Though my initial favorite design for Ground Zero was the Norman Foster design, I’ll be looking forward to either the Daniel Libeskind or THINK Team buildings. The THINK building, two towers of lattice was one of the ones I really didn’t like at first, but that was based on seeing only one photo. The 3D walkthrough on the New York Times Envisioning Downtown site is astounding. Both designs are exceptionally well thought out, I especially liked Libeskind’s use of light to commemorate the times of impact on September 11th.

2-pop recently implemented UBB fourms, which is a huge improvement. I threw together a quick forum jump menu for their front page, but it got eaten by the forum ampersand translation. Here is a working version:

2-Pop Forums

SpotLight:
Final Cut Express

Production:
DV Cinematography
DV Camcorders
Panasonic AG-DVX100 Camera
Gear & Accessories
Production Audio

Final Cut Pro:
FCP Editing
FCP 101
FCP - Advanced Techniques
FCP for Film
FCP -Audio
FCP for Documentaries
FCP- Titling, Compositing and Effects
FCP - PAL Issues
FCP on PowerBooks
FCP - Hardware
FCP - Feature Requests
Apple iMovie

Compositing, Animation and Effects:
Compositing, Animation and Effects

NLE Software:
Adobe Premiere
Avid XpressDV
Pinnacle Edition

DV Hardware:
Decks, VTRs, Media Storage and Firewire
Capture Cards

Web and Multimedia:
DVD - Authoring & Creation
Cleaner, QuickTime & other Compression Applications

Education & Training:
Education & Training
DV for Teachers

Community:
Feedback
User Groups Announcements
2-pop Café - Open Discussion
Advertise Services
Marketplace - The Place to Sell your Gear

Jobs:
Jobs

Creative Planet Communities:
Cinematographer
Digital Cinema Magazine
Design In Motion
Post Industry
Director’s World
Editor’s Net
VFX Pro
Videography

Hilarious MiSTing of the Democratic response to the State of the Union address. In all fairness to Governor Locke, he got better towards the end as he grew more comfortable. However after watching both speeches the Democrats now seem even more scattered and disorganized than they did before blowing last November’s elections.

Transcripts:

• State of the Union address
• Democratic Response

Ugh. Just spent the better part of four hours dealing with hard drive problems. Lost mail and Dock preferences again, but everything’s better now. Thank you Disk Warrior.

Why would you ever post a math puzzle like this without linking to the solution?

It took me a little while, but here’s my solution:

The area of the total triangle is always 32.5 (5*13*0.5).

The area of the red triangle is 12 (3*8*0.5).
The area of the teal triangle is 5 (2*5*0.5).
The area of the yellow shape is 7.
The area of the green shape is 8.

Now we have a problem. 12+5+7+8 is 32. How is it that the overall area becomes 33 when the shapes are rearranged?

The problem is that the puzzle is bogus.

The area changes because the triangles are not congruent. Their angles are slightly off which causes a unit of slip in either direction spread out across the hypotenuse of both triangles.

The proof is in the angles of the smaller triangles versus the angles of the larger ideal triangle. Solving the triangle for it’s angles reveals the problem.

The Red triangle’s angles are 20.56° and 69.44°
The Teal triangle’s angles are 21.8° and 68.2°
All the triangle’s angles should be 21.04° and 68.96°
(all numbers rounded for clarity)

Another clue is that the leftover rectangular area defined by the two triangles is originally 3*5 units for an area of 15. When the triangles are rearranged, the area becomes 2*8 units, an area of 16.

If the ‘puzzle’ was legit, the red triangle would be 8*3.077 with an area of 12.31 and the teal triangle would be 5*1.92 with an area of 4.81. The magic and certainty of numbers prevail, I hate these kinds of carnival tricks.

My sophomore year of high school I received a “D” grade in Pre-Algebra. I was bored.

These automated triangle solving tools made this go much faster. Here is an MySQL query which returns the angles of the bogus triangles:

SELECT
ATAN(5/13) * (180/PI()) AS whole_triangle_A,
90 - ATAN(5/13) * (180/PI()) AS whole_triangle_B,
ATAN(3/8) * (180/PI()) as red_triangle_A,
90 -ATAN(3/8) * (180/PI()) as red_triangle_B,
ATAN(2/5) * (180/PI()) AS teal_triangle_A,
90-ATAN(2/5) * (180/PI()) AS teal_triangle_B;

(via Making Light)

Something corrupted my mail preferences this morning. Luckily I didn’t lose anything, partly because of a backup and partly because the application behaved well after crashing. I did lose all my filtering rules, four months of learned junk mail filtering and the record of which messages had already been downloaded from the server. After restoring my prefs and restarting mail, it proceeded to download almost 800 messages, most of which had already been read, responded to and filed. So there went my morning.

If you’re using OS X, back up the Library folder in your Home folder. Just take the whole thing and throw it on a CD if it will fit. Do this regularly. If it wont fit, start by backing up the following folders in your user library:

• Mail
• Application Support
• Preferences
• Keychains (all stored passwords are in here)
• Addresses (all the Address Book stuff)
• Calendars (if you’re using iCal)

Depending on which browser you’re using, these are the locations of their various bookmark files:

Safari: ~/Library/Safari

Chimera: ~/Library/Application Support/Chimera

Explorer: ~/Library/Preferences/Explorer

Phoenix: ~/Library/Phoenix

Mozilla: ~/Library/Mozilla

Opera: ~/Library/Preferences/Opera Preferences

OS X is really good but it’s still a long way from perfect.

JVC Hi-Def camcorder: Like the Panasonic 24fps DVX100, this is going to shake up the DV world all over again. Are Canon and Sony sweating over these? I just hope JVC’s HD format is open and not a repeat of Sony’s almost useless MicroMV format.

My next camcorder will either be Hi-Def or tape-free. Maybe both. And hopefully it will use the Foveon X3 chipset. Lately I’ve been wishing my still camera also shot DV, that would be my dream camera.