The Daily Grind

Genius. Utter genius. Via Team Gupta, who ponders re-enacting this at a real party… after the drink has been flowing. Evil man.

[edit: changed the embed to the earliest posting I could find on YouTube. The original source is the Marie Curie Actions ‘Teens’ site, which appears to follow standard EU practice of there being an inverse releationship between the funding level of a project and the quality of the web design.]

Here’s a lovely little text experiment. Via Big Contrarian.

Lousy way of making tea, though.

After the use-video-for-geometry-and-stills-for-high-res-texture-maps tech demo, here’s another gob-smacking bit of video frighteningness:

Blimey. Using multi-point motion-tracking to unwrap a texture map, which you can then modify before re-applying to the source image.

Back in the mists of 2006, I blogged about how one outcome of increasing use of high-definition video might be greater demand for post-production rotoscoping techniques to smooth out actors’ wrinkles. Looks like I might have been right.

I’m following the BBC’s excellent Olympic live-update page, which combines a video stream with irreverent text updates from a relay team of BBC staffers. One of the things that keeps cropping up is viewers complaining about the use of the word ‘medal’ as a verb.

Look, folks: if you’re going to get all nit-picky about grammar, make sure you check your facts. The OED isn’t free, of course, and the edition I have to hand is one of the crappy one. But pick any other online dictionary and you’ll find that ‘medal’ can be a verb. Here’s the American Heritage Dictionary on my Mac, for example:

medal | ˈmedl |
noun
a metal disk with an inscription or design, made to commemorate an event or awarded as a distinction to someone such as a soldier, athlete, or scholar.

verb ( medaled | ˈmɛdld |, medaling | ˈmɛdlɪŋ |; also chiefly Brit. medalled, medalling) [ intrans. ]
earn a medal, esp. in an athletic contest : Norwegian athletes medaled in 12 of the 14 events

Yes, I was surprised too. But it’s not bad English just because we haven’t had the chance to use it very often.

Lovely shots at 120 frames/sec, shot on a Red One.

These aren’t the broad beans I’m eating tonight. These are broad beans from two years ago. They wouldn’t be as nice as the ones I’m about to scoff. Not by now. Though they were nice at the time.

I’m sorry. I may have become monosyllabic. I’m salivating at the thought of broad beans. They have a strange effect on me.

Broad. Beans.

Broad beans.

Yum.

I’ve been looking for something like this: Channel 4’s interactive medal table. I still want to see one that I can pivot by discipline, though.

Michael Johnson’s reaction was almost – almost – better than Usain Bolt’s spectacular 100 metre victory. Watch at the BBC’s site.

Paper and demonstrations of some gob-smacking video enhancement demonstrations. The basic model is to use video to capture geometry and dynamic lighting detail, but high-resolution stills to provide the texture mapping.

Utterly, utterly amazing. Also scary, in a ‘pictures lying to me’ sort of way. Well worth a look.

(via Chairman Gruber)

Amazing Flickr photoset from photographer Eric Lafforgue, from a holiday in North Korea in April this year.