CityLiveSketch is an artistic project created by Italian artist Pietro Cataudella. This ongoing series features 3D architectural drawings that seem to jump off the page using perspective and shadow. Other drawings depict cartoon characters as well as famous paintings superimposed over other paintings and structures to create an unexpected effect.
The aim of CityLiveSketch is to showcase the beautiful world surrounding us, both the iconic places and the most characteristic views, using not only simple photos but also drawings made on a normal travel sketchbook.
See more of Pietro Cataudella's work on Instagram or at his website.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation carries a piece of analysis/commentary on the societal ethics of advertising. I found it fascinating by the depth of arguments (true, there is a bias, but it's likely that most of us soylents share it); do take your time to read it in full, my attempts to summarize it below is bound to fail:
Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.
Two problems result from this. The solution to both requires legal recognition of the property rights of human beings over our attention.
First, advertising imposes costs on individuals without permission or compensation. It extracts our precious attention and emits toxic by-products, such as the sale of our personal information to dodgy third parties.
Second, you may have noticed that the world's fisheries are not in great shape. They are a standard example for explaining the theoretical concept of a tragedy of the commons, where rational maximising behaviour by individual harvesters leads to the unsustainable overexploitation of a resource.
A classic market failure
The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good — access to your attention — doesn't reflect its full social cost.
...Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.
...It's a classic case of market failure. The problem has the same basic structure as the overfishing of the seas or global warming. In economics language, people's attention is a common good.
L’engouement médiatique autour de Greta Thunberg a culminé avec sa nomination comme personnalité de l’année par le magazine Time. Selon Laurent Alexandre d’Atlantico.fr, la jeune écologiste suédoise, issue d’un milieu d’extrême-gauche, a récemment révélé lors d’un discours son véritable agenda : il n’est pas écologique mais révolutionnaire. Pour les lecteurs de Dreuz, j’ai traduit l’article […]
by Sam Barsanti on News, shared by Sam Barsanti to The A.V. Club
It’s been more than five years since Showtime’s Dexter came to its terrible conclusion, freeing the world from the burden of having to continue watching a TV show they don’t like anymore, but something even crueler took Dexter’s place: Seemingly constant rumors about Showtime putting together a Dexter revival or…
by Reid McCarter on News, shared by Reid McCarter to The A.V. Club
Björk hasn’t performed on TV in 8 years and this, as anyone who’s seen clips of her shows will tell you, is a real shame. After biding her time for nearly a decade, perhaps spending this period fully considering the ways in which studio lights reflect off glitter paint and plumes of costume feathers, the Icelandic…
"Take the fifty most murderous, duplicitous, treacherous, and violent people in the world...Now, put them in a room with one seat and make them play musical chairs to the death." Scott Meyer has perfectly summarized the concept behind Game of Thrones.
(Phys.org) —In most demonstrations of quantum teleportation between remote atomic qubits, the atoms exist in free space. In a new study, scientists have discovered that trapping the atoms in optical cavities can overcome some of the previous obstacles facing matter teleportation, which enables an improvement in efficiency of almost 5 orders of magnitude and teleportation across a record-breaking distance of 21 m. These improvements in quantum teleportation could open the doors to realizing quantum networks with many nodes for teleporting qubits to various destinations.
From Public Policy Polling: "Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?" Do 4% Do not 88% Not sure 7%
Special thanks to my current employer Tivix, who is sponsoring me and this project. For the next month I will be working on Hive with Tivix and all it’s resources are at my disposal.
I can now focus on this 100% and get it out the door asap. (get yourself ready)
I will be bringing in at least one other person who is 100% focused on Hive as well.
I also will be getting help from some of the most talented people I know and already work with.
With their help, along with my full attention, you can get it in your hands way faster and hopefully with fewer bugs.
This is super exciting news. I couldn’t ask for anything better. HUGE thanks to Tivix for giving me this opportunity and resources to see Hive come to life. (I think they got tired of me always talking about it and spending all my free time on it, lol)
To you, the community: thanks for sticking with me! This is now happening without a doubt and should arrive way faster. Expect more updates, we want to be very open about what’s happening and keep you in the loop.
Lastly, the answer to Beta keys is soon. I’ll have a more concrete answer hopefully late next week.
Google has announced
that it is forking the WebKit rendering engine to make a new project called
Blink. "Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than
other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the
years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium
projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so
today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based
on WebKit."
An anonymous reader writes "Linux developers are now working on open-source 3D support for NVIDIA's Tegra in cooperation with NVIDIA and months after the company published open-source 2D driver code. There are early patches for the Linux kernel along with a Gallium3D driver. The Tegra Gallium3D driver isn't too far along yet but is enough to run Wayland with Weston."
Good, but can you comment items with this RSS reader ?
Google has been in the news a lot recently, and much of it has been for all of the wrong reasons. The vast majority of that news has swirled around the decision the company made to kill its Reader program. Ghacks has discussed this in detail, providing a list of alternative apps and commentary on the backlash the Google decision has caused.
In my quest to find a replacement before the Google clock clicks down to zero I have tried both Feedly and The Old Reader. Both had their upsides and downsides. My latest attempt involves a service called Feedspot.
Unlike some of the ones out there, Feedspot is free. It is web-based and it can also import your Google Reader OPML file. To get started, you just need to sign up for an account., using your email address. The service prompts you to follow at least one of the feeds listed, which I suppose are partners and the revenue source for this model. These are not junk feeds though, so there is no need to panic on this. For instance, I chose to add National Geographic to my science section. I suppose you can unfollow later, but I will not because I actually like my choice.
After this, click the down arrow to the right of your name at the top of the screen and select "Import" to grab that XML file you took from Google Takeout. The import is almost instantaneous and you will be up and running in no time. However, it does not sync with Reader as services like Feedly do, so you will be face potentially thousands of "unread" stories.
There is an "Edit" button that allows you to arrange your feeds into categories, as I like to do. You can also follow people to see what they are sharing. There is a "Friend Activity" button at the top of the page -- it all looks very Facebok-like.
Conclusion
As far as the interface goes, Feedspot is by far my favorite service so far. It looks nice, works quickly and just appears slick overall. However, updates of new stories seem a bit slow. Overall, it is still the front runner to be my landing spot come July 1 when Google says goodbye to Reader.
I used to be a huge fan of Star Wars, but I can no longer ignore the ugly truth. This is a video of a performance, part comedy, part political analysis of the Star Wars universe, wherein I present my take on the Star Wars mythology. Can you be leftist and pro-monarchy?
Carlos De Carvalho et Aude Danset ont imaginé cette vidéo d’animation 3D appelée « Premier Automne ». Dans cette magnifique création de 10 minutes, Abel, enfant de l’hiver rencontre Apolline, enfant de l’été. Tous les deux, poussés par le désir de se connaître, vont apprendre à faire des compromis pour se protéger.
They’re looking for a more pleasurable STD and pregnancy prevention device that people will actually use. They already have proposals for one made out of silicone and one made out of--we’re serious--electrically spun fabric. What else will condom innovators come up with?
The humble condom remains our best defense against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. It is the one device that protects against all risks, is easily transportable, and cheap to produce as well. In places where more expensive options are unavailable, it is already a life-saver.
The problem is many men don’t like wearing them, despite the threat to themselves, and their partners. Studies in the developing world show that cultural factors, misconceptions, and a belief that condoms reduce sensation, all lower rates of use.
You can see how the desire for better sex wins.
"People’s assessment of their own risk is sometimes not realistic," says Stephen Ward, a program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "Sex is a powerful motivator. When you’re talking about reducing the pleasure someone can derive from sex, and you add that to a poorly understood risk, you can see how the desire for better sex wins."
The Gates Foundation is launching a "grand challenge" to find fresh condom concepts. It wants to hear from material scientists, product designers, and sex experts interested in making prophylactics more "user-friendly."
If we could make something better, we could have a really substantial effect on HIV prevention.
"This is an opportunity for people in all areas of research to think about a problem they might not have thought about before," Ward says. "If we could make something better, we could have a really substantial effect on HIV prevention and unintended pregnancy in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia."
Researchers are developing alternative "multi-purpose prevention devices" like vaginal rings and "co-formulated injectables." But Ward says they’re "years away from deployment into hands of people who need them," and that a better condom could save lives in the interim.
The submission period runs until May 7, but will probably be extended for another six months this fall. Initially, at least, the bar for practicability is not high. Researchers need only fill out a two-page application, and prove the concept works in basic terms. "We’re looking for a couple of experiments to show the idea has legs," Ward says. Winning entries get $100,000 for further development.
Ward and his colleague, Papa Salif Sow, hope to get hundreds of ideas, but there are two they like already.
Researchers at the University of Washington are working on a very fine electrically spun fabric made of nanometer-sized polymer strands that dissolve to release sperm-blocking and anti-HIV drugs. And, Origami, a company in California, is developing a silicone injection-molded condom that it says is easier to put on, and more pleasurable to use.
"Origami are taking an innovative design-centric approach to making condoms with the sensual experience at the forefront, understanding the user preferences of the populations they are testing in," Ward says. "The electro-spun approach is a new technology. The Origami is a good example of a new philosophical approach."
If you have an idea of your own, the Gates Foundation wants to hear from you. The application page is here.
From Public Policy Polling: "Do you believe that shape-shifting reptilian people control our world by taking on human form and gaining political power to manipulate our societies, or not?" 
