Amiga Warhol

The second computer I ever bought (and the third) was an Amiga. This video shows Andy Warhol doing a portrait of Deborah Harry at the 1985 product launch. When I moved over to the states (again) in 2005 I managed to sell my over ten years old Amiga 4000 with Macro Systems video editing system (including the huge 2GB internal harddrive) so they aged well!

via Drawn!

Wasteful Advertising

All junk mail is waste but here are two particularly useless and this wasteful examples.

Verizon keeps sending us, about weekly, a letter with accompanying folders inviting us to switch to FIOS. The ridiculous part being that, while being mailed to our current address, it explicitly states the address of service: our former apartment

And today I got a great offer from Delta Airlines on flights to New York City. I'm typing this on our porch, and if I stand up and look to the left, I see the Empire State Building. I checked, it is still there. Delta airlines wasted a bit of advertising budget on us once more.

UPDATE: Me and my big mouth! When I threw them into the trash, I mean recycle box, I noticed those Delta flights were FROM New York. It was still SPAM though.

Blender continues to amaze.

I had no idea it was so easy to set up a fluid sim in Blender and create something like this:

Yes, there are a couple of glitches and to be able to remove those, that's the question! I thought that some fluid simulator developed at a university had been incorporated, but it was a Google Summer of Code project. By Nils Thuerey. Wait, just one programmer? Ah, he intergrated his PhD thesis work into Blender. Nice!

No, we have not switched to Blender in the advanced animation class I teach, but the simulated mesh can be imported into Lightwave using a plugin.

And WOW! Someone created this in Blender:

We are not alone...

And now for something completely different: here are dolphins with bubbles up their nose:

[via BoingBoing] - Now back to our regular programming: mashing a banana.

Stanford Celebrity Meltdown

Yes, I really needed to create this to show how to use particles to melt an object. I originally used the full mesh with 34k points, but even though after being non responsive for an hour and a half Lightwave did finish the calculation of a particle system, working with 3.5k points turned out to be more practical

I was really preparing a lecture on facial animation though....