Yes, it’s a zoomable 26 gigapixel photo of Paris, the biggest image ever stitched apparently. It looks brilliant, and there’s loads of info about how they did it here. You can see right into people’s windows! Unfortunately nobody seems to be doing anything interesting.
Found this presentation from a recent GIS conference analysing data from the DublinBikes stations. Probably nothing that surprising in the results, but I like the way they got the data by scraping it off the DB website.
They’ve just released Tableau Public:
http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/download
I like the last paragraph of this
To steal from their biggest fan, whom I know personally, “But they’re both so talented, it’s so hard to decide”
Moonwalk One, the poetic, beautiful, fascinating film about the first moon landing was broadcast last night on one of the Discovery channels. Lost for 35 years and rediscovered about a year ago, it’s a mix of documentary and a sort of film-poem, both touching and informative.
Discovery decided to show the film with introductory and break segments, featuring an anonymous, young, doctor of space, telling us about times he spoke to a mission commander, or that the astronauts were spacemen, and you can see the moon if you go outside and look up. Banal stuff, especially in contrast to the film it surrounded.
Worse, though, was watching something really great, unlike the normal television documentary, only to have a presenter tell you what’s coming up, what you just saw, and what’s on now. Formula television, drab, pointless, half of its time spent pointing to the other half. In a way, it’s surprising, with more and more channels out there, more and more people making films, more freedom for people on the fringes or without a standard film education to take up their cameras and produce works interesting, works unusual, works defective or even imaginative, that we delve deeper into the world of structurally and formally monotonous television. Teenagers and their love triangles, cops and their murders, spies and their double agents, families and their comedic mishaps. All of them walking side-by-side, stopping, turning to face one another, and continuing their conversation in over-the-shoulder-shot-reverse-shot.
Back in the world of 3D movies, Clash of the Titans came out yesterday in Ireland to minimal fanfare. I’m sure it will make several hundred dollars at the box office, and will make some idiots happy, though not many. It’s a dull movie, badly written and full of erratic, disorganised action. It has an obligatory “in-joke” for the three people still alive who saw the original (nobody laughed), and a great scene with Liam Neeson in which he tells the other gods “Leave us!” only to turn to camera and say “Release the Kraken!”, thus highlighting the ten lines of missing dialogue. This is, of course, about the standard one should expect of such a film, it’s a summer blockbuster, and the studio that made it hopes it will be a “tent-pole” picture. That is, one of their big money efforts which will prop their business up for the year.
Over the last few years a few movies have been dual-releases in regular old flat-o-vision, and glorious 3D. Up, Alice in Wonderland, Avatar are the most recent big movies to open in 3D. Clash joins them, but unfortunately I think it joins them in a nasty sub-group of 3D: the hastily cobbled together conversion. Films like Avatar, were made and released in 3D (that is dual camera rigs, stereoscopic editing and effects, the full bit). …the Titans appears to have been shot on a single camera, intended for a 2D release and then converted by a team of lackeys into a chimera. Not 2D, not really 3D either.
Dropping my polarized glasses to look at the screen, I could see entire scenes with barely a hair of depth. Everything with people in it seemed flat, the titles and a few of the 3D monsters had depth (see also: acting, characters). The same could generally be said of Alice in Wonderland, another converted feature film. And despite my earlier enthusiasm for on-the-fly conversion to a small monitor for home viewing and for providing the content necessary for widespread domestic adoption of 3DTV, I find the result on the large screen frustrating and disappointing.
As any dullard can tell you, spectacle is at the heart of the Hollywood cinema experience. And 3D promises to enhance that with various buzzwordy traits, like “immersion”, “naturalism”, “edge-of-your-seat-thrill-ride-a-minute”, and maybe “diegesis”. The 3D of Avatar was well realised, and enhanced the experience of watching it. The extra half-dimension of Clash of the Titans, does not.
So why do it? Well, all those films that released in 2 and 3D, made more money per screen for the 3D version. Avatar became the most profitable film of all time partly because more people wanted to see it in 3D, and they paid a few extra shekels for the experience. Audiences, that film showed, are willing to pay more for an extra dimension (wait till Jerry Bruckheimer finds out that there are 11 or more). It came out in November, just when CotT was in production (or somewhere near post), some executive called down to the lackey department and demanded a conversion for super-profits. The problem is, if they continue to do conversions like this and Alice in Wonderland, that add little or nothing to the experience, the 3D cash cow will be killed. Audiences will gradually find little to attract them to the 3D screenings. Hopefully, the lesson has been learned this year and more films will be shot specifically for their 3D release, as it offers a lot of filmmaking possibilities that have yet to be explored.
By the way, did I mention that CotT is a terrible film?
