I’m similar to you, except to upgrade my practical math skills at college I did cultivate a “liking” for math comparable to other technical areas I pursue. Namely, I started reading popular math books and articles, watching math youtubers, solving recreational puzzles from math periodicals… It was like, half actual interest and half contrived interest, seeing if I could develop in that direction. One summer when I had a lot of free time, with the help of a mathematician friend, I worked through a few advanced textbooks and video lecture series beyond anything I strictly needed. Progress was real but agonizing, and then I promptly forgot everything. It turns out that just maintaining a mid-to-late-undergraduate-level understanding of applied math is all I can be responsible for. It’s a responsibility I attend to, but my brain is only so mathy. At some point it becomes a question of both motivation and ability.
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Kaijo
Authenticity (as Gidon Kremer once said), above all, is what is genuinely felt, and the inner world of a dedicated listener who has built up a relationship with their music over a lifetime is full of genuine feeling. It _is_ participation, not mere consumption. Even if the act of listening is a private one. Art forms need properly attentive audiences.
I say this as a decent pianist who collaborates, performs, teaches, records. And who messes around with AI with great fascination. Music is so broad and diverse in the experiences it can provide and the social functions it stands in relation to. Separate channels and bubbles can be good, the signs of a tree of life diversifying. Your lakeside vignette doesn’t say anything about something wrong in music and culture, it’s just a normal thing that happens whenever people chill out by a lake throughout human history. Off-key singing and dancing to salsa and reggaeton? I wouldn’t be nervous about joining in, I’d be heading to the opposite side of the lake. And that’s good too – how personal music can be, that that’s your thing, not my thing.
To drain pasta or noodles quickly, I put it in a colander, hold it above my kitchen sink, and swirl it around in quick circles. I realized about a month ago my circles are always counterclockwise, and very efficient, but that I can't keep a clockwise spin going for more than a few cycles before messing up. Since then I keep trying to spin my pasta clockwise (such are the small excitements and adventures of my wfh life), starting with very slow movements, but I just can't do it. There's something weird about this motor skill specifically that eludes me. I'm left-handed but my right-handed writing is reasonable and I play piano with matched abilities in both hands. Maybe one day, with enough practice, my pasta will go clockwise.
Thanks for mentioning this. I have activated a one-month LinkedIn Premium free trial, hopefully as another layer of protection while I re-establish myself and fortify my profile.
I hate LinkedIn but need it for a few things, mostly accessing certain clients and projects as a freelancer. Last October my ISP (Vodafone UK) assigned me a datacenter-classified IPv6 address with 80+ abuse reports on reputation databases, for bots, DDoS, crawlers. Before I realized this I started getting locked out, suspended, restricted from just about every web service I use, having to solve captchas for simple Google searches, etc.
I resolved everything except LinkedIn. They required Persona verification to restore access, but I'd already recently verified with Persona, so clicking the re-verification links just returned a Catch-22 "you've already verified with us." LinkedIn support is unreachable unless you're signed into an account. I tried direct emails, webforms, DMs to LinkedIn Help on Twitter, all completely ignored.
Eventually some cooldown timer must have expired, because Persona finally let me re-verify last week. Upon regaining access, I was encouraged me to verify with Persona AGAIN, this time for the verified badge.
I now have a taste of what "digital underclass" means, and look forward to the day when no part of my income depends on horrible platforms that make me desperate for the opportunity to give away my personal data!
Wolfram came to our evolutionary biology department to preach that book about 20 years ago. We all got our heads into cellular automata for a while, but in the end they just don't have the claimed profound explanatory power in real biological systems.
It depends on the kind of work. If it's routine stuff, past seven hours or so, I can keep going and not feel tired, but I increasingly don't want to, and the feeling that I'd rather be doing something else becomes very distracting. If the work is technical and intellectually rewarding, I might feel inspired to continue, but I start making mistakes and past a certain point, it becomes counterproductive. If the work requires conceptual or creative insights, my brain stops delivering them for free and my backup methods for squeezing them out start failing too. If I'm speaking or writing, I lose the thread and my words lose their punch and personality. My occasional bouts of insomnia bring a different kind of all-encompassing fatigue. I become overemotional. At my most sleep-deprived, I struggle to operate a kettle. Things were different when I was younger. Writing up my PhD, I essentially slept every other night for months, yet stayed sharp, productive.
I find it impossible to reconcile Monty's character with the fact Richard Griffiths was only forty years old when he played him. Yes, forty. I'm 46 now but however old I get, Uncle Monty will forever remain the archetypal "batty older queen" in my head.
From what I understand, Moses's major contribution was describing color mixing principles for pigment paints independent of the notion of specially nominated primary colors, showing among other things that a mixture of any two paints is reduced in saturation in proprtion to their separation on the hue circle. I've been exploring classic color theory texts lately and the most illuminating by far as been Michel-Eugène Chevreul's "Principles of Color Harmony and Contrast", which has a wonderful recent translation and commentary by Dan Margulis. The core of the work elucidates what are known today as the optical phenomena of simultaneous contrast, chromatic adaptation, perceptual constancy. There is also a good overview and critique of historical color wheels at https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color14.html
The third video in the "Featured Introductions" section near the top of the page, called "A Swift Introduction to Geometric Algebra", is a very good starting point.
I also have to balance foodie obsessions with being economical and healthy. (Growing up, my extended family had a culture of "living to eat" and they ran several restaurants as a trophy thing, i.e., with negligible profit but acclaimed food.) I'm now an experienced home cook who likes throwing somewhat elaborate dinner parties, but when on my own it still makes sense to just batch cook and freeze. When it comes to that, what I notice is that I'm still making the same dishes I did as a poor student, just augmented. The base dish is quite tasty to start with, but now I can afford to use a few nicer or speciality ingredients that take it up a level. If you're making a cauldron of risotto or tomato sauce or whatever that will yield dozens of servings, it doesn't cost that much more per serving to add the extra thing or perform the extra technique that makes it really delicious or interesting (and compensates for the fact you're freezing it). The same applies to everyday things that I whip up to eat fresh, in terms of keeping a well-stocked pantry of somewhat pricey powders and potions that only get used up slowly.
The addon you're referring to is already available: https://github.com/rlguy/Blender-FLIP-Fluids/wiki/Mixbox-Ins...
It works as a kind of experimental extension supplied with the paid FLIP Fluids addon. Note that the fluid solver built into Blender is also an implementation of FLIP, but "FLIP Fluids" is a separate product. I've played with fluid simulation in Blender quite a bit. The bundled FLIP is very limited, FLIP Fluids is great, and the color mixing is amazing!
This is a technical paper, but it has a quite conversational abstract and introduction that is easy enough to follow if you have some experience with mesh modelling: https://www.graphics.rwth-aachen.de/media/papers/337/learnin...
The next step is to automatically add "nodes" to the 3D images where the model can pivot, rotate and whatnot and then boom, you have on-demand animated, interactive content.
The next step is to generate models with higher quality mesh topology that allows animation and editing without breaking the mesh. I've done a lot of retopologizing and if I (or AI) were to rig these models as-is there would be all kinds of shading and deformation issues. Even without animating they are glaringly triangulated up close. But I suspect really high quality 3D asset generation is just around the corner because all you'd have to do is join up the approach seen here with AI quad re-meshing based on estimated direction fields and feature detection, which is also getting scarily good.
One thing that at least doubled my modelling efficiency was my acquisition of a multi-button gaming mouse with a twelve-button thumb grid. In Blender I have that mapped mostly to the numpad which enables 3D navigation at the speed of thought, and without me having to move my other hand away from the cluster of most-often-used hotkeys at the bottom-left of the keyboard. You also get five functions out of the MMB which also can really speed up working in the Node Editor. But. I'm left-handed. The only suitable mouse I can find like this is a Razer Naga Left-Handed Edition, and I don't like the build quality. It's too light and small for my hand, and on the two specimens I've used, the MMB is a little bit glitchy (occasionally registering scrolling the wrong way, and click turns into push-left or push-right). So I wouldn't be without it, but I wish there were better options.
This is true with some qualifications. If you're interested in the kind of investment grade diamonds that a major auction house would deal with, then you're looking at heavy weights and/or fancy colors that synthetics can't reach yet. In the diamond trade the word "paragon" is sometimes reserved for flawless or near-flawless stones above 100 carats, of which there is a long list of famous examples, but the largest gem grade synthetic is still around 30 carats I believe. Vivid colors top out at much lighter than that. I guess we'll be able to outdo nature within a few decades though (as far as terrestrial diamonds go, anyway -- I seem to recall reading somewhere about the discovery of moon-sized space diamonds).
I'm a lifelong collector of a variety of (very) niche things, and have at times sold or tried to sell items from my collections, or whole collections at once. You're right about everything, I would only add that each category of thing is its own world in terms of liquidity and how certain you can be of obtaining a guide price. It also pays off to learn about the collector cultures and communities surrounding each type of thing, so you know what obscure periodical or special interest show, etc. to target when you are trying to sell. Never be in a rush, and the other thing that can make a difference is developing good product photography/videography skills.
I started making a lot of field recordings on my last few expeditions into remote rainforest. This is the soundscape at dawn from a camp in Maliau Basin, Borneo, featuring gibbons, hornbills, elephants, songbirds, insects... https://vocaroo.com/1ofQSNJYXLh2
I've recently upgraded my recording device, and will make a large library available in higher quality one day.
There are "obviously" new species that do still crop up because undescribed biodiversity is concentrated in little-surveyed tracts of remote tropical rainforest, and the visible spore-producing structures of those fungi might only appear rarely under poorly-understood environmental triggers. So no, they are not all already known about. "Obvious" species new to science are still being described from such locations. Two examples from recent decades I have seen myself, Chlorogaster dipterocarpi, Spongiforma squarepantsii... I know of many more from taxonomic journals. Also I have found some spectacuar mycoheterotrophic plants in the genus Thismia that were only very recently described. Also, there is a high diversity of secotioid hypogeous fungi many of which are "obvious", but you have to be digging around in the soil looking for them to find them, so they are still poorly known.
It's an especially acute problem for fungi. Fungi defy easy collection. With most animals and plants one can envisage conservation strategies to preserve lineages in artificial conditions. Breeding programmes, seed banks, tissue culture... But whole swathes of the fungal kindgom have such complex ecological requirements and sensitivities that isolating and growing them outside their natural habitat presents huge technical challenges. Even if you can coax them into culture, getting them to complete their life cycle is another matter entirely. And even with our best preservation methods, cultures that are not maintained as breeding populations have an expiry date. I have had a lot of frustration retrieving fungi of conservation interest from culture collections, supposed repositories of biodiversity, that turned out to be hopelessly senescent.
Yes, there may be a large amount of undescribed fungal species diversity, but most of it doesn't take the form of distinctive, visibly novel macroscopic structures. A lot of new species descriptions are of cryptic species, species only distinguishable to an expert eye, entirely microbial species, unremarkable little brown things, species only known from sequences in enviromental samples, and so on. I have spent years rambling around tropical forests and have only had a handful of "what the hell is that?" moments that turned out to be truly unusual.
The article claims that it does, because of the limestone terrior. But I don't have much confidence in that claim, because the author is obviously at pains to make this mushroom sound as special as possible for the sake of a story, calling it a "unique species" when it is just another cultivated variety of the same old Agaricus bisporus.
I got out of bed (here in London) for this one and managed to see the aurora for the first time!
It isn't just a question of their visual representation in culture. Many major taxonomic works on Lepidoptera only provide illustrations of species in the pinned-out format. This is even more of an issue with moths than butterflies as moths show such a huge diversity of distinctive postures and wing configurations -- tucked up and folded away and overlapped in all kinds of unlikely and bizarre morphologies. I can think of so many weird examples, but to take one, check out this lasiocampid moth I found in Borneo some years back: https://i.imgur.com/auo2t9l.jpeg
If you manage to find that species in the standard work to consult, the eighteen-volume Moths of Borneo[1], you'll only see images of a pinned-out specimen, which makes it look like all the others. The motivation for this was to provide a standardized format for the formal visual depiction moth and butterfly anatomy, principally for taxonomists who will be working with dead specimens, and where the actual delimitation and description of taxa is done mostly using microscopic characters. But how moths hold their wings gives very valuable diagnostic information for both field ID and broader questions of classification, that would be very useful to see in a standard reference. This is increasingly recognized and I know of several recent large monographs and ongoing surveys that emphasize including photographs or illustrations of the in situ appearance.
I wonder if mycorrizhae is extending through the frog's body?
Do you mean mycelium? Mycorrhizhae are specialized mycelial structures that interface with plant roots.
I've seen numba used in a few addons for Blender 3D. Speeding up reaction-diffusion simulations on meshes, things like that. Scientific computing for artistic purposes!
Maybe they are hampered by "doing the right thing" and only training on Adobe Stock content?
Firefly (Adobe's generative AI) works well if you're already stuck in a Photoshop-heavy workflow, for quick successive generations right in the canvas if you're editing or extending an existing image. Better than Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugins I've tried.
What an interesting evolutionary mechanism, hardly a "mystery" as it seems thoroughly elucidated by the recent research. Aside from the mechanism, I find external asymmetry in any species that you'd expect to have determinate symmetrical morphology to be visually highly intriguing. This fish is listed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_featuring_exte...
(As a 3D lifeform artist that article provides a trove of examples to riff on.)
The mesh topology here would see these rejected as assets for in basically any professional context. A competent modeler could make much higher quality models, more suited to texturing and deformation, in under five minutes. A speed modeler could make the same in under a minute. And a procedural system in something like Blender geonodes can already spit out an endless variety of such models. But the pace of progress is staggering.
There's a rare ascomycete fungus, Nectrioposis violacea, that parasitises Fuligo septica and turns it from yellow to blue in color. There seem to be various color morphs, one I found was a really spectacular deep violet-blue. The ecology of these specialized fungal parasites whose hosts are themselves rare or very patchily distributed really fascinates me.