The Weekend Nerdiary

Episode 13

This week in the Nerdiary we'll gaze deep into the Milky Way, fly an Airbus, play with fonts, and explore the worrrrrld of tomorrow. Onward!

[[ Shiny new things ]]

The Zoom Escaper - "a tool to help you escape Zoom meetings and other videoconferencing scenarios. It allows you to self-sabotage your audio stream, making your presence unbearable to others." 🤣🤣

The impossible is becoming more possible. Adobe just released a new feature to its Camera Raw software called Super Resolution, which is basically the "Enhance!" feature from TV crime shows. It uses machine learning to at least give the appearance of detail where there previously wasn't (and lets you turn, say, a 10MP photo into a 40MP photo that doesn't look terrible.)

=- Space invaders -=

Finnish visual artist and astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio took twelve years (1250 hours between 2009 and 2021!) to collect enough data for this mosaic image of the Milky Way. This tiny image doesn't do it nearly enough justice - go to his website to check it out:

Here are some detail shots from the larger image (moon for scale):

-// Fly time //-

Ever wonder what's going on up front while you're adjusting your seatback and tray table? Here's a 30-minute video of the full departure/takeoff sequence from SFO of an Aer Lingus A330 en route to Dublin.

** Play time **

This is absurd(ly awesome): Fontemon, a fully-playable mini video game....inside a font.

An insane thread about the mirror universe inside Duke Nukem 3D...

{ Code code code code code }

This week the demoscene was accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany, which is really cool. (A "demo" comes in various flavors, but in essence is a small program designed to push hardware to its limits and show off the creator's programming, visual art, and music skills.) . I share a lot of demos because they just hit that perfect nerd note.

Here's a link to the results from the 2020 Revision competition (one of the gatherings recognized by UNESCO). And here's the winner of the 2020 PC category:

!@# Animatia #@!

Futurama is of legendary Nerdiary canon. I mean, how can we not deeply appreciate a TV show in which writer Ken Keeler actually penned and proved a theorem based on group theory, and then used it to explain the plot twist in the episode?

Here's the key moment from the episode (Or the full episode broken up into pieces, because YouTube, if you prefer!)

Here's a list of every opening quote from every episode :)

Here's a full breakdown of the samples that went into the theme song:

And here's an awesome 3-minute remix of that theme song:

.. /dev/urandom ..

How do you film 10 million monarch butterflies up close without disturbing them? You build a camera drone shaped like a hummingbird, of course. PBS shows how it's done:

That's it for this week! Thanks again for playing along. If you enjoyed this, feel free to forward to someone else who might as well. If you got this from a friend, subscribe here.

Until the next one,
--Noah

Copyright © 2021 NLH Heavy Industries, LLC. All rights reserved.

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