used – including its exceptionally fine linen dressing and high-quality resin – was not thought to have been achieved until 1 ka later.