Wolfram came to our evolutionary biology department to preach that book about 20 years ago. We all got our heads into cellular automata for a while, but in the end they just don't have the claimed profound explanatory power in real biological systems.
It depends on the kind of work. If it's routine stuff, past seven hours or so, I can keep going and not feel tired, but I increasingly don't want to, and the feeling that I'd rather be doing something else becomes very distracting. If the work is technical and intellectually rewarding, I might feel inspired to continue, but I start making mistakes and past a certain point, it becomes counterproductive. If the work requires conceptual or creative insights, my brain stops delivering them for free and my backup methods for squeezing them out start failing too. If I'm speaking or writing, I lose the thread and my words lose their punch and personality.
My occasional bouts of insomnia bring a different kind of all-encompassing fatigue. I become overemotional. At my most sleep-deprived, I struggle to operate a kettle. Things were different when I was younger. Writing up my PhD, I essentially slept every other night for months, yet stayed sharp, productive.
I find it impossible to reconcile Monty's character with the fact Richard Griffiths was only forty years old when he played him. Yes, forty. I'm 46 now but however old I get, Uncle Monty will forever remain the archetypal "batty older queen" in my head.
That is wild, yes - he's one of those actors that always seems about that age. He was 57 or so when the first Harry Potter was filmed.
In fact, I would like a Potter/Withnail mashup, with Harry looking confused and distraught while Withnail shouts "Have you been at the controls!!? I demand some booze!" at him.
From what I understand, Moses's major contribution was describing color mixing principles for pigment paints independent of the notion of specially nominated primary colors, showing among other things that a mixture of any two paints is reduced in saturation in proprtion to their separation on the hue circle. I've been exploring classic color theory texts lately and the most illuminating by far as been Michel-Eugène Chevreul's "Principles of Color Harmony and Contrast", which has a wonderful recent translation and commentary by Dan Margulis. The core of the work elucidates what are known today as the optical phenomena of simultaneous contrast, chromatic adaptation, perceptual constancy. There is also a good overview and critique of historical color wheels at https://www.handprint.com/HP/WCL/color14.html
The third video in the "Featured Introductions" section near the top of the page, called "A Swift Introduction to Geometric Algebra", is a very good starting point.
I also have to balance foodie obsessions with being economical and healthy. (Growing up, my extended family had a culture of "living to eat" and they ran several restaurants as a trophy thing, i.e., with negligible profit but acclaimed food.) I'm now an experienced home cook who likes throwing somewhat elaborate dinner parties, but when on my own it still makes sense to just batch cook and freeze. When it comes to that, what I notice is that I'm still making the same dishes I did as a poor student, just augmented. The base dish is quite tasty to start with, but now I can afford to use a few nicer or speciality ingredients that take it up a level. If you're making a cauldron of risotto or tomato sauce or whatever that will yield dozens of servings, it doesn't cost that much more per serving to add the extra thing or perform the extra technique that makes it really delicious or interesting (and compensates for the fact you're freezing it). The same applies to everyday things that I whip up to eat fresh, in terms of keeping a well-stocked pantry of somewhat pricey powders and potions that only get used up slowly.
It works as a kind of experimental extension supplied with the paid FLIP Fluids addon. Note that the fluid solver built into Blender is also an implementation of FLIP, but "FLIP Fluids" is a separate product. I've played with fluid simulation in Blender quite a bit. The bundled FLIP is very limited, FLIP Fluids is great, and the color mixing is amazing!
>The next step is to automatically add "nodes" to the 3D images where the model can pivot, rotate and whatnot and then boom, you have on-demand animated, interactive content.
The next step is to generate models with higher quality mesh topology that allows animation and editing without breaking the mesh. I've done a lot of retopologizing and if I (or AI) were to rig these models as-is there would be all kinds of shading and deformation issues. Even without animating they are glaringly triangulated up close. But I suspect really high quality 3D asset generation is just around the corner because all you'd have to do is join up the approach seen here with AI quad re-meshing based on estimated direction fields and feature detection, which is also getting scarily good.
One thing that at least doubled my modelling efficiency was my acquisition of a multi-button gaming mouse with a twelve-button thumb grid. In Blender I have that mapped mostly to the numpad which enables 3D navigation at the speed of thought, and without me having to move my other hand away from the cluster of most-often-used hotkeys at the bottom-left of the keyboard. You also get five functions out of the MMB which also can really speed up working in the Node Editor. But. I'm left-handed. The only suitable mouse I can find like this is a Razer Naga Left-Handed Edition, and I don't like the build quality. It's too light and small for my hand, and on the two specimens I've used, the MMB is a little bit glitchy (occasionally registering scrolling the wrong way, and click turns into push-left or push-right). So I wouldn't be without it, but I wish there were better options.
This is true with some qualifications. If you're interested in the kind of investment grade diamonds that a major auction house would deal with, then you're looking at heavy weights and/or fancy colors that synthetics can't reach yet. In the diamond trade the word "paragon" is sometimes reserved for flawless or near-flawless stones above 100 carats, of which there is a long list of famous examples, but the largest gem grade synthetic is still around 30 carats I believe. Vivid colors top out at much lighter than that. I guess we'll be able to outdo nature within a few decades though (as far as terrestrial diamonds go, anyway -- I seem to recall reading somewhere about the discovery of moon-sized space diamonds).
Vivid colors are a trivial engineering problem, and one the Chinese have already cracked. Screenshot: https://ibb.co/s6gWTy1
Prices are dropping like a rock from a high tower, and colors and other options are becoming more available. Within 10 years you'll be able to buy virtually any diamond you like, in any common color, for less than a 2ct stone would have cost in 2014.
Though if you are interested in investment grade diamods I'd say it is time to get out - diamonds have never been as rare as investors like to pretend, and things are going to get worse.
A diamond the size of a moon? Does that mean it's a single molecule of pure carbon the size of the moon? I wonder what effects gravity has at that scale
I don't know about moon sized but there are solar systems out there where carbon is more common than silicon. In such a system if you had a terrestrial planet then you're likely get diamonds instead of quartz being the most common mineral in the crust. You also might possibly get diamonds in an octagonal crystalline form which are theorized to be far stronger than the diamonds we have here on Earth.
The density of diamond is about 3.5 g/cm^3. The Earth's moon has a density of around 3.3 g/cm^3, so if you replaced it with a diamond of about the same size, it actually wouldn't be all that different in terms of gravity. Solar eclipses would be pretty wild though.
Was more thinking about whether there are any interesting gravitational effects on the internal chemistry of a giant crystal. Say it is one single crystal, how would its centre differ from the surface?
Earth, Moon, or Big Fine Diamond, the gravity at the surface is 1 unit (for whatever normalised radius, density to get a 1 works) while the gravity at the centre is 0.
It's certainly polycrystalline rather than a giant single-crystal. It would contain lots of every other element that's soluble in it, to its limit of solubility, and whatever's insoluble or over that limit would have to form different mineral inclusions at grain boundaries.
