Category: General

Great post, video, and com­ment dis­cus­sion regard­ing Ed Cat­mul­l’s grad­u­ate research film which involves one of the ear­li­est (if not the first) 3D ren­dered com­put­er ani­ma­tion. Cat­mull would go on to form Pixar in the fol­low­ing decade. Many of the con­cepts and tech­nolo­gies used in this short film are used today in infra­struc­ture to dig­i­tize road­ways, build­ings, bridges, etc. into point clouds. (via Kot­tke)

I’ve been a fan of fan­ta­sy pret­ty much my entire life. No mat­ter how much I got a cer­tain amount of enjoy­ment of the scant­i­ly clad women war­riors from artists like Frazetta or Lar­ry Elmore, much of the—uh, armor?— that some women wore did­n’t seem like it would be of much help in a sword fight. Or keep them from freez­ing to death in a cool breeze. Or even just stay on them, for that matter.

Some­one has cre­at­ed a handy Tum­blr blog so we can all enjoy know­ing that there are plen­ty of sen­si­ble women in the make-believe worlds of fan­ta­sy. Enjoy some of the great art at Women Fight­ers in Rea­son­able Armor.

I may even make some self-res­cu­ing princess art for my daugh­ter from some of these.

I often hear from oth­ers and even find myself say­ing “I’d pay more for a ver­sion of prod­uct X if it were made in the U.S.” Accord­ing to this Forbes piece by Steve Den­ning, most com­pa­nies could­n’t man­u­fac­ture or even design a lot prod­ucts here, even if they want­ed to. The facil­i­ties and know-how all got shipped over­seas along with the jobs and money.

One exam­ple that struck me:

The lithi­um bat­tery for GM’s [GM] Chevy Volt is being man­u­fac­tured in South Korea. Mak­ing it in the U.S. wasn’t fea­si­ble: recharge­able bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ing left the US long ago.

Some efforts are being made to res­ur­rect recharge­able bat­tery man­u­fac­ture in the U.S., such as the GE-backed [GE] A123Systems, but it’s dif­fi­cult to go it alone when much of the exper­tise is now in Asia.

Inter­est­ing, giv­en that my neigh­bor here in Franklin, TN—Nissan—will be man­u­fac­tur­ing the bat­ter­ies for the Leaf in near-by Sym­r­na, TN (one of their larg­er plants in N.A.) by next year. I think it is far too ear­ly to make any claims as to the via­bil­i­ty of one choice over the oth­er, as both cars just hit the mar­ket and pro­duc­tion lines have prob­a­bly yet to even hit any sort of reg­u­lar­i­ty. How­ev­er, that seems to be a glar­ing hole in the argu­ment that bat­ter­ies, at least, can­not be made in the states.

Or, on the oth­er hand, it may soon serve to prove that point. Only time will tell. I, for one, am root­ing on Nis­san to make it work.