HomeOwnersInsurance.org has a new infographic visualizing the number of people killed by various natural disasters including droughts, earthquakes, and tsunami’s. Broken down by continent, you can see countries like Africa suffer greatly from droughts, while countries like Asia suffer fairly equally from earthquakes and storms.
The Economic has a great video interview done with Pixar’s president Ed Catmull about the creative process, the limits of eccentricity, and the dangers of attempting to prevent errors. In it are several excellent ideas, such as how far can eccentricity go before it becomes a problem:
[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange… but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative – we get rid of them. If we don’t have a healthy group then it isn’t going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.
As disk sizes grow, so does our risk of losing massive amounts of data in hard drive failures or theft. A new infographic on YouTube shows some of the risks with some truly scary statistics:
Your Hard Drives have a 1 in 10 chance of failing this year
Human Error & Faulty Media are the 2 leading reasons of Data Loss
Only 1 in 20 companies that suffer a serious data loss will remain in business
Average time to be “up and running” After a restore is 4 hours
Sean Christmann has some new demo’s up on CraftyMind showing some of the fun stuff that HTML5′s Canvas and Video tags enable. He shows how you can, relatively easily, interact with live video with a simple “explosion” demo and rotate it in 3D. He also brings this up:
Don’t ask me why, but copying pixel data out of a video tag is expensive, so expensive that drawing it into a temporary canvas, and then drawing pieces of that temp canvas onto a final canvas is faster then just referencing the video tag repeatedly within the same loop. That’s why you’ll see 2 Canvases in the source code for the demos. I’m sure there’s a technical reason for this duplication process, but it’s a lazy reason.
My guess would be that accessing the Video object directly gets into many levels of very complex API’s for decoding the live stream, simply adding a lot of overhead as it finds keyframes, re-decodes to the requested frame, and deals with the overhead of various codecs. Once you copy it into a canvas, access is a simple (x*width+y) operation.
Google has created a new politically-motivated interactive mashup that shows the quantity of takedown notices and user information requests from various world governments. This includes takedown notices for sites like Youtube, and access information for various websites and users. While still in development, it’s pretty easy to see that the US is second only to Brazil in data requests.
Like other technology and communications companies, we regularly receive requests from government agencies around the world to remove content from our services, or provide information about users of our services and products. The map shows the number of requests that we received between July 1, 2009 and December 31, 2009, with certain limitations.
We know these numbers are imperfect and may not provide a complete picture of these government requests. For example, a single request may ask for the removal of more than one URL or for the disclosure of information for multiple users. See the FAQ for more information.
Financial Infographics has posted an infographic on the history of credit cards, or to be more specific, the history of credit. The term credit card first arose in the novel Looking Backward in 1887. In 1951, the Diner’s Club credit card was the 1st credit card issued to 200 people who could use it at 27 restaurants. Diner’s Club was the first general purpose credit card that allowed a person to use it at multiple stores, instead of a credit card that was good at only one merchant.
Throughout history, many different methods were used to keep track of credit. Eventually, as you may know, we ended up with the credit card. Here’s what went on before that magical little piece of plastic came about.
It’s been 3 months since you tuned in to see me on The 1st Question, but tonight Pooky has scored another pair of impressive guests: Boonsri Dickinson of tech|startups, and the CEO of Linden Labs himself Mark Kingdon.
No doubt Mark Kingdon (known as M Linden inworld) will be sporting the best SL can offer, but Boonsri had a bit more difficulty getting started:
I’m not a Second Life person — I spend enough time in front of the computer as it is. But Pooky helped me create an avatar so I could participate in her show.
Thankfully, Linden Labs is working to improve the new user experience, so hopefully stories like this will become less common. No doubt Kingdon’s appearance will draw a huge crowd, so get there early if you want a seat!
Ronen Bekerman’s blog has a new “Making Of” from Fietter Chalim, who recently won the IDVN Design Visualization Render Challenge 2009 with his picture “Winter Interior”.
The ‘Winter Interior’ scene was created during my local forum IDVN render challenge. In this project, I was trying to create and work on a mood that I’ve never tried before – winter. The initial idea was to create an environment that has an after-rain or snowy kind of feel and mood. I also tried to bring nature into the interior by introducing plants in the middle of the interior, which I hoped will help to achieve the mood that I wanted. I searched the internet for reference images depicting the kind of mood that I had in mind.
HomeOwnersInsurance.org has a new infographic visualizing the number of people killed by various natural disasters including droughts, earthquakes, and tsunami’s. Broken down by continent, you can see countries like Africa suffer greatly from droughts, while countries like Asia suffer fairly equally from earthquakes and storms.
The Economic has a great video interview done with Pixar’s president Ed Catmull about the creative process, the limits of eccentricity, and the dangers of attempting to prevent errors. In it are several excellent ideas, such as how far can eccentricity go before it becomes a problem:
Sean Christmann has some new demo’s up on CraftyMind showing some of the fun stuff that HTML5′s Canvas and Video tags enable. He shows how you can, relatively easily, interact with live video with a simple “explosion” demo and rotate it in 3D. He also brings this up:
Google has created a new politically-motivated interactive mashup that shows the quantity of takedown notices and user information requests from various world governments. This includes takedown notices for sites like Youtube, and access information for various websites and users. While still in development, it’s pretty easy to see that the US is second only to Brazil in data requests.
Today’s Links:
- $42.99 for all 5 movies!
It’s been 3 months since you tuned in to see 
Ronen Bekerman’s blog has a new “Making Of” from Fietter Chalim, who recently won the IDVN Design Visualization Render Challenge 2009 with his picture “Winter Interior”.
David Ward has a new tutorial on BlenderCookie that focuses on creating fur with the Blender Particle system.
VizWorld.com 
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