Today I Learned

[iNow]

6 hours ago, TheVat said:

A really unusual neo-noir

Stunningly filmed thus far.

[Eise]

10 hours ago, TheVat said:

With possibly also elements of the German series, Dark.  

Except one (or two?) episodes of 'Tales from the Loop' playing with time, it is not the essence of the series, as it is in 'Dark'. The episodes of 'Tales' are relatively independent, but there are a few running threads through the episodes. But maybe this is not the place to discuss that.

Maybe the admins could open a new forum for discussing movies and series?

Ups, I did not say that! 

[MSC]

3 hours ago, Eise said:

Except one (or two?) episodes of 'Tales from the Loop' playing with time, it is not the essence of the series, as it is in 'Dark'. The episodes of 'Tales' are relatively independent, but there are a few running threads through the episodes. But maybe this is not the place to discuss that.

Maybe the admins could open a new forum for discussing movies and series?

Ups, I did not say that! 

I'm game! Swansont and MigL need to do a deep dive into Farscape lol

[Moontanman]

3 hours ago, MSC said:

I'm game! Swansont and MigL need to do a deep dive into Farscape lol

Travelers dude! Travelers is the show to watch! Time travel is the bomb! 

[MSC]

48 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

Travelers dude! Travelers is the show to watch! Time travel is the bomb! 

As a massive Dr Who fan, this I can appreciate! Will watch for sure thank you!

[Moontanman]

5 minutes ago, MSC said:

As a massive Dr Who fan, this I can appreciate! Will watch for sure thank you!

The premise is quite unique for Travelers, a relatively new take on an old trope. 

[dimreepr]

4 hours ago, jonasdouglas said:

Today I learned some interesting things about SEO marketing as I was reading through the internet.

Today I learned, there's more people who speak English in China than in the USA. 😉

[zapatos]

Today  learned that female cicadas seem to confuse the sound of lawnmowers with the sound of male cicadas. I can walk through my yard and maybe have a couple of cicadas fly into me. When I cut the grass it is more on the order of 100 or so that land on me, one after the other.

[TheVat]

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

 

 

[dimreepr]

1 minute ago, zapatos said:

Today  learned that female cicadas seem to confuse the sound of lawnmowers with the sound of male cicadas. I can walk through my yard and maybe have a couple of cicadas fly into me. When I cut the grass it is more on the order of 100 or so that land on me, one after the other.

Think yourself lucky, I got a Turkey who thinks I'm sexy enough to gobble at...

[Moontanman]

8 minutes ago, zapatos said:

Today  learned that female cicadas seem to confuse the sound of lawnmowers with the sound of male cicadas. I can walk through my yard and maybe have a couple of cicadas fly into me. When I cut the grass it is more on the order of 100 or so that land on me, one after the other.

Watch out for the ones with fuzzy butts! 

[Ghideon]

This week, thanks to @joigus, I learned about squircles and some associated mathematics. A squircle is a shape intermediate between circle and a square. I got fascinated and then, for reasons unknown, curious about the possibility of a shape that is between a triangle and a circle. I searched and it was easy to find images but not names or mathematical definitions; "triangular squircle" is obviously not a good starting point in a search engine. 

But the search led me to the cool shapes generated by roulettes** and finally after some experiments the Hypotrochoid: A hypotrochoid is traced by a point attached to a circle of radius r rolling around the inside of a fixed circle of radius R, where the point is a distance d from the center of the interior circle.

With parameters  d=1, r=3, R=9 I get the triangular shape I was looking for:
 

 

**) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roulette_(curve)

[MigL]

8 hours ago, Ghideon said:

With parameters  d=1, r=3, R=9 I get the triangular shape I was looking for

So, not a trircle ?

On 4/23/2024 at 5:40 AM, MSC said:

I'm game! Swansont and MigL need to do a deep dive into Farscape lol

First three episodes of The Boys S04 just dropped.
Now waiting on S Stallone's Tulsa King S02.

Not learning anything watching TV shows.

Edited June 15, 2024 by MigL

[MSC]

2 minutes ago, MigL said:

So, not a trircle ?

First three episodes of The Boys S04 just dropped.
Now waiting on S Stallone's Tulsa King S02.

I've been watching Andromeda after work for a few months now. Almost at the end of season 3. Only ever recal seeing an episode or two as a Kid when it was on TV but never really tuned in. 

[MigL]

Having grown up on Star Trek ( saw my first episode 'Who Mourns For Adonais' in 1971 ), I'm sort of spoiled for other sci-fi series; at least until Star Trek: Voyager.
I find all other sci-fi series 'cheesy'.
Even the new Star Treks ( Picard, Discovery, etc ) are kind of lame, although I do like Strange New Worlds.

[Ghideon]

5 hours ago, MigL said:

So, not a trircle ?

Good question! I did try and found related shapes such as

Reuleaux triangle

Rounded triangle 

Epitrochoids 

Deltoid

But not the one I wanted.

 

Edited June 15, 2024 by Ghideon
Image posted twice

[joigus]

Today I learned about the existence of ECC (elliptic curve cryptography). A cryptographic method which seems to bee just as efficient as RSA, but with smaller-size keys.

Thanks to @Ghideon.

[zapatos]

Today I learned that sometimes you can increase photosynthesis in plants by reducing the sunlight they are exposed to.

While listening to a gardening podcast there was a discussion of the impact of heat on photosynthesis. Some garden plants stop photosynthesizing at about 85 F.  If you provide some shade you can locally cool the area and provide potentially a couple of extra hours per day of plant growth.

[Janus]

TIL that children's tendency to dislike vegetables may actually be an evolutionary advantage. Vegetables tend to be somewhat bitter, but so are poisons.  Children have more taste buds than adults, since we lose them as we age, which makes them more sensitive to this bitter taste.  With their smaller size, it takes a smaller amount of poison to be lethal, so a greater tendency to spit out bitter foods decreases the chances of ingesting enough toxins to be fatal if they put the wrong thing into their mouth.

[TheVat]

i learned from the newest member of the Vat household that five week old kittens will eat unscented cat litter, even when high quality food is available.  (the mom cat's human had a baby last night and, due to circumstances, the adoption we were going to do at 7-8 weeks was moved up; fortunately the weaning process was well underway, so the litter snack didn't displace dinner too much)

[Ghideon]

During my vacation I learned, among other things, that Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle can be seen as a formalization of Occam's Razor in the context of statistical modelling and data analysis. 

Thanks @joigus for sharing this that triggered my curiosity:

On 8/3/2024 at 3:20 AM, joigus said:

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Algorithmic_information_theory

 I had some practical experience from related areas such as data compression and communication. But I did not know much about the science that formalize and quantify intuitive but vague concepts (for instance complexity, simplicity, randomness of individual objects) and hence allows one to talk about them in a rigorous way.

 

[Janus]

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.)

 

[Janus]

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.