Tag: video

Mafia Art World

Step inside a world of high art, low cunning and prices beyond your wildest imaginings. The Banker’s Guide To The Art Market is a revealing, wry and rare look behind doors that are closed to most of us. Propelled by the newly rich of the financial world, London’s art market has soared to historic highs.

The film deconstructs this extraordinary phenomenon and looks back over a century of the market’s twists and turns to try to explain it, talking to outspoken collector Jeffrey Archer – ‘I couldn’t afford to buy my own pictures’ – maverick dealer Kenny Schacter – ‘when money is introduced it brings out the worst in people’ – and gallerist Nicholas Logsdail – ‘You’ll never go wrong, if you buy from a good gallery’. We don’t think you will look at a painting in quite the same way again.

100X faster metallic rendering

The standard approach to modeling the way surfaces reflect light assumes that the surfaces are smooth at the pixel level. But that’s not the case in the real world for metallic materials as well as fabrics, wood finishes and wood grain, among others. As a result, with current methods, these surfaces will appear noisy, grainy or glittery. “There is currently no algorithm that can efficiently render the rough appearance of real specular surfaces. This is highly unusual in modern computer graphics, where almost any other scene can be rendered given enough computing power.”

20nm imaging

The technology incorporates several innovations in fluorescence microscopy and super-resolution microscopy and harnesses the same kind of “adaptive optics” technology used in astronomy – deformable mirrors that change shape to compensate for light distortion. In astronomy the deformable mirrors are used to compensate for atmospheric distortion to yield clear images of celestial objects. Deformable mirrors also can be used to counteract the distortion caused when light passes through biological tissue.

Trace of the Weirding

it feels like decades worth of change happening within the space of weeks so it’s a weird kind of world happening around us right now you can’t really judge the state of it in the sense of providing an accurate snapshot but what you can do is narrate the perspective you have as you can make your way through the world. we’re gonna try to get a sense of the state of the weirding.

Largest war in history

The largest war in animal history — in fact, by numbers the largest war in history — is going on right now. The supercolony grew to cover most of the United States. Then it spread to England, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. L. humile is now abundant on every continent except Antarctica, and wherever she goes, she slaughters native ant species Things have not been perfect. Near San Diego, a schism formed, and a separate supercolony was created. The battlefront extends for km; some 30M ants die there every year. But for now, a global megacolony still persists, consisting of around 1T individuals: a humble brown ant united in war against every other ant alive.

GoT got nothing on these guys. Super vicious.