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One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな！）
One Cut of the Dead (カメラを止めるな！) is a low budget Japanese zombie movie that became hugely popular here. I just watched it over the weekend and it was wonderful. The writing is very funny and very clever, and when it was over I found myself immediately wanting to watch it a second time.
From Wikipedia:
One Cut of the Dead was made for 3 million Japanese Yen (approximately $25,000 in US Dollars at the time) with a cast of unknown actors. It was made in eight days after director Shinichiro Ueda participated in workshops for actors and filmmakers at the Enbu Seminar drama school in Tokyo
One Cut of the Dead opened in Japan in an 84-seat Tokyo art house theater with an initial theatrical run of six days. It was showing at around 200 screens in Japan by March 2018 where it had officially grossed 800 million yen ($7.3 million)
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The World's Most Beautiful Data Center
Image: Barcelona Supercomputing Center
The Torre Girona Chapel was deconsecrated in the 70s, and now houses the MareNostrum supercomputer.
“We were in need of hundreds of square meters without columns and the capacity to support 44.5 tons of weight,” Maspoch told me in an email. “At the time there was not much available space at the university and the only room that satisfied our requirements was the Torre Girona chapel. We did not doubt it for a moment and we installed a supercomputer in it. ”
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Automating Materials Science with Machine Learning
A robot arm dips a pipette into a dish and transfers a tiny amount of bright liquid into one of many receptacles sitting in front of another machine. When all the samples are ready, the second machine tests their optical properties, and the results are fed to a computer that controls the arm. Software analyzes the results of these experiments, formulates a few hypotheses, and then starts the process over again. Humans are barely required.
The setup, developed by a startup called Kebotix, hints at how machine learning and robotic automation may be poised to revolutionize materials science in coming years. The company believes it may find new compounds that could, among other things, absorb pollution, combat drug-resistant fungal infections, and serve as more efficient optoelectronic components.
This sounds like a perfect application for machine learning. It’s a great combination of smart design and brute force effort.
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Spaghetti Carbonara
For a long time I thought I didn’t like carbonara because the few I tried were too creamy and eggy. Recently I gave it another try because the picture in the menu looked delicious. It was excellent, and I decided I wanted to learn how to make it myself. I needed some practice before I felt comfortable with the timings, but overall it’s a pretty simple recipe that wasn’t hard to learn.
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Lucid Dreaming
I was consistently able to have lucid dreams when I was in high school. Partway through a dream, I would realize that I was dreaming and could then control the rest of the dream to a small extent. As I’ve grown older though, this has become less and less common. Maybe age has changed something about my brain.
Naturally, I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming and have read a lot about it. Tim Ferriss has a fascinating beginner’s guide on his blog. Different people seem to have different approaches and theories, so I thought I would write about my own experiences.
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Universal Basic Income
I wonder sometimes about what a better society than ours would be. What should our goals be as we try to improve?
As our society improves and we get more efficient, I like to imagine a future where we don’t have to work as much. That seems like a nice thing to aim for. Universal basic income (UBI) seems like one possible solution. If we could afford to give everybody a fixed minimal income, people could work less and still have a basic amount of wealth needed to survive. But I’m not yet convinced whether UBI is the correct answer to describe an ideal future.
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The Value Promise of Subscription Games
I had been playing World of Warcraft on and off for about 10 years, but I decided to stop playing again about a year ago. I quit because of a series of changes that were made to the game, and it motivated me to think about why I reacted that way as a paying customer.
A series of recent changes made to WoW were designed to motivate players to play by ensuring they always gain something and grow a little every time they play. Unfortunately, a side effect of these changes was an increased pressure to spend many hours playing. This made me feel like my limited time spent in the game was less valuable, and is what ultimately led to me quitting the game.
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How to Cook Popcorn in a Pan
The best way to cook popcorn in a pan. The secret is to heat up the kernels evenly in hot oil first, before heating them over a flame to pop them quickly all at once.
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Picular - Google, but for Colors
Picular is a site that lets you search for words like “water” or “summer” and see a list of related colors. It seems to work by running a Google image search and extracting the primary color of that image.
This is the kind of project I love. It’s simple and easy to understand, but fun to play with.
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Game Idea: PvP Pac-Man
Concept
Play Pac-Man online against other players. 1 player plays as Pac-Man and 4 other players play as the ghosts. Pac-Man’s goal is to collect as many dots as possible, and the ghosts’ goal is to work together to catch Pac-Man. Players receive points at the end of the round based on performance, and roles are rotated for the next round.
Gameplay
In terms of strategy, the ghosts will need to work together in order to win. Pac-Man will move faster than the ghosts, so the ghosts’ main strategy will be to trap Pac-Man in a corner. To encourage teamwork, all ghosts will receive the same amount of points at the end of round regardless of who actually caught Pac-Man.