BP has followed up on their previous infographic about the intricacies of drilling a relief well near the existing spill with a new graphic showing how the “Riser Insertion Tube” is expected to work.
This system was designed to minimize the formation of gas hydrates at 5,000 feet below the surface. Gas hydrates – similar to ice crystals – thwarted an earlier attempt to divert the flow of oil through a larger subsea containment dome.
The riser insertion tube will also have methanol injection to prevent the formation of gas hydrates in the ultra-deepwaters. The MMS and the Unified Area Command have approved use of methanol injections in this system.
In addition, the new riser will be heated with sea water to promote the flow of oil from the ocean floor to the drillship above. This is a commonly used practice in ultra-deepwater production because the temperatures at these water depths tend to stymie the flow of oil.
DirectX suffered a bit of a setback with DirectX10, being inextricably linked with an unpopular operating system (Windows Vista) and requiring significant investment of resources from developers due to the new API. With Windows 7, we got DirectX11 which seems to fulfill many of the hopes that DirectX10 never met, but does it live up to the hype? HotHardware runs it through some tests and writes up “The State of DirectX11″.
We’ve tested five of the earliest available DirectX 11 titles and we’re happy to report that the situation this time around is looking quite favorable for early adopters. While we observed performance hits when switching to DirectX 11 from DirectX 9 in all five games, we also observed a noticeable corresponding image quality improvement. The drop in performance for DirectX 11 in our tests can be attributed to the added image quality. Effects like tessellation, screen-space ambient occlusion, advanced post processing and DX11 exclusive anti-aliasing in some games brought the performance down in our testing, but they also boosted image quality.
An infographic from InfographicWorld contains a mind-boggling amount of information related to the Gulf Oil Spill. Showing data as of yesterday (Thursday, May 13th), it starts with the basic “Location of Oil” graphs and “Predictions for the future” of the oil spill, but then continues to add in information on quotes from public officials and details on the response effort.
That alone would be fine, but then it goes way too far at adding information on the Top Hat, relief wells, environmental risks, a complete timeline, impacts on the fishing industry, companies involved, public opinion, offshore drilling and much much more.
This infographic really epitomizes information overload. Still, if you want to know everything about the Gulf Oil Spill as of today, this has it all in a single collection of tiny-point font. The fact that it’s a lossy JPEG doesn’t help either.
NVidia has long held that the rumors of poor yield in the GF100 from TSMC were just that, rumors. Today, however, it seems they are backpedaling a bit and saying that things are “finally getting better”.
This isn’t something Nvidia has wanted to talk a whole lot about, but according to recent statements made by David White, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Nvidia, things are starting to improve.
“Supply constraints are finally easing,” White explained during a quarterly conference call with financial analysts.
Of course, Better is never good enough.
“From a supply perspective, we wish we had more 40nm capacity,” Huang said. “We are working TSMC really closely. They are doing a fab job. Yields are improving,. Capacities are improving. But we are finding it hard to keep up. Everyone is clamoring to have Fermis out the door. We are working really hard to get Fermis out the door.”
As if to prove that not all infographics are ‘a good thing’, a project from Meredith Kresge takes some rather dull and boring information about energy consumption & pricing in Mississippi and Alabama and makes it look more interesting than it really is with some hexagonal bar charts.
The assignment was to create an eye-catching way to show hideous amounts of terribly mundane information. The final product ended up being clusters of polygons. They’re essentially proportional bar graphs so they visually show the contrast in amount between the states of Mississippi and Alabama.
As a resident myself, I have to agree it’s pretty dull. But I am surprised to see how Alabama is beating Mississippi in almost everything (good and bad). “More” Economy (I can’t read what the bars actually mean), higher price of electricity, more consumption.
Here is a pretty cool time lapse video shot by Sean Stiegemeier of the Eyjafjallajökull Volcano Eruption, along with some shots of a waterfall. Pretty cool stuff.
So I saw all of these mediocre pictures of that volcano in Iceland nobody can pronounce the name of, so I figured I should go and do better. But the flights to get over took forever as expected (somewhat). 4 days after leaving I finally made it, but the weather was terrible for another 4. Just before leaving it got pretty good for about a day and a half and this is what I managed to get.
Wish I had more time. I missed all the cool Lightning and the Lava of the first eruption. But I figure this will just be a trial run for another day.
I am of course accepting sponsors to send me back there for more please…!! haha
Music: Jónsi – Kolniður (jonsi.com) Canon 5d mkII HUGE thanks for the Motorized Dolly via MILapse (vimeo.com/milapse). Details are to come soon so stay tuned…
Just a few days ago we talked about Matt McKeon’s infographic on The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook. He used a simple graphic to convery a powerful message: check your privacy settings and make sure that they are set to a level that you are comfortable with.
Now, the New York Times has created an infographic to portray the same information. While it is not colorful, and while it is not flashy, it does get its point across. Personally I like Matt McKeon’s infographic better. However, the bar graph in the Times graphic showing the growth of the privacy statement with time conveys the same message.
At 5,803 words, the Facebook Privacy Statement is longer than the Constitution. Just for grins, I did a word count on a Request for Proposal I just finished writing. 5,680 words. I beat the Constitution, but lost to Facebook.
To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.
The Blender Foundation is making the final push in their “Open Movie Project”, named Sintel. Just this week they released the first Trailer for the upcoming short film which not only looks like it will be an interesting film, but really showcases how far Blender has come.
With big thanks to Jan Morgenstern for the epic soundtrack, which as usual makes our humble creations look so much better!
We have less than 2 months now to finish this completely… imagine the tension that’s building up here to get everything perfect. For today, we’ll celebrate a big step forward. Enjoy!
If you like it, you can go ahead and pre-order the movie now as a 4-DVD set that will include not only the movie as a high-quality widescreen DVD, but an HD version in AVI or MOV format, and all of the .blend files, models, and textures. All could be yours for a mere 34€.
Over 285 million Americans subscribe to mobile services. That is approximately 91 percent of the total population. Of course, some people may have more than one cell phone, and so are counted twice. Still, that is extremely good penetration into the population as a whole.
Those 285 million Americans spent talked on their phones for about 1.12 trillion minutes. That breaks down to 21 minutes per day per person. The average cell phone bill is about $63.
How satisfied are you with your carrier? BillShrink has posted an infographic answering that very question. The short answer is that in every city surveyed, Verizon was number one for customer satisfaction. Hit the link below to see the full graphic.
Virtually everyone has a wireless and cell phone plan. The difference in the number of dropped calls and cell phone reception can depend on many factors, including location and the wireless carrier. A recent survey of wireless customers pulled back the curtain on which wireless carriers are making their customers the happiest and which ones could stand to do a bit better if they expect customer loyalty and the profits that come with it.
A neat little proof-of-concept/research project from Toshiya Hachisuka is the “Parthenon” rendering, a GPU-accelerated global-illumation renderer. It boasts a nice collection of features like direct illumination, indirect illumination, and a hybrid approach of both CPU and GPU algorithms.
His website contains PDF’s of his presentations on the work from SIGGRAPH presentations and his GPU Gems 2 contribution, as well as the EXE for you to download and play with. Requires DirectX9 or later, and a video card that supports floating-point buffers, vertex shader 2.0, and Pixel Shader 2.0
BP has followed up on their previous infographic about the intricacies of drilling a relief well near the existing spill with a new graphic showing how the “Riser Insertion Tube” is expected to work.
DirectX suffered a bit of a setback with DirectX10, being inextricably linked with an unpopular operating system (Windows Vista) and requiring significant investment of resources from developers due to the new API. With Windows 7, we got DirectX11 which seems to fulfill many of the hopes that DirectX10 never met, but does it live up to the hype? HotHardware runs it through some tests and writes up “The State of DirectX11″.
An infographic from InfographicWorld contains a mind-boggling amount of information related to the Gulf Oil Spill. Showing data as of yesterday (Thursday, May 13th), it starts with the basic “Location of Oil” graphs and “Predictions for the future” of the oil spill, but then continues to add in information on quotes from public officials and details on the response effort.
NVidia has long held that the rumors of poor yield in the GF100 from TSMC were just that, 
VizWorld.com 
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