3D is absolutely analogous to the development of color film, and on that developmental timeline stereoscopic photography is the equivalent of hand-painting color onto black and white frames.
It seems the current iteration of 3D movies might be here to stay. In the last year or so, it’s been gaining legitimacy among some influential directors as a storytelling platform rather than a crowd-pleasing spectacle.
Rian Johnson (Brick, Looper) has some solid opinions on 3D and articulates it well. I recommend reading his blog post.
Currently, 3D films fall into a version of the uncanny valley pretty hard, and the way it’s marketed is off-putting to many of us. But if we start to look at it as an important stepping stone in the evolution of cinema (and more broadly, the evolution of storytelling, or the replication of reality in a fairly malleable medium), it’s clear that we should respect it. It has value, and to dismiss it entirely is to ignore a notable development in cinema.
It’s more than you ever wanted to know, but also, everything you ever wanted to know.Stephen Wolfram’s recent analysis of over a million people’s Facebook data from the Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook program, is unbelievably thorough. The analysis covers topics such as how people friend each other, how people change with age, and how Facebook land compares to the real world. Our Facebook behavior has never been scrutinized like this before.
The questions I am often asked about my career tend to concentrate not on how one learns to code but how a woman does.
Let me separate the two words and begin with what it means to become a programmer.
The first requirement for programming is a passion for the work, a deep need to probe the mysterious space between human thoughts and what a machine can understand; between human desires and how machines might satisfy them.
The second requirement is a high tolerance for failure. Programming is the art of algorithm design and the craft of debugging errant code.
[…]
Now to the “woman” question.
I broke into the ranks of computing in the early 1980s, when women were just starting to poke their shoulder pads through crowds of men. There was no legal protection against “hostile environments for women.” I endured a client — a sweaty man with pendulous earlobes — who stroked my back as I worked to fix his system. At any moment I expected him to snap my bra. I considered installing a small software bomb but understood, right then, what was more important to me than revenge: the desire to create good systems.
I had a boss who said flatly, “I hate to hire all you girls but you’re too damned smart.” By “all” he meant three but, at the time, it was rare to find even one woman in a well-placed technical position. At a meeting, he kept interrupting me to say, “Gee, you sure have pretty hair.” By then I realized he was teaching me a great deal about computing. It would be a complicated professional relationship, in which his occasional need for male dominance would surface.
So, on that day of my pretty hair, I leaned to one side and said, “I’m just going to let that nonsense fly over my shoulder.” The meeting went on. We discussed the principles of relational databases, which later led me to explore deeper reaches of programming, closer to operating systems and networks, where I would find my real passion for the work. My leaning to one side, not confronting him, letting him be the flawed man he was, changed the direction of my technical life.
I was very obsessed with this video for a long time. Every clip is so perfectly chosen, I can’t describe it. Most of them are visual puns, but some references run pretty deep.
My favorite is the clip during the “bunnies wanting to be fed it” line. Annie says “I’ll be back in two shakes of a rabbit’s ass” in the episode, and that’s a reference that’s impossible to get unless you’ve rewatched seasons 1-2 multiple times.
I feel a strong kinship with whoever made this video.
In computing, Subject-Oriented Programming is an object-orientedsoftware paradigm in which the state (fields) and behavior (methods) of objects are not seen as intrinsic to the objects themselves, but are provided by various subjective perceptions (“subjects”) of the objects. The term and concepts were first published in September 1993 in a conference paper[1] which was later recognized as being one of the three most influential papers to be presented at the conference between 1986 and 1996.[2]
As illustrated in that paper, an analogy is made with the contrast between the philosophical views of Plato and Kant with respect to the characteristics of “real” objects, but applied to software ones. For example, while we may all perceive a tree as having a measurable height, weight, leaf-mass, etc., from the point-of view of a bird, a tree may also have measures of relative value for food or nesting purposes, or from the point-of-view of a tax-assessor, it may have a certain taxable value in a given year. Neither the bird’s nor the tax-assessor’s additional state information need be seen as intrinsic to the tree, but are added by the perceptions of the bird and tax-assessor, and from Kant’s analysis, the same may be true even of characteristics we think of as intrinsic.
