Call For Participation

The year 2011 marked an explosion of radical mobilization, from student protests and occupations to uprisings and insurrections. These events were characterized by the embodied reclaiming of public space, demands for economic, social, and political change, and instrumentalization of technology to communicate, organize, and revolt. As these political struggles spread globally, artists, activists, and scholars have engaged and responded to these actions by generating militant research practices, radical art gestures, and networked communities.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics Graduate Student Initiative invites graduate students from the humanities, arts, and social sciences to come together for our Convergence 2012 to discuss contemporary notions of emancipation, liberation, revolution, occupation, geopolitics, “artivism,” and militant research, and to consider the lived tensions of these concepts in bodies, knowledge, and locations.
In the spirit of the Hemispheric Institute Encuentros, Convergence 2012 intends to bring together about 100 participants to generate a space of intensive connections between scholarship, artistic expression, and politics, promoting embodied practices — performance — as a vehicle for the creation of new meaning and the transmission of cultural values, memory and identity. During the three days of Convergence 2012, we aim to explore new political potentials for emancipation, liberation, and revolution.

Invited Speakers and Artists include: Andy Bichlbaum (The Yes Men), Colectivo Situaciones (Argentina), Counter-Cartographies Collective (Durham NC), Ricardo Dominguez (UCSD), Esther Gabara (Duke University), Macarena Gómez-Barris (USC), Jack Halberstam (USC), Michael Hardt (Duke University), Brian Holmes (activist), Josh Kun (USC), Pedro Lasch (Duke University), Diane Nelson (Duke University), Walter Mignolo (Duke University), Spirithouse (Durham NC), Diana Taylor (NYU), and Wu Tsang (performer/filmmaker)

What’s on this page? I’m interested in producing complexity out of simple parts. This page contains bookmarks that I collected while working on games; I did not write most of the content linked from here. As a result the set of links here reflects the types of things I needed to know: only a few specific topics (not everything related to game programming), general ideas instead of platform-specific information (graphics, sound, compilers), and ideas and designs instead of source code (I find it easier to go from an idea to code than from code to an idea). Other sites, like Gamedev and Gamasutra, cover lots more topics than mine does.

Having previously been disappointed by the information available on the topic, this is my attempt at categorizing different ways to implement 2D platform games, list their strengths and weaknesses, and discuss some implementation details.
The long-term goal is to make this an exhaustive and comprehensible guide to the implementation of 2D platform games. If you have any sort of feedback, correction, request, or addition – please leave it in the comments!
Disclaimer: some of the information presented here comes from reverse engineering the behavior of the game, not from its code or programmers. It’s possible that they are not ACTUALLY implemented in this way, and merely behave in an equivalent way. Also note that tile sizes are for the game logic, graphical tiles might be of a different size.

Sticks + Stones

@aguynamedben thanks man! I just finished merging in a bunch of new cities:

A field guide to Twitter Platform objects

Like any ecosystem, the Twitter platform has a variety of flora and fauna.
Use this field guide to better understand the most frequently observed wild objects.

“How is it that a cash-strapped city like Oakland can afford a monster like this?” bargain price of only $323,000

Yacht depot

Tim Reynolds’s Isometrics series, beautiful 3D illustrations:

Important decisions.

To prevent the dog from scratching up the furniture.

Macy's

.@fitnr very much so. Here's a break in the sidewalk, I can see down two or three stories.

Seams like this in the street mean I'm actually straddling two rooftops, I think.

Charles Ray, Hinoki, Cypress

Amazing, detailed breakdown of MPEG encoding minutiae:

Typed arrays, streaming json and IndexedDB!

The time for fat clients is now! There are some key projects that were all released over the last month or two that allow for some really exciting (relatively) large data manipulation and storage in the browser. If you Voltron them together you can open up an AJAX request to arbitrarily large JSON response that you can stream in realtime into a persistent client-side data store. This workflow opens up a lot of new web application possibilities.

Whoa, I'm in the wavy building.

.@iandees

.@y0n3l all of the hills rendering code is packaged up here:

For over a year, I have been playing around with printing things out on a receipt printer. Recently, a few accidents of implementation gave more life to my tinkerings than I had originally intended.

TL;DR: In a nutshell, I’ve accidentally built a software system that makes it easy for YOU to:
build your own small internet-connected printers,
produce customised content for them, and
share that content with other people who also have small internet-connected printers.
I’m ready to share, and I’d like you to get involved, and I will explain how at the bottom of this post. But before that – if you can stand to wait – indulge me in some introspection.
I am often asked “why are you doing this printing stuff?” or “what is this all for?”. These are good questions. I struggle to answer them. The truth is: I don’t really know why. I wish I could tell you. I can’t even really justify it. There may be no practical purpose for this.
But: I have a hunch that there’s something interesting to be explored.
If you’re really impatient, you can skip to the end to find out what I’ve done, but first I wanted to explain how I got here from essentially no-clue-what-I-was-trying-to-do.
It’s important to me that you understand that there was no grand plan. I didn’t have any sort of vision. The solution to each problem pointed in a fairly straightforward way to the solution of the next problem, and so the evolution of my original goal into the idea I’ll describe at the end is just one simple step after another.
But the best way to understand is to simply start from the start. Really, I just wanted to finish something.

@nelson Bingo! (well, @revdancatt disagrees and Greg Borenstein also disagrees )

@nelson Bingo! (well, @revdancatt disagrees and Greg Borenstein also disagrees )

@nelson YES and

@nelson YES and

"QR codes are 2-dimensional bar codes that encode arbitrary text strings. A common use of QR codes is to encode URLs so that people can scan a QR code (for example, on an advertising poster, building roof, volleyball bikini, belt buckle, or airplane banner) to load a web site on a cell phone instead of having to “type” in a URL.

QR codes are encoded using Reed-Solomon error-correcting codes, so that a QR scanner does not have to see every pixel correctly in order to decode the content. The error correction makes it possible to introduce a few errors (fewer than the maximum that the algorithm can fix) in order to make an image. For example, in 2008, Duncan Robertson took a QR code for “http://bbc.co.uk/programmes” (left) and introduced errors in the form of a BBC logo (right):


That's a neat trick and a pretty logo, but it's uninteresting from a technical standpoint. Although the BBC logo pixels look like QR code pixels, they are not contribuing to the QR code. The QR reader can't tell much difference between the BBC logo and the Union Jack. There's just a bunch of noise in the middle either way.


Since the BBC QR logo appeared, there have been many imitators. Most just slap an obviously out-of-place logo in the middle of the code. This Disney poster is notable for being more in the spirit of the BBC code.

There's a different way to put pictures in QR codes. Instead of scribbling on redundant pieces and relying on error correction to preserve the meaning, we can engineer the encoded values to create the picture in a code with no inherent errors."

Predicting Assange-level abstraction leakage:

A new problem: What are we to say about stories that feature both allegorical and literal versions of the same thing, of the same class of object or type of person—about True Blood, for instance, whose vampires code comprehensively as queer even though the show also includes among its characters several mortal, day-walking gays and lesbians? This is a real problem, because the show seems to be drawing a distinction, prompting a rigorous reader, one perhaps suspicious of allegory, to insist that the vampires can’t possibly be in some general way stand-ins for queer folk because the show already possesses these latter, and they are not coterminous with the vampires. Placing an allegorical construct in the same room as its literal equivalent doesn’t, as one might suspect, make the allegory stronger or easier to explicate. Quite the contrary: The allegory and the literal referent are going to be locked in a struggle for the relevant name or meaning, and it’s not entirely clear which is going to have the upper hand in that fight. You might think that the literal term has home turf advantage. If a gay person and a vampire are standing next to each other, and I only get to call one of them “gay person,” I’m going to choose the gay person. That’s what it means to say that the presence of the literal term can prevent the allegory from coalescing, like the trace amounts of yolk that ruin your every attempt at meringue. But then hyperbole is at the heart of allegory—you create an allegorical version of x by exaggerating certain features of x—and in that case, the non-literal construct can easily seem like the better version of the thing, more fully and vividly itself, purer, pushed further away from the imaginary average against which all specific difference is gauged.

@kelsosCorner—Watercolor Maps with OSM prezi is PDF at . Tiles are cc, check out the embed demos on

One bad ass car.

Goofing with @mapbox: worldwide data size of OSM

Glibc has continued to evolve up to the present at varying speeds; during most of this time, the bulk of the work has been done by Ulrich Drepper. Of the nearly 19,000 commits found in the project's git repository (which contains changes back to 1995), over 12,000 were made by Ulrich. Never known for a willingness to defer to others, Ulrich quickly became the decision maker for glibc. The project's steering committee was formed by the FSF in 2001 as a way of asserting some control over the project, but, to a great extent, that control remained in Ulrich's hands. In 2008, Roland described the situation this way:

drepper, roland have blanket discretion to commit. (This means that Uli gets to go upside my head after I commit something he doesn't like. It doesn't mean you get to lobby me to commit something that Uli has refused.)
Four other developers (Andreas Jaeger, Jakub Jelinek, Richard Henderson, and Andreas Schwab) had the ability to commit "after approval." But that approval, in the end, had to come from Ulrich.

One need not look far to find complaints about how Ulrich managed the glibc project. He was never one to suffer fools, and, evidently, he saw himself surrounded by a lot of fools. Attempts to get changes into glibc often resulted in serious flaming or simply being ignored. Developers often despaired of getting things done and simply gave up trying. It is easy to criticize Ulrich's attitude at times, but one should also not lose track of all the work he got done. This includes steady improvements to glibc, big jumps in functionality (as with the Native POSIX Thread Library work done with Ingo Molnar) and lots of fixes. Ulrich's work has made all of our systems better.

That work notwithstanding, Ulrich is widely seen as, at best, an unpleasant maintainer who has turned the glibc project into an unwelcoming place. One need not challenge that characterization to point out that glibc actually had a number of problems associated with highly cathedral-style projects: a well-ensconced priesthood, a lack of interest in or awareness of the wider world's needs, etc. At some point, it seemingly became clear to a number of developers associated with glibc that it needed to become a more open project with more than a single point of control. A number of changes have been made to prod it in that direction.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has developed a ten-by-five-metre inflatable structure that could be quickly deployed to isolate sections of transit or rail tunnels in the event of flooding or the release of chemical agents.

The cylindrical "resilient tunnel plug" is made out of a flexible material that can be rapidly inflated and then filled with water to make it sturdier. It was developed by the DHS's Science and Technology Directorate in collaboration with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, West Virginia University and ILC Dover

When the plug is not in use, it can be packed into a small storage space in the tunnel, a little like an airbag. The system has been designed to avoid situations like the one that took place in Chicago in 1992 when a leak in an unused freight tunnel caused £1.26 billion in damages and took six weeks to clear.

The plug is made out of three separate layers of strong material: a thick webbing made out of a liquid-crystal polymer called Vectran, a second non-webbed layer of Vectran and a third polyurethane layer. The design draws inspiration from manufacturing techniques used by ILC Dover to make space suits and inflatable space habitats

The plug was tested earlier this year in a dummy steel tunnel. It was then inflated and tested with pressurised liquid and gases to see whether it would keep them isolated. It succeeded in doing so.

The team hopes to test the system further over the course of 2012, with a view to commercialising the product.

In a conversation about this idea, Kyle McDonald argued that Catt’s taking the comparison too far. While there is a functional comparison between the current state of computer vision and the state of computer graphics in the 80s, the actual markers we’re using in CV work today don’t much resemble 8-bit graphics aesthetically.

To explore this idea, Kyle and I decided to put together a collection of as many different kinds of markers as we could think of along with links to the algorithms and processes that create and track them (though I’m sure there are many we’ve missed – more contributions are welcome in the comments). It was our hope that such a collection might widen the New Aesthetic visual vocabulary by adding additional ingredients as well as focusing some attention on the actual computational techniques used to create and track these images. Since so many of us were raised looking at 8-bit video games and graphics I think it quite helps to look at the actual markers themselves in their surprising variety rather than just filing them away with Pitfall Harry’s rope, Mario’s mushroom, and Donkey Kong’s barrel, which we already know so well.

So, what do real CV markers actually look like? Browse the images and links below to see for yourself, but I’ll make a few quick general characterizations. There is a lot of high contrast black and white as well as stark geometry that emphasizes edges. However the grid that characterizes 8-bit images and games is nearly never kept fully in tact. Most of the marker designs are specifically trying to defeat repetition in favor of identifying a few specific features. Curves and circles are nearly as common as squares and grids.

"wiff of peace"

Glitching the dessert

Transfiguration: Olivier de Sagazan is barely human

River of dog

“The voiceless do not gain voice by politely lining up to speak at public comment periods… constructed to mute them”

Power is the power to exclude

Linux Tycoon is the premier Linux Distro Building Simulator game in the universe.
(Truth be told: It’s probably the only Linux Distro Building Simulation game in the universe.)
So what exactly do you do in a Linux Distro Building game?
So glad you asked!  Here’s some examples of the thrilling challenges you’ll find in Linux Tycoon:
Analyzing and selecting software packages.
Fixing Bugs.
Managing volunteers and paid staff.
Keeping the total size (in MB) of your Distro at a reasonable level.
And so much more!

“Starship Troopers is fascist propaganda for a fascism that does not yet exist.”

No city, town, or rural area was untouched by the New Deal.  Hundreds of thousands of roads, schools, theaters, libraries, hospitals, post offices, courthouses, airports, parks, forests, gardens, and artworks—created in only one decade by our parents and grandparents—are still in use today.

Because these public works were rarely marked, the New Deal’s ongoing contribution to American life goes largely unseen. Given the New Deal’s scale and impact across America, it seems inconceivable that no national register exists of what the New Deal built.  The Living New Deal is making visible that enduring legacy.

Today, our team is building a national database of thousands documents, photographs, and personal stories about public works made possible by the New Deal.  And it’s all just a click away on our national map of New Deal public works sites. California historian, writer and former State Librarian Kevin Starr has likened the Living New Deal to a WPA project from the 1930s in its ambition and scope.

The investment America made in New Deal seventy-five years ago is still working for the American people—and our economy—today.  The legacy of the New Deal has much to teach about farsighted leadership and what can be achieved when our country rallies to serve needs of ordinary people in troubled times.

So, apropos of nothing in particular, let’s say you wish to communicate privately with someone you’ve not communicated with privately before, for whatever reason you might have. And, wanting to stand out from the crowd, you decide to try to be clever about it, because, hey, you are a clever person, and as far as you know, people seem to like that about you. So you write your clever bit and send it off, safe in the knowledge of your cleverosity, and confident that your various cleverations will make the impression you want to make on the intended cleveree.
Two things here.
1. The effectiveness of clever on other people is highly contingent on outside factors, over which you have no control and of which you may not have any knowledge; i.e., just because you intended to be clever doesn’t mean you will be perceived as clever, for all sorts of reasons.
2. The failure mode of clever is “asshole.”

git + webcam = lol
Takes a snapshot with your Mac's built-in iSight/FaceTime webcam every time you git commit code, and archives a lolcat style image with it.

By default, the lolimages are stored by a Github style short SHA in a ~/.lolcommits directory created for you.

Coping with Facebook: fake names, disemvowelled names, paired accounts, time-based deletion, periodic deletion, etc.

Throughout this demonstration, my group of friends had been split pretty evenly along gender lines in their reactions. Across the board, the men either looked amused or (in the case of my beardo Diaspora friend) philosophically pleased with themselves about their existing opinions about social networking. The women, on the other hand, looked sick and horrified.

It was at this point, though, that the tendrils of the girls’ unease — their deeply empathic sense of someone being unsafe — seemed to creep through the entire group.

“And if that doesn’t work on Zoe,” I concluded, consulting the app one last time. “There are — let’s see — nine other girls at the Independent tonight.”

Often times, a writer uses tricks and exaggerations to convey to a reader the spirit — if not the precise truth — of what occurred. I just want to make clear that when I say that one of my friends was actually on the verge of tears, you understand that this is not such a trick. She was horrified to the point of crying.

“How can Apple let people download an app like this?” she asked. “And have you written about this?”

In answer to the first question, I replied that as sleazy as this app seemed, Girls Around Me wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. Sure, on the surface, it looks like a hook-up app like Grindr for potential stalkers and date rapists, but all that Girls Around Me is really doing is using public APIs from Google Maps, Facebook and Foursquare and mashing them all up together, so you could see who had checked-in at locations in your area, and learn more about them. Moreover, the girls (and men!) shown in Girls Around Me all had the power to opt out of this information being visible to strangers, but whether out of ignorance, apathy or laziness, they had all neglected to do so. This was all public information. Nothing Girls Around Me does violates any of Apple’s policies.

In fact, Girls Around Me wasn’t even the real problem.

Please don't steal.

Which is to say, @paulsmith interviewed me about Stamen’s new Watercolor map, and more: (can’t put a name at the front)

All licensed London taxi drivers need to pass a special test before they can drive one of the Capital's famous black cabs. This test is called the Knowledge.

How long it takes to become a licensed taxi driver depends on whether you want to be an All-London driver or a Suburban driver.

London or the suburbs?

All-London drivers - also known as Green Badge drivers - need a detailed knowledge of London within a six mile radius of Charing Cross.

All-London drivers' Knowledge is based on learning 320 routes (or runs). This will help them learn the 25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest in the six mile radius of Charing Cross.

It takes between two and four years to pass the All-London Knowledge. Once you are licensed you can work anywhere in the Greater London area.

OSM UX tweets (@ajturner @wonderchook @iandees @mhaklay @tmcw @nacin @HeatherLeson @sgillies)

Your name in lights

OpenCL consists of two parts. There is a host-side which is typically written in C, and a device-side which is written in a derivative of C defined by OpenCL. This code is compiled to the device (typically a GPU) at run-time.

CLyther attempts to abstract everything out. You write the host-side code in Python. You write the device-side code in a subset of Python (in a similar way to Cython). This is very high level and easy-to-use.

PyOpenCL is a comparatively low-level binding to the OpenCL API from Python. Device-side code is written in OpenCL's subset of C99. It gives you full access to and full control of OpenCL. Very little is abstracted away.

I have limited experience with both, but my impression is that, once both are mature, I would prefer to use Clyther for most projects. It is more user-friendly, which means you're more likely to use it, and to use it more. It is also easier to shift code back and forth between Clyther and Python than PyOpenCL and Python, so code maintenance and refactoring should be easier. For very performance-critical projects, I would prefer PyOpenCL. It gives better low-level control, and fewer layers between you and the hardware. The ultimate possible performance should be better with PyOpenCL than with Clyther.

I do not know if this will continue to be the case forever. It is likely that PyOpenCL will, eventually, add higher-level constructs, and that Clyther will, eventually, add lower-level control. In an ideal world, the Clyther developers would move the core such that it was built on top of PyOpenCL, so we wouldn't have to choose, and to avoid duplication of labor. I doubt that will ever happen, though.

At present, PyOpenCL appears to be more mature than Clyther. It was started first, and is less ambitious in scope. It has better documentation than Clyther, and appears to have a bigger user community. Both are fairly similar in code size -- Clyther is about 4KLOCs of Python and 4KLOCs of C. PyOpenCL is about 7KLOCs of Python code, and 9KLOCs of C++ code. This is approximate (includes build systems, examples, etc), so should not be treated as implying anything beyond approximate equality.

OpenGL uses a "current rendering context" to which all OpenGL commands within the process are directed.  Each windowing system that can host an OpenGL context provides a few basic services which allow for the creation and manipulation of the context.

OpenGL calls bypass the windowing system and talk directly to the OpenGL GL, meaning that the OpenGL (rendering) code tends to be cross platform and standard. Unfortunately, as the API for the rendering context is not specified, OpenGL programmers looking to use a new GUI library to host their application will have to learn the intricacies of the GUI library before they can dive into rendering.

This document outlines the basic steps required for setting up a simple OpenGL rendering context.  It provides sample code for creating contexts with GLUT, wxPython, Tkinter and FXPy.

Real world applications, of course, will tend to use more abstract and structured approaches to building their rendering context classes. We're focusing here on immediate gratification of acquiring an OpenGL context into which you can begin rendering.

In OpenGL rendering pipeline, the geometry data and textures are transformed and passed several tests, and then finally rendered onto a screen as 2D pixels. The final rendering destination of the OpenGL pipeline is called framebuffer. Framebuffer is a collection of 2D arrays or storages utilized by OpenGL; colour buffers, depth buffer, stencil buffer and accumulation buffer. By default, OpenGL uses the framebuffer as a rendering destination that is created and managed entirely by the window system. This default framebuffer is called window-system-provided framebuffer.

The OpenGL extension, GL_EXT_framebuffer_object provides an interface to create additional non-displayable framebuffer objects (FBO). This framebuffer is called application-created framebuffer in order to distinguish from the default window-system-provided framebuffer. By using framebuffer object (FBO), an OpenGL application can redirect the rendering output to the application-created framebuffer object (FBO) other than the traditional window-system-provided framebuffer. And, it is fully controlled by OpenGL.

Similar to window-system-provided framebuffer, a FBO contains a collection of rendering destinations; color, depth and stencil buffer. (Note that accumulation buffer is not defined in FBO.) These logical buffers in a FBO are called framebuffer-attachable images, which are 2D arrays of pixels that can be attached to a framebuffer object.

There are two types of framebuffer-attachable images; texture images and renderbuffer images. If an image of a texture object is attached to a framebuffer, OpenGL performs "render to texture". And if an image of a renderbuffer object is attached to a framebuffer, then OpenGL performs "offscreen rendering".

By the way, renderbuffer object is a new type of storage object defined in GL_EXT_framebuffer_object extension. It is used as a rendering destination for a single 2D image during rendering process.

"A little while later I stood by the side of the road in the rain, waiting for the number 3 bus to take me back to the house, with a stack of eight five foot by 1 by 12 sheets of MC3800; MC3800 is apparently used as the padding in rear car bumpers. And then spent the next three days assembling a big and goofy pixeldrone out of foam, bourbon and a small orchestra of inappropriate tools.

None of the lines are as clean as I'd like and there's a gaping seam in the head which tells you where I managed to get my measurements all wrong. And it's floppy. Really floppy. I have a whole new appreciation for people who design airplanes and why people are so panty and excited about laser cutters.

But it was worth doing if only to walk it down the stairs of the Driskil Hotel afterwards, with all its balloons riding high, and through the breakfast crowd out in to the street. And then, yeah, we went swimming with it.


...

Now, though, it is a captial-T thing with history because it was present in the room when we did the panel."

The FBI is your new ISP: interesting story about DNS changer replacement servers via @nelson

I feel sorry for blogging. How could something so great just wither on the vine? There are vast prairies of abandoned blogs now. Without any specific decision, there’s been a mass migration to social networks, like tribesmen picking up and moving to cities overnight. It’s certainly not the worst decision in internet history but maybe it’s fair to say that it wasn’t given much consideration at the time. “Just imagine a band of savages,” Diamond writes, “exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep.” Progress isn’t deliberated upon, it’s magnetic. But once drawn in, you might find yourself living (in a shotgun shack) on a cheaply manufactured high-carb, high-fructose diet of realtime information. You’ve traded still pools of honest expression for rivers of pageviews and machine-generated timelines. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether we all made a little mistake with that.

Or maybe not. Maybe the super-accelerated infobahn of internet time just breeds early-onset blogging nostalgia, like how being a tweedy professorial New England type can lead you to be nostalgic about scratching around in the underbrush for berries and shit. Progress is having none of that. Progress tells you to shut up, grab the shovel, and dig.

Stop the press: There exists a world outside of the Adobe Creative Suite. And it’s called Keynote.

I should start by saying I am by no means a Keynote ‘pro’ compared with many of our web team who could use it in their sleep. In fact, when I first started working at ESPI last July, I was very surprised to find out that designers were using Keynote for laying out presentations. My surprise turned to alarm when I found out that they were also using it as a design tool to build UI designs for websites and apps. It turns out that I was absolutely wrong. Keynote is an incredibly powerful design tool. Less then one year later, I now rarely (if ever) use InDesign to layout presentations, and I have started using Keynote almost exclusively for any web layouts I do. And not just UX wireframes, but full UI designs. On a recent project, I also used it for poster mock ups, banner designs and a bunch of other formats.

Most of the web team here at ESPI are what I like to call Keynote aficionados. They use the program for virtually every project, rarely dipping into Photoshop except occasionally to create some small graphic elements. An example of this is Red Bull Music Academy website that was completed last year.  With the exception of some vector iconography created in Illustrator, it was all designed in Keynote.

BACKGROUND:
Multiple lines of evidence suggest that there are seasonal effects on mood and behavior, and that these effects are related to serotonergic and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) function. This study sought to determine whether there is a seasonal effect on clinical parameters, baseline cortisol and prolactin levels, and cortisol and prolactin responses to fenfluramine administration in subjects with major depression.
METHODS:
In all, 136 subjects with major depression entered the study. Sixty-two subjects who had a major depressive episode (MDE) in Spring or in Fall (the Spring/Fall group) were compared to 74 subjects who had MDE in Winter or in Summer (the Winter/Summer group). Demographic and clinical parameters were assessed and recorded. Clinical parameters included depression, aggression, impulsivity, hopelessness, hostility, and current suicide ideation rating scales, suicide attempt status, and number and maximum lethality of suicide attempts. Cortisol and prolactin levels were drawn before fenfluramine administration and hourly for 5 h thereafter. Cortisol and prolactin levels were computed as the area under the curve of hourly cortisol measurements.
RESULTS:
Baseline cortisol levels were significantly higher in the Spring/Fall group compared to the Winter/Summer group (14.1+/-4.5 ng/ml vs. 12.5+/-4.4 ng/ml, df=132, t=2.16, p=0.03). There were no seasonal effects on baseline prolactin levels, or post-challenge cortisol and prolactin levels.
CONCLUSIONS:
The Spring/Fall group and the Winter/Summer group may represent different subtypes of major depression. Future studies need to both confirm our results and elucidate the mechanism of the circannual effect on biological function in depressed patients. The results of our study underline the importance of considering seasonality in psychobiology.

"Legit is a complementary command-line interface for Git, optimized for workflow simplicity. It is heavily inspired by GitHub for Mac.

Git Workflow for Humans
Feature branch workflows are dead simple.

$ git switch <branch>
# Switches to branch. Stashes and restores unstaged changes.

$ git sync
# Syncronizes current branch. Auto-merge/rebase, un/stash.

$ git publish <branch>
# Publishes branch to remote server.

$ git unpublish <branch>
# Removes branch from remote server.

$ git harvest <branch>
# Auto-merge/rebase commits from given branch.

$ git sprout <branch>
# Sprout a new branch from the current branch.

$ git graft <branch>
# Merge unpublished branch into current branch, then remove it.

$ git branches
# Nice & pretty list of branches + publication status."

Reluctant to press this button.

"Shadow Of The Colossus is a good game in itself, but it is the technology which is operational within the machine, PS2-wise, that gives it the true "next-gen impression".

So now, we have brought together the information from the development of Shadow Of The Colossus, because we had heard discussion on the technology we used and wished to present it.

After starting SOTC, the first impressive visuals you get are probably the view of the magnificent scenery seen outside from inside the sanctuary. It floods the external scenery which is seen from the interior to white, and light overflows through the opening of the columns which support the sanctuary. This is the trendy high dynamic range rendering (HDR - High Dynamic Range).

When you emerge from the dark sanctuary interior to the outside, the outside scene is drawn almost completely white, which settles shortly to it's proper brightness balance. This is called the dynamic tone mapping, which is part of the HDR effect."

Kai's Power Tips & Tricks for Adobe Photoshop

These are HTML versions of Kai's Power Tips and Tricks for Adobe Photoshop. They have been written by Kai Krause in the early 1990s.
Contents

Tip 1: Secrets of Chops (Channel Operations)
Tip 2: You need more Chops
Tip 3: Instant "Brushed Aluminum" textures
Tip 4: How to Clean Up ... a Fax or a Scan
Tip 5: Have a Ball ... Instant Spheres
Tip 6: Top Ten List: Often Overlooked Basics
Tip 7: Filter Skelter: Displace is nice ....
Tip 7a: KPT Displace.Star Explosion
Tip 7b: KPT Displace.Push from Behind
Tip 7c: KPT Displace.Glassy Spheroid
Tip 7d: KPT Displace.Schizophrenia
Tip 7e: KPT Displace.3-D Space Trails
Tip 8: Arbitrary Maps: Magic other than the wand
Tip 9: Undiscovered Heroes: Polarizing ... ?
Tip 10: Litter Removal: Moiré Rémoval;
Tip 11: One Minute Quickies: 10,000 volts in 3 steps
Tip 12: Colorization for Ted Turner...... NOT
Tip 13: Colorization II: and Hue and Eye
Tip 14: Selections: Naturally, Darwin
Tip 15: One Minute Quickies: Instant Spirals
Tip 16: Algorithmic Textues II: From noise to nice
Tip 17: Secrets of Chops, Vol. 3
Tip 18: Secrets of Chops, Vol. 3b
Tip 19: Another Chopping Spree, Vol. 3c
Tip 20: Composing Atoms out of Quarks, or Pictures in an Exhibition
Tip 21: TilinggniliTTilinggniliT: Tiles in Style
Tip 22: Domain Shifts: Applied Metamorphosis
Tip 23: Complexity-city! The Snowy Mask Technique

"No generation of artists has ever been more dependent on scientific and technical advances than today’s. Today’s artists work on computers. Advances in computer science and related mathematical fields underlie everything that digital artists make. Recently these advances have lead to the advent of whole new creative fields like interactive art, generative graphics, data visualization, and digital fabrication.

In order to produce excellent and novel work in these new fields, artists have had to learn computational and mathematical techniques. They started with basic material like trigonometry for 2D games and graphics, the rudiments of computer vision for interactive installations, and primitive signal processing for embedded electronics.

Increasingly these new creative fields are becoming the basis of art and design across our culture. And these techniques are becoming the foundation of a new kind of art and design education. A cohort of today’s best art and design schools teach introductory programming and a survey of these basic topics as their core curriculum (NYU ITP, CMU’s Studio for Creative Inquiry, Parson’s, CIID, UCLA Design Media Arts, etc.).

However, as these new creative fields advance, driven by their own internal momentum and inspired by the advent of new developments in computer science and technology, they are beginning to require more advanced math and programming techniques. Today’s SIGGRAPH papers and academic journal articles are tomorrow’s breakthrough creative coding projects.

Topics like linear algebra, topology, graph theory, and machine learning are becoming vital prerequisites both to doing daily work in these fields and, more importantly, to inventing, popularizing, and teaching the new creative tools that are rapidly arising. Without them, artists are forced to wait for others to digest this new knowledge before they can work with it. Their creative options shrink to those parts of this research selected by Adobe for inclusion in prepackaged tools. Instead of the themes and concerns of creative work driving the selection of tools from a growing technical cornucopia, artists find themselves turned into passive users of tools that are already curated, contextualized, and circumscribed by others.

So, I want to do something about this. I want to figure out a way to teach myself and others these more advanced mathematical and computational concepts with a specific eye towards applying them in creative technology. For example, I want to be able to read SIGGRAPH papers, understand what’s going on in them, explain that to others, and create software libraries that implement their techniques. I want my peers who do data visualization to be able to implement regressions, curve fitting, statistical analysis and machine learning so that their projects are more than just pretty graphs with good typography. I want the hardware hackers who are building the next generation of DIY 3D printers to be able to turn topological algorithms and concepts into open source tool path generation software that creates more efficient gcode and enables the fabrication of previously impossible physical forms."

"I had no idea until that night that the federal authorities in China are mandating that certain factories paint their roofs a specific shade of blue so that they can be read from space by satellites. It makes perfect sense but is still all kinds of wacky and sort of makes you appreciate everything Mike Kuniavsky and crew have been beating on about with their BlinkMs that much more. I suspect, in the long-term though, just giving someone a paint roller and minimum wage is probably a more secure strategy when you stop and think about the bad craziness you could get up to by hacking a smart roof and spoon-feeding crap to the space robots...

It's also all a nice reminder of just how big the Earth is. We are so used to airplanes and the Internet and other magic port-holes through geography that it's easy to neglect the scale of it all.

Someone asked whether it was possible to do the same momentum trick with the iPad version of Google Earth but it's not. Honestly, if the iPad version of Google Earth had momentum none of what's about to follow would have happened.

Ever since that evening I've been thinking about building a plain-vanilla tiled/slippy wandermap of my own. Nothing fancy, just a simple thing that was native to the web and could work on all these extra screens we're collecting as time goes by."

Welcome to Emojicons, your one-stop plot of internet land for every ლ(╹◡╹ლ), ¯_(ツ)_/¯, ಠ_ಠ, and (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ you can possibly imagine. We're here to serve your every textual need, providing a relentless number of ways to refine your chats, tweets, IMs, Facebook posts, YouTube responses, Reddit comments, forum flaming, rage quitting, trolling, and every other type of written discourse. Emoticons, kaomoji, facemarks, and smileys galore!

So indulge, coddle, and rampage through this site to find every emoticon that speaks to your whimsical soul, then fling copious amounts of it all across the internets :).

Two left feet

Who got the poisoned bottle?

@sd ah weird, it's not on the front page. Sorry, thought it was everywhere. Try

Beautiful map tiles, hand crafted by dedicated artisans in San Francisco's trendy Mission district.

A thing we made:

The pattern, the trend, and the continuity are far more interesting than the individual stories. Part of it is simply the usual racist narcissism of The West, of course, which is and which must always be History’s Protagonist, for which all problems become nails, the better to be serviced by our hammers. But while this is the Occam’s razor explanation – and it’s the true one – there is also more to see here, more to say: what these fiction writers also have in common is a certain objective sense in which they are right, in which the story they are telling is true. While their subjective accounts tend to be the least true part of it (the most damning lies have to do with Daisey’s description of his personal experiences, for example), but behind those subjective untruths, we also find a broad field of objective accuracy: Foxconn is a terrible place to work, Joseph Kony really is a nightmare, building schools in Afghanistan is a good thing to do, and Syrian repression is no joke. Marlo really was a serial killer.

This is not a defense, of course, but it is worth saying: if we only emphasize the lies in these accounts, we thereby overlook the extent to which they were saying true things. And it is also worth remembering that truth is not an either/or. One can easily deceive by telling nothing but the truth – telling it selectively, misframed, etc – and one can also tell a kind of truth by using statements which are, on their own, untrue. This is why fiction matters, and why journalism never rests on quite the firm bedrock of objectivity that it needs to pretend it does. But again, this is not a defense, just an attempt to describe a problem that we often have vested interests in failing to acknowledge, the blurriness of the line that separates fact from fiction.

In RGBA mode, pixels can be drawn using a function that blends the incoming (source) RGBA values with the RGBA values that are already in the frame buffer (the destination values). Blending is initially disabled. Use glEnable and glDisable with argument GL_BLEND to enable and disable blending.

glBlendFunc defines the operation of blending when it is enabled. sfactor specifies which method is used to scale the source color components. dfactor specifies which method is used to scale the destination color components. The possible methods are described in the following table. Each method defines four scale factors, one each for red, green, blue, and alpha. In the table and in subsequent equations, source and destination color components are referred to as R s G s B s A s and R d G d B d A d . The color specified by glBlendColor is referred to as R c G c B c A c . They are understood to have integer values between 0 and k R k G k B k A , where

k c = 2 m c - 1

and m R m G m B m A is the number of red, green, blue, and alpha bitplanes.

Source and destination scale factors are referred to as s R s G s B s A and d R d G d B d A . The scale factors described in the table, denoted f R f G f B f A , represent either source or destination factors. All scale factors have range 0 1 .

Has your garden been ravaged by the marauding squirrel hordes? Has your bird feeder been pillaged? Tired of shaking your fist at the neighbor children? Learn how to use Python to tap into computer vision libraries and build an automated sentry water cannon capable of soaking intruders.

Militarizing Your Backyard with Python: Computer Vision and the Squirrel Hordes

The Golden Gate LiDAR Project is a cooperative project sponsored by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and San Francisco State University (SFSU) that has resulted in the collection and processing of high resolution 2 meter nominal pulse spacing or better LiDAR and meet objectives of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).   The DEM data generated from the LiDAR will be added to The National Map, a set of national geospatial datasets available to the public at no cost.  The raw point cloud LiDAR will also become available through the CLICK (Center for LiDAR Information Coordination and Knowledge).  During the summer of 2010, we acquired LiDAR data for the counties and parks of the Marin and San Francisco Peninsulas. We also collected, concurrently, aerial photography and hyperspectral imagery.

The Principal Investigator is Dr. Ellen Hines, an Associate Professor at the SFSU Department of Geography and Human Environmental Studies.   Please email her at ehines@sfsu.edu for further information or if you'd like to be included on our email list. Also see the link for the Coastal & Marine Conservation and Spatial Planning Lab.

The project extent is based upon the watershed boundaries for all watersheds that contain the lands of Marin County and San Francisco County. It also includes the watersheds that contain Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.  The area of interest includes watersheds that are also located in southern Sonoma County and northern San Mateo County and when combined total ~835 square miles (planimetric estimate) of area (please refer to the map below). The project area includes the Marin Peninsula and San Francisco Peninsula that form the western edge of San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay. These peninsulas are north and south of the strait at the mouth of San Francisco Bay called the Golden Gate. This region is the northern part of the Central California coast.

"The total size of the page goes from 502.90K to 2.13MB when the retina versions of images are downloaded." #richkidweb

"never read the bottom half of the Internet"

A 2D rendering engine is not one of the best scenarios for 3D acceleration, and here I’m showing some techniques I must have had to develop to provide the best acceleration scenario possible.

It’s needed to be said that CAAT will be using hardware acceleration if available, and will transparently fall back to canvas if not. Here you can find a mathmayhem game implementation which tries to use WebGL as its renderer. The game suffered no changes at all. You just can tell CAAT to use WebGL by calling Director’s initializeGL method. All the other development issues will be covered by CAAT itself.

First of all, some notes about WebGL needs. Despite us (developers) being thorough regarding our class hierarchies and animation actors collections, the hardware acceleration layer is not aware of or interested at all about our data organization. WebGL is a rasterizer (a very efficient one indeed) so to keep it at high FPS rates, I must have made a switch from object oriented development to data oriented development. In any professional 3D engine it is a must to keep shader switch operations to the minimum, that is sorting your scene assets by shader and by geometry. Achieve this objective’s been priority nº 1 in CAAT.

In the future, there are lengthy technical articles about the best way to put static files on the world wide web