MetaFilter posts tagged with modeling

This is what happens when you take the blue pill and the red pill.

Room 641-A — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:15:17 -0800

Postcards From Google Earth: "I collect Google Earth images. I discovered them by accident, these particularly strange snapshots, where the illusion of a seamless and accurate representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down. I was Google Earth-ing, when I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked like they were upside down." Clement Valla (previously) explains how Google's The Universal Texture system is changing the way we see the world:

"At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the algorithm, but looking closer I realized the situation was actually more interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition—an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They reveal a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources constantly updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion; Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation. These uncanny images focus our attention on that process itself, and the network of algorithms, computers, storage systems, automated cameras, maps, pilots, engineers, photographers, surveyors and map-makers that generate them."

The Universal Texture WebGL Earth Documentation WebGL Earth 3D Digital Globe

The Dark Side of the Miss USA Pageant

reenum — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 08:10:30 -0800

Donald Trump trumpets the integrity of the Miss USA pageant. The truth is a bit different.

Aspiring Animators & Game Designers, Study Your Calculus & Combinatorics

zarq — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 13:20:49 -0800

Every film Pixar has produced has landed in the top fifty highest-grossing animated films of all time. What's their secret? Mathematics. Oh, and 22 Rules of Storytelling. Dr. DeRose has recently been giving lectures about the Pixar formula ("story, concept art, modeling, rigging, shading and lighting") around the country. On Youtube: Movies, Math and Making. PDFs of his papers are archived at Pixar's website. Vimeo: Math in the Movies: Making It All Add Up

Sashay! Shantay!

MaryDellamorte — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 18:06:44 -0800

72 year-old Liu Xianping becomes an internet sensation after modeling his granddaughter's teen clothing line on her Tmall website.

on Kate Moss, and "taking one for the team"

flex — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 09:10:29 -0800

On Kate Moss, and Taking One for the Team: "So, earlier this week Vanity Fair published a rare interview with Moss, in which the model, who is well-known for her circumspection, is unusually frank about the early years of her career. Moss was still a skinny, gangly teenager when she was plucked from mediocrity in Croydon and catapulted to superstardom. She was barely an adult, almost still a child, when she did her first topless photo shoot, with Corinne Day for The Face. In the interview, she talks about how uncomfortable this made her... This isn't the only the only revelation Moss made during the interview. It also turns out that the famous Calvin Klein campaign she did in 1992 with Mark Wahlberg gave her a nervous breakdown... Conveniently ignoring the fact that when the pictures were taken, Moss wasn't 'the face of the '90s', but a skinny teenage girl who cried because she was made to take her clothes off, Needham continues by saying that Moss' skinny frame 'seemed to encapsulate the euphoria of those long-distant times.'" *summary of the Vanity Fair interview at Vanity Fair *Alex Needham - How a 16-year-old nude Kate Moss ushered in the 90s: "Moss may regret that early shoot, but it took beauty out of the realm of fantasy glamour into something more wonky and fallible" *Kate Moss: the style icon who suffered in silence: "This week, a new coffee-table art book dedicated to Kate Moss is published... it will no doubt be a thing of great beauty, but it won't attract half the fuss that last week's Vanity Fair interview with Moss has." *Was Kate Moss exploited as a young model?: "In 1990 she was just 16 when a nude photoshoot launched her career. But it wasn't a happy time, says the supermodel" photos (may be NSFW for some): *her first topless photo shoot, with Corinne Day for The Face, 1990 *the famous Calvin Klein campaign with Mark Wahlberg, 1992 *Vogue UK shoot by photographer Corinne Day, 1993

On nude modeling

Brandon Blatcher — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 11:27:05 -0800

On being a nude model for artists: males (1, 2, 3), females (1, 2, 3, 4).

A Lot of Work Goes into Your Stompy-Stomp

gilrain — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 13:05:43 -0800

Even if you don't have a fondness for building-sized, stomping war machines, you might find this detailed interview and pictorial about the process of designing, from concept to texturing, a mech interesting.

Cliodynamics

zarq — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 13:25:12 -0800

Peter Turchin is a Professor of Mathematics, and of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Connecticut. For the last nine years, he's been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and using them to model human history -- a pattern identification process he calls Cliodynamics. The goal of cliodynamics (or cliometrics) is to turn history into a predictive, analytic science. By analysing some of the broad social forces that shape transformative events in US society: historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence, he has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way, and should peak around 2020. From the Nature link: Cliodynamics is viewed with deep scepticism by most academic historians, who tend to see history as a complex stew of chance, individual foibles and one-of-a-kind situations that no broad-brush 'science of history' will ever capture. “After a century of grand theory, from Marxism and social Darwinism to structuralism and postmodernism, most historians have abandoned the belief in general laws,” said Robert Darnton, a cultural historian at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in a column written in 1999. Most think that phenomena such as political instability should be understood by constructing detailed narratives of what actually happened — always looking for patterns and regularities, but never forgetting that each outbreak emerged from a particular time and place. “We're doing what can be done, as opposed to aspiring after what can't,” says Daniel Szechi, who studies early-modern history at the University of Manchester, UK. “We're just too ignorant” to identify meaningful cycles, he adds.
Related, Boston Globe, from 10/11: How Long Will America Last? 'An impossible question, answered with math.' Interview with Turchin at Gene Expression: 10 Questions Turchin's Blog on the Social Evolution Forum An opinion piece by Turchin on cliometrics was printed in Nature in 2008, entitled Arise 'cliodynamics' (pdf) A blog post gives a summary and review of "one of the most comprehensive and theoretical books on cliodynamics: Introduction to Social Macrodynamics by Korotayev et al (it’s quite rare, as there’s only a single copy of it in the entire UC library system). The key insight is that world demographic / economic history can be modeled to a high degree of accuracy by just three basic trends: hyperbolic / exponential, cyclical, and stochastic*."

I'll See Your Hand, and Raise You the Future: Computer Learning of Games via Video Input

darth_tedious — Fri, 13 Jul 2012 14:10:55 -0800

I See What You Did There: Software Uses Video to Infer Game Rules and Achieve Victory Conditions. A French computer scientist has constructed a system that successfully divines the rules to simple games just by using video input of human players at work.

Alex B.

Trurl — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:38:35 -0800

Observations, stories and photographs by and of art model, sometime dancer, Alex B. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) (NSFW)

Eureqa!

BillW — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 20:21:21 -0800

Wired called it 'A Robot Scientist.' H+ Magazine asked, 'Signs Of The Singularity?' Even the more pedestrian Science News titled their article 'Software Scientist.' So what is Eureqa? Eureqa is a software package that takes complex data and produces equations that describe the data by evolving solutions from a population of random programs. Based on genetic programming, it combines an elegant interface with a simple way to elicit expert knowledge from the user. But most importantly, it provides a testable way to differentiate general principle from trivial models. With this approach Eureqa has accurately replicated some fundamental laws of physics and has discovered new models describing biological systems.

Supreme court opinions successfully modeled as Facebook like button

jeffburdges — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:35:07 -0800

Roger Guimera Manrique and Marta Sales-Pardo have shown that "U.S. Supreme Court justice votes are more predictable than one would expect from an ideal court composed of perfectly independent justices." "For our predictions, we use models and methods that have been developed to uncover hidden associations between actors in complex social networks. We show that these methods are more accurate at predicting justice's votes than forecasts made by legal experts and by algorithms that take into consideration the content of the cases."

Metal Machine Models

exogenous — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:13:09 -0800

Young C. Park builds aluminum models of aircraft. via Make. Previously, Pierre Scerri’s model Ferrari.

Broken Doll Pose

hermitosis — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:46:23 -0800

"Broken Doll" - an article by DIS Magazine that heralds a new generation of Broken Doll pose aspirants.

The World's Largest Model Airport

Trurl — Thu, 12 May 2011 19:01:52 -0800

Frederik and Gerrit Braun, energetic twin brothers with no shortage of dreams, have just finished construction of the world’s largest model airport. With 40,000 lights, 15,000 figurines, 500 cars, 10,000 trees, 50 trains, 1000 wagons, 100 signals, 200 switches, 300 buildings and 40 planes, Knuffingen Airport is both a wonder to behold as well as a technological tour de force. The best part of Knuffingen is that it’s alive. Forty planes and 90 vehicles move about autonomously.

A specialized type of planetary gear.

boo_radley — Thu, 07 Apr 2011 19:41:04 -0800

Behold the Moebius Gear. Includes a description of the entire process from modeling to fabrication for your reading pleasure.

Play Dough Circuitry

Ery — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:56:23 -0800

Squishy Circuits: recipes for making insulating and conductive modeling doughs, for fun electronics projects (via)

"Only trust yourself. People who say they'll take care of you are the very ones who will hurt you the most."

zarq — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 10:05:32 -0800

The shady, predatory side of the modeling industry is the one former model Sara Ziff wanted to portray in her new film “Picture Me: A Model’s Diary”, which chronicles five years in the lives of a group of models, following them backstage and beneath the makeup." An interview with Ziff regarding her then-upcoming film appeared on MeFi in June, 2009. The documentary opens today in NYC. Official Site. Trailer. At New York Magazine's Website: Webisode 1 / Webisode 2. Initial reviews have panned the film: New York Post / New York Times / Slant

"Don't think it hasn't been a little slice of heaven...'cause it hasn't!"

zarq — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 12:00:05 -0800

Three newly approved 'in vitro' toxicity tests using artificial human skin are reducing the need for animal testing of cosmetics and chemicals. "...on July 22 ... the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — an international group that, among other things, provides guidelines to its 32-member countries on methods to assess chemical safety—officially approved three commercially available in vitro models of human skin for use in chemical testing. Specifically, the new guideline (OECD Test No. 439) stipulates that the models can serve as an alternative to animals in tests for skin irritation, one of several human health endpoints for which chemicals are tested. Similar 3-D models were approved for corrosion tests in 2004, leaving many hopeful that soon it may be possible to the assess the full spectrum of a chemical's effects on human skin—from irritation to corrosion—without using live animals."

Figure 3. Basic model outbreak scenario. Susceptibles are quickly eradicated and zombies take over, infecting everyone.

brundlefly — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:03:37 -0800

When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection [pdf] (via)

Star Maiden, Walking Liberty

carsonb — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:02:45 -0800

Descending Night, Audrey Munson [Nudity] via feuilleton

the peculiarities of journal citation data

zennie — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 19:25:19 -0800

The scholarly literature forms a vast network of academic papers connected to one another by citations in bibliographies and footnotes. The structure of this network reflects millions of decisions by individual scholars about which papers are important and relevant to their own work. Therefore within the structure of this network is a wealth of information about the relative influence of individual journals, and also about the patterns of relations among academic disciplines. Our aim at eigenfactor.org is develop ways of extracting this information. Borrowing methods from network theory, eigenfactor.org ranks the influence of journals much as Google’s PageRank algorithm ranks the influence of web pages. By this approach, journals are considered to be influential if they are cited often by other influential journals. C.R. Shalizi, care of the the University of Michigan's Center for the Study of Complex Systems, has more on the history of why all this is necessary and how it came to be.

The total value of all your mines, mills, money bins, and so fourth is one multiplujillion, nine obsquatumatillion, six hundred and twenty-three dollars and sixty-two cents!

JBennett — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 13:42:10 -0800

A miniature of Scrooge McDuck's money bin. (in the words of the model maker) This is a set of images documenting a model of the world's richest duck's money bin, built by me, using blueprints created by the great Don Rosa and Dan Shane.And remember Carl Barks - the mind behind the idea of a man storing all his money in a giant concrete bin.

These ain't no slashies, folks... These are the pure breeds.

Gervais Brooke-Hamster — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:14:45 -0800

You have to be beautiful to create something beautiful: Designer // Slash // Model

Miniatures!

nj_subgenius — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 21:10:06 -0800

M i n i a t u r e s!