Farewell Tim Apple, welcome John Apple!
I'm really hopeful about John Ternus as Apple CEO. Pretty much everything he's done leading hardware engineering has been an unqualified success, and hardware should lead a company like Apple.
www.apple.com/newsroom/202...
There's a new simulation engine plugin in development for Blender called HiPhyEngine by Haixiang Liu. Knowing him from back when he was my colleague at Disney... Haixiang is the Real Deal™, and I expect that this plugin is going to be really good.
superhivemarket.com/products/hip...
My car can do a half-marathon even faster, and a fighter jet can do it faster still, and an orbiting spacecraft can do it in like 3 seconds.
The impressive thing about half marathon times isn’t the time, it’s that a human did it.
Most cubit definitions are quite a bit longer than a foot, I thought. A cubit is roughly the length from an elbow to the tip of the middle finger, which usually hovers around a foot and a half ish.
There’s a bit in the Project Hail Mary book where Rocky chooses to work in Earth units because Grace is bad at math. That reminds me of one of my favorite science jokes:
Man: why is the speed of light so arbitrary? why is it 299792458 m/s?
God: the speed of light is 1, dummy.
I keep hoping that as the 70mm/GT format has been getting more popular and more directors are wanting to shoot in it now, they'll eventually build more GT-capable theaters. There is one GT-capable theater in Brussels, Belgium. The closest 70mm IMAX theaters to Belgium are in the UK and Germany.
Unfortunately 70mm IMAX theaters are very rare; there's maybe 30 in the world, and out of that two thirds are in the United States. There are about 100 IMAX theaters worldwide that can show films in the full 1.43:1 aspect ratio ("IMAX GT"); the ones that don't do 70mm film use dual-laser projection.
They also did this interesting thing where even the 2.39:1 scenes have flares and halation that run out into the 1.43:1 frame, which I thought was very very cool.
BTW in 70mm IMAX, every space scene in Project Hail Mary is 1.43:1, which means 75% of the movie is in 1.43:1. I think it's by far the highest 1.43:1 percentage in any movie released so far (Odyssey is supposed to be 100%). It really is worth every extra cent to see in 70mm IMAX.
..........okay I lied, I'd make one change to the movie: you gotta balance that centrifuge, man. (8/7)
Despite the vast scale and stakes, PHM is at its core a deeply human movie, even if one of the most human characters is a scary space spider (reference for book readers lol). Amaze amaze amaze indeed; it's going right to the top of my favorite scifi movies list. (7/7)
The PHM movie omits quite a lot from the book, but it captures in full (and then some more) the most essential part of the book: the friendship between Grace and Rocky, and the sense of hope and optimism against all odds. (6/7)
...that PHM's version exceeds Interstellar's version in every way conceivable. I think a lot of this is because PHM has something none of its predecessors quite have in the same quantity: an absolutely massive, beating heart. (5/7)
PHM borrows a lot from predecessors such as Arrival, The Martian, and Interstellar, but PHM somehow defies the odds and exceeds everything that it drew inspiration from. The "Fishing/Centrifugal Force" sequence clearly draws from Interstellar's Docking scene, but I think... (4/7)
The movie simply looks and sounds like a zillion bucks. Seeing it in 70mm, you can really see that they physically built the entire Hail Mary, and the CG VFX work is absolutely seamless; clearly a vast amount of care went into making PHM, and every bit of it is visible. (3/7)
Visually, PHM is stunningly gorgeous. I'm admittedly an unabashed Greig Fraser fan, but I think he outdid himself on this one; PHM strikes an incredibly deft balance between the most spectacular vast scifi shots you've ever seen with beautiful close intimate work. (2/7)
I finally saw Project Hail Mary in 1.43:1 70mm IMAX. I refused to see it until I could see it in 70mm IMAX. In my book, it's a perfect movie: 10/10, A++, not a single thing I'd change, and it's the type of movie that proves why 70mm IMAX is the best film format ever made. (1/7)
1. The new Olivia Rodrigo single slaps
2. I have heard before that inside Versailles is an insanely difficult place to get a filming permit for. Would love to see a behind the scenes for how they did this.
youtu.be/78wrful9cVU?...
Shoe company pivots to renting out AI servers because we are living in the dumbest possible timeline.
I was going to say that in retrospect with Project Hail Mary, The Martian kind of feels like Ridley Scott doing a Lord and Miller!
It’s been interesting watching Dodgers baseball the past several years with the dawning realization that someday I’m going to be telling my grandkids about these years.
I think it’s great fun when a director does an impression of another director. Like: A.I. is Spielberg doing a Kubrick. Super 8 is Abrams doing a Spielberg. Interstellar is Nolan doing a Spielberg. Shutter Island is Scorsese doing a Nolan doing a Hitchcock.
NASA undertaking the most ambitious and expensive version of “just zoom with your feet bro” ever
Artemis II is producing some of the most genuinely astounding photos taken in this century. Unfortunately NASA's main image server is getting hug-of-deathed, but they also have a backup feed on Flickr. I highly recommend spending some time there:
www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...
The Milky Way galaxy, as captured by Artemis II.
Shot on Nikon Z9, 35mm f/2D!
www.flickr.com/photos/nasa2...
There's some wild stuff in the Claude Mythos Preview system card:
I like to say that an iphone is a billion dollar object. there is no way to create such a thing for less. it's just that you share the cost with 5 or 10 million other people
the world is full of billion dollar objects that you can own
I also think it’s really cool how it doesn’t matter if you are a high school or college student, or a Middle Eastern oil prince, or a Hollywood cinematographer, or a NASA astronaut on a trip around the moon: it’s all exactly the same iPhone.
I have this exact camera sitting on my desk right in front of me.
I think that’s the single most mind blowing and coolest thing about the democratization modern tech can bring: the same tech that is good enough for NASA is available to me to take pics of my toddler with.
Apple would have to be insane not to put up giant ads everywhere simply showing these images with the caption "Shot on iPhone".