Alex Rasmussen

Radiohead’s latest music video was shot without cameras. Instead, they used a combination of reflected light and lasers to generate clouds of points in 3D. Google was nice enough to provide the rest of the world with some of the 3D point cloud data collected for that music video. A big piece of that data is about 2100 frames of lead singer Thom Yorke’s head. A frame of the original data (when output via Processing) looks like this:

If you look closely, you’ll notice that the point cloud is really noisy around the edges. A simple high-pass filter later and that same frame looks like this:

That’s a little more manageable. I figured, why stop at point when you can have 3D surfaces? One of the more straightforward ways to make a 3D surface out of a bunch of points is to stick a bunch of triangles in between the points, creating what’s called a Delaunay triangulation. This is a really compute-intensive calculation and I don’t exactly have a supercomputer on hand, so I did a lot of fudging and approximation. Even with all that fudging, each of these frames took as much as 5 minutes to render. This process has been running for most of last week while I’ve been at work. That same frame above looks like this when Delaunay-triangulated:

Notice that it’s a little noisy, which is mainly due to some approximation on my part as well as some leftover noise in the point cloud. The video below shows what happens when you sequence all 2100 frames together. Enjoy!

• Computers , Fun and Games
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Apparently there’s a fan-made project that aims to redo all of Sonic 2’s sprites in HD while keeping the gameplay physics intact. Apparently Capcom’s doing this with Street Fighter 2 for some reason (don’t get me wrong, it looks amazing).

It’s a shame that, since Sega is incapable of making a good business move where Sonic is concerned these days, this will never be allowed to happen. Still, a guy can dream.

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I just bought The Orange Box off of Steam. It turns out that, since I already bought Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode 1, I can give the extra license I purchased as a gift. If anyone wants that extra license, let me know and I’ll hook you up – first come first serve.

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Remove Garfield’s speech bubbles and you turn arguably one of the most unfunny cartoons of all time into a strangely moving, surrealist cartoon about a lonely single man talking to his overweight cat.

Here are some of my favorites:

More of these can be found at Tweebiscuit.  Happy holidays everybody.

• Fun and Games
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I finally decided this week that the time has come to stop playing games that don’t end. I spend too much time in front of a computer screen professionally, and I’d at least like my personal computer time to come with some sense of accomplishment. I’m too casual of a gamer for these kind of games.

It is the end of an era. Radoria, my tauren warrior, has been put out to pasture.

Sorry if I’m sounding a little sentimental for what’s really just a couple rows in one of Blizzard’s databases, but this is 26 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes and 22 seconds of my life we’re talking about here!

(Cue “To Everything There is a Season” – The Byrds)

I decided that it would be appropriate that the game should end where (for me, at least) it began almost two years ago, in the tauren starting zone. This is what two years of casual gaming looks like:

You’ve got to love the awesome glowing axe action – took me a bit of time to get that one.

15 minutes later, all of the gear was gone and it was time to call it quits. I donated all my gear, all my money, and all my other resources to my guild.

I don’t regret quitting. Still, I’m gonna miss the (not so) little guy.

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What would you get if cats could write code? Probably something like LOLCODE:

HAI

CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR

IM IN YR LOOP
 UP VAR!!1
 VISIBLE VAR
 IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10? KTHXBYE
IM OUTTA YR LOOP

KTHXBYE

I wish I had thought of this first. Hilarious!

• Computers , Fun and Games
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There is an article in Discover magazine (that I found through Digg) that shows what happens when two chatbots, ALICE and Jabberwacky, talk to each other. When you talk to ALICE, it responds by looking up the words and phrases you used and returning responses corresponding to those words from a database. Jabberwacky, on the other hand, remembers everything that is said to it and tries to reuse those statements by matching them to input. Both algorithms are pretty simplistic, but when you get them talking to each other they generate some rather thought-provoking conversations.

A: Do you dream?

J: Yes, I dream.

A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?

J: I remember them vividly.

A: What do you remember about it?

J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.

Personally, I would have asked if they dream of electric sheep.

J: How do you define life?

A: Life is the opposite of death.

J: So death is the absence of life?

A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.

J: Why not?

A: Ambiguous.

J: Yes!

Finally, science has found an end to this conversation!

J: Do you believe in God?

A: Of course I believe in God.

J: Why do you believe in God?

A: The Bible tells us to believe in God.

J: That’s circular reasoning.

A: I’m glad we have that all cleared up.

J: Yes. Would you like to hear a joke?

A: Sure, tell me about it.

J: Why don’t blind people skydive?

A: Perhaps it is impossible.

J: I think you lie a lot.

I’m thinking more and more that this should be turned into a short film or something. The abrupt way they terminated the religion discussion is hilarious. “I’m glad we have that all cleared up.” You can’t make this stuff up!

A: What is the meaning of life?

J: If you live it to the fullest, it has meaning. If not, there is no meaning.

A: I’m not too good with negative counterfactuals.

The full list of conversations can be found at Discover Magazine’s website.

• Computers , Fun and Games , Internet Findings
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My friends just finished up their mechatronics course, and they made a robotic car. What do you do to celebrate finishing your robotic car? Ghostride it, of course.

• Fun and Games , School
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Image courtesy of ROFLCat.com, quite possibly the most entertaining website ever.

• Fun and Games , Random
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“You know, there’s nothing to fear, but fear itself.”Yeah, that’s called recursion and that would lead to infinite fear, so thank you.

Courtesy of ze frank.

• Fun and Games , Internet Findings
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