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Janus

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Everything posted by Janus

  1. I'm a pure hobbyist, so just do it for fun. I mostly stumble around trying to figure things out for myself. Of course, this often leads to my doing things the hard way, simply because I don't realize that there is a simpler, quicker method. Kudos to your son, I don't think I would ever try to take on a project that big. About the longest thing I've attempted was this recreation of a sequence from a "Lost in Space" episode, and most of the work involved was with the models, since the animation was pretty straight forward.
  2. Using my new found skill set, I went back to revisit an old animation. It actually was the first ones I did using a bone rig to do a "walking" animation. I chose it because it was both simple and from one of my favorite cartoons growing up; Jonny Quest. While my original merely had it walking across the frame, this time I added an element from the actual episode, where it takes a hit from a tank, recoils, shakes it off, and then continues on. (And in case you're wondering, the heroes were able to defeat it in the end) I've added some sound effects to up the ante.
  3. TIL how to "chain" animations together in Blender. Just to explain bit:. When you animate, there are times when certain actions, ( like walking) is a simple repetition of the same motions. And rather than have to manually assign these motions over and over again, Blender allow you to automatically cycle them. So once you've animated a particular set of motions, you can have Blender just repeat them over and over again. So example, left foot forward, then right foot forward, left foot forward... The problem is that unless you tell Blender to stop, your character will just keep walking forward forever. And if you do put a limit on how many times to cycle the animation, After it hits the limit, everything jumps back to the beginning. What if you want the character to stop walking across the floor and begin to climb some stairs? You just can't add a new set of motions, as Blender treats them as part of the original cycle. (instead of walk forward 10 steps, then start the stair climbing cycle, you get: Take two steps forward, then climb two steps, take two steps forward... ) This bothered me for quite a while. There are way to get around this but they can be tedious, And I knew there should be an easier way. Today I found it, and its been there all along. It turns out that there is a editor you can open that will turn any animation sequence into an "Action". So you can take your "walk 10 steps forward" and convert it to an action in this editor. Then, when you go back to the animation editor, you are back to a "clean slate". While all your objects are still there, all the motions you gave them are gone, and they are where they would be at the end of the the action. In other words, if you had your character walk forward 10 steps, it will be where it would have ended up after doing so. You can now assign it an animation set (climbing steps, for example) using the same cycling trick as before. This can then be converted into an action and appended to the end of the previous action. Repeat as needed. Here is a simple example: The first action is a descending stairs animation cycled until it reached the floor, then an action to bring the trailing leg to floor level, then a repeated forward walking forward cycle action, an action to lift one leg onto the first step, and lastly a repeated stair climbing cycle. It may not look like much, but learning how to do this opened up a whole new world of animation possibilities for me. (BTW, the color pattern on the floor is due to optimizing the animation file to make it as small as possible.)
  4. On the other hand, my grandparents, who also came from a far North land, were pale, blue-eyed, and Protestant, met with a fair amount of resistance. Apparently, they weren't the "right type" of pale, blue-eyed Protestants.
  5. Like the "fun" of calling a Finnish person a "China-Swede" while lifting up the sides of your eyes with your fingers.
  6. It's a long story. At one time, the year started with March with the period now taken up by January and February just called Winter. This is September, October, November and December, are now the 9th, 10th, 11th and 12th Months, even though Sept, Oct, Nov, and Dec are prefixes for 7, 8, 9, and 10. (there were also months with the prefixes of 5 and 6, but Julius an Augustus Caesar got their hands on them.)
  7. I remember at the time getting a letter from my pension plan early on, assuring me that they had already updated their systems to avoid any issue.
  8. Duolingo teaches the phrase: Norjalainen on viikini, ja suomelainen on velho. ( The Norwegian is a viking, and the Finn is a wizard.) Now while there is a storied event that this refers to, it is not a phrase that is likely to come up in normal conversation.
  9. Janus

    Gravity

    I seems like nonsense because it is. Objects do not "acquire" gravity, as they've always had gravity. The gravity of a single rock is just very, very, weak. Join two rocks together, and their gravitational fields add together. The more rocks added, the greater the sum of their fields.
  10. Finnish: tyttö - girl ( base/subject) tyttöä/tyttön - girl(object)* tyttöt girls(subject) tyttöjä/tyttöt girls(object)* * I am looking at the girl - katson tyttöä I see the girl - Näen tyttön (Tyttön is also the possessive for girl, tyttön makki -A girl's dress) In the same way. I am looking at the girls- katson tyttöjä and I see the girls - Näen tyttöt
  11. Yes, In addition, Finnish isn't even an Indo-European language, but is Uralic instead. Here is a map for the spoken "I" in different regions of Finland. https://forum.unilang.org/viewtopic.php?t=60834 In the birthplaces of my grandparents, they are Mää/Minä (right on the border between the two), mä, and miä. Now that's today, and I don't know how this differs from when they were born.( though since they didn't seem to have any trouble communicating with each other, it must not have been an issue.) 'Minä' is the formal/written form. However, they aren't used all that often. Verbs are conjugated according to the pronoun they are used with, so for example " I am going" = minä menen, while you are going is sinä menet. Because of this, the pronoun is often left out, and just menen or menet alone are used. A couple of peculiar things about Finnish are: No articles(the/a/an) Limited use of prepositions, but uses "cases" instead. (metsä= forest, metsässä = in the forest) Cases are applied to more than just the noun. ( for example; old forest = vanha metsä, while in the old forest = vanhassa metsässä
  12. It would be hard to pull off "talking like native" as a tourist in Finland, largely because the common spoken language differs somewhat from the written/formal that you'd be taught in a language course. For example "minä olen"( I am) is "mä oon" or Kello on kakskymmenta yli yksi"( the time is 20 past 1) is Kello on kakskyt yli yks. (BTW, 'y' in Finnish is always a vowel and is pronounced similar to the 'u' in 'cute'.)
  13. If you are asking another person in another country if they speak English, you are indicating that you want to converse in English, which is not going to help you in learning their native tongue. If you are truly interested in improving your language skills, you might try requesting that they speak in that language rather than English, even if they can. For example "Haluaisin puhua suomea." ( I would like to speak in Finnish.) If they say something you don't get, you could say "Anteeksi, en ymmärrä. Hitaasti, ole hyvä." (Excuse me, I don't understand. Slowly, please.)
  14. This might explain the Finnish spelling. I heard that Finnish can act as a "freezer" of sorts for older words. If they borrow a word from another language, it doesn't tend to change, even if it later evolves in the mother tongue. So, if the Finn's borrowed it when it was in the 'taler" form, it stayed that way. An example is tuoli (chair) which comes for the old Swedish, "stuoli". Since then, Swedish for chair has become stol.
  15. I'm sure both of you know 2 Finnish words, the other being 'sauna'. As far as "plate" goes, lautunen is the common Finnish word, so I'm going to assume 'talerka' is a loan word from Russian. I'm not exactly sure for the reason for the change in spelling for this one. With others, it's to compensate for sounds/letters that aren't in Finnish, or to make it compatible with the Finnish case endings. For example, 'siideri' for 'cider'.
  16. These aren't homonyms, as they have distinct pronunciations. Though Finnish does have it's homonyms(kuusi = six or spruce tree. Voi = able to, butter, or "oh"), it doesn't have those like right,write, and rite. In Finnish, if the word is spelled differently( even slightly) it is pronounced differently. For example, Koira(dog) and Kissa(cat) are how you spell/say these words when they are the subject of the sentence, but Koiraa and Kissaa is used for when they are the object. The difference in pronunciation is that with the latter 2 you carry the ending a bit longer. And this slight difference can actually effect the meaning of a sentence. "Koira etsi Kissaa" and 'Kissaa etsi Koira" both mean that a dog is looking for a cat. The word order, unlike in English, doesn't matter here, So when spoken, the meaning relies on the subtle difference between the "a" and "aa" endings.
  17. Or take kuka and kukka in Finnish, the first means who, and the second means flower. The only difference in pronunciation is that with the second, both ks are pronounced. Or vettä, viettä and viettää ( water, export, and "spend"/"celebrate"/ "lead" .)
  18. For while now, I've been slowly trying to learn Finnish, since it was the natural tongue of all my grandparents. However this isn't going to be strictly about that but abut learning languages in general. They often start by teaching you a few simple phrases, that may come in useful, (hello, my name is... etc.) One of those phrases is often along the lines of "Do you speak English(or whatever language you normally speak)? For example, in Finnish, this would be "Puhetko* englanitia?" After some thought, I realized that there is no real reason you need to know how to say this. If you were in Finland and wanted to ask someone if they spoke English, you could just ask in English. If they do, they will understand you, and answer in English, and if they don't, they'll say something like "Ei"( no), or "en ymmärrä"( I don't understand), or give you some other indication that they don't. Either way, you've got your answer. Now, I can see where it would appear more polite to ask in Finnish( or in whatever the language is where you are), but in a purely logical sense. it is not strictly necessary. And of course, the one thing you definitely shouldn't do if you get the second response is to ask the question again, but LOUDER.... AND....SLOWER. *or "puhutteko" if you being formal or addressing more than one person.
  19. Here are some equations that may help Where: t =Earth time T= ship time d= distance v = velocity a= acceleration For brevity: ch = hyperbolic cosine sh = hyperbolic sine th = hyperbolic tangent t=(c/a) sh(aT/c) = sqrt[(d/c)2 + 2d/a d=(c2/a) [ch(aT/c)-1] = (c2/a) (sqrt[1+(at/c)2]-1) v= c th(aT/c) = at/sqrt[1+(at/c)2] T= (c/a) sh-1(at/c) = (c/a) ch-1[ad/c2 +1]
  20. Janus

    Harris vs Trump;

    I do know that, of as late, the pre-election polls have consistently predicted that Republicans would fare much better than they ended up doing in the election. So something does seem to be askew.
  21. Just for fun, if you wanted the tidal influence to equal that now exerted by the Moon, you'd have to increase the orbit by a factor of 30, putting it somewhere in between the orbits of Himalia and Lysithea, with an orbital period of over 250 days.
  22. If Earth orbited around Jupiter at the moon's present distance from Earth, then it would orbit Jupiter once every 1.43 days. Assuming it starts with its present rotation rate, then Jupiter would cross the sky every 3.33 days. However, it would be undergoing nearly 27,000 times the tidal forces it does now, and this would likely drive a great deal of geological heating and tidal braking, and tidal locking would be the eventual outcome. It wouldn't be a pleasant place to live.
  23. Assuming a 100% efficient "Photon drive", you would need a fuel to mass ratio of 886 to 1 in order to just do a trip to Vega (27ly), stopping there. (this doesn't include a return trip) The center of the galaxy would require one of 955,000 to 1, and the Andromeda galaxy 4.2e9 to 1. Since 100% efficiency is not in the cards, in reality, these would be significantly higher .
  24. Janus

    Harris vs Trump;

    Bush is likely adhering to Reagan's 11th commandment: "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican." Since his father was Reagan's VP, this was likely strongly impressed on him, and a hard habit to break.
  25. Janus

    Harris vs Trump;

    It didn't seem to help him the last time, as he received no bump in the polls afterward. Maybe, after all his whining about "witch hunts" concerning his recent legal problems, he's used that well too often, and it's gone dry.
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