The main problem with developing working warp drive apparently isn’t the math. We’ve figured that part out. What we need, though, is an unimaginably monumental supply of energy to power the thing.
The spokesman for CERN’s ALPHA experiment—Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University, Denmark—says that trapping these atoms was a bit of an overwhelming experience:
What’s new about Alpha is that now we’ve managed to hold on to those atoms. We have a magnetic bowl, kind of a bottle, that holds the antihydrogen […] For reasons that no one yet understands, nature ruled out antimatter. It is thus very rewarding, and a bit overwhelming, to look at the ALPHA device and know that it contains stable, neutral atoms of antimatter.
Well now we’re one step closer. At CERN, scientists have successfully captured antihydrogen and can hold atoms of it for study in a magnetic bottle. They know they’ve got antihydrogen, because when they release it, the expected annihilation takes place.
You’ve just gotta see this.
Why have I been writing about leaps in scientific knowledge and technology lately?
Because I feel that Humanity is reaching for its future with both hands, and that if we can solve the mysteries of the universe, it’ll make it easier to solve the problems of your everyday garden variety human beings as individuals. It is an exciting time to be alive. We are on the verge of a new frontier, and it all begins right here, right now. Our perspective and perceptions are shifting as our awareness and understanding of the very nature of reality itself expands.
On seeing the Enterprise’s warp engine while visiting the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation (where he would briefly play himself in the 1993 episode Descent, Part I), Stephen Hawking smiled and said: I’m working on that.
I feel like a kid on Christmas morning. I can hardly wait to see what’s under the tree.
When your life is a blur of work and driving to and from work and being so tired from work that you don’t even have the energy to sit up and watch television when you get home – when things you thought were being handled for you aren’t being handled at all and it all winds up on your shoulders anyway – you start to lose the meaning of it all. Nothing matters anymore look what i found. You start to wonder why you keep doing it day after day after day with no reward and no purpose, and no joy.
Stop and look around you. No matter what, that tremendous weight of responsibility you carry is only made worse if you forget who you are, what makes you you and why you started down the road you took in the first place. If you can’t remember why you started down that road, and you realize it’s taking you to places you no longer want to go, it’s not too late to turn around, go back up the road a piece, and pick a different one.
Better choose – you only get to travel so many roads in your lifetime. You’d better make each mile count. And on the way, don’t forget to look around and enjoy the things you enjoy. You have a right to it.
Look yourself in the mirror every morning and ask yourself, “If I got to choose what I’d be doing today, would I voluntarily choose to do this?” We’re not guaranteed a tomorrow. Your lifetime might be ninety years – or only thirty-two years, and only one more day after that. Your days are the most precious thing you have.
So it’s not idle frivolity to “stop and smell the roses”. You need to stop and smell the roses once in a while to make sure that the roses are actually still there. And if they’re not, you need to go find some.
I wrote this thing ages ago for a commercial project for the now-defunct subsidiary of Sony, Sony Development. We were trying to make a giant pinball machine where you tilted the entire machine to play. To test the physical controller hardware as they worked the kinks out of the design, they needed a little 3D engine to hook up to them so they could see what it would do. So in about a week, I wrote one.
It’s a little odd as engines go in that it loads Lightwave 6.x (or greater) scene and model files and renders them, and then lets you fly a camera around and look at them. It lights the scene according to whatever lights you put in the scene, but all lights are translated as point lights. I never got spotlights or area lights working. It does respect global ambience settings in the scene, though, as well as maintain the hierarchical relationship between all the scene elements (i.e., parenting of scene elements is preserved at runtime.
It eventually ended up being listed in the news section on the now defunct Flay.com, one of the world’s more important Lightwave 3D web sites, and OpenGL.Org also had my listing. I even found a web site in Japan that linked to the original page. Too bad I can’t read Japanese! The engine has been downloaded tens of thousands of times since I posted it after SIGGRAPH 2001.
The engine does do texture maps, but only UV textures, and there are a few ways to apply the textures in Lightwave that don’t actually work. The best approach seems to be to convert whatever conventional texture mapping you might have on your models into UV maps using the “Make UVs” tool in the “Map” toolset in modeler. Since the loader doesn’t handle DMAP chunks, models using cylindrical or spherical mapping need to have the vertices split at the seam, or you’ll get mapping errors.
The source code will compile under either Windows, using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.x or greater, or under Linux using GCC. Yup, it’s cross-platform code!
Download the source code, binaries and sample data here. It’s pretty tiny by modern standards – only 3 megs, even though it includes all the model files and textures and whatnot that you get with it. It’s a fairly modest example of a 3D engine. Once I got the object and scene loaders working, the rest of the engine was done in about five days. It does give some good example code for reading objects in native Lightwave LWO2 format, though. By the way, in the ‘credit where credit is due’ department, I started with the example ‘C’ loader code written by Yoshiaki Tazaki at D-Storm.
Once you’ve gotten it to compile (it shouldn’t be difficult if you know how to use the compiler at all), run it by giving a parameter of either a model file or a scene file. If you give it a scene file as a parameter, it’ll assume all the assets are right there in the same directory with you, even if the scene file says otherwise. If you give it a model file as a parameter, it’ll just load the model file and let you spin it around and look at it from different angles. If you can’t compile the project or don’t want to bother, binary executables are included for both Linux and Windows.
A comment: this project was set up to compile from KDevelop in versions prior to 2.x. If your version is more recent than that, you’re going to have a few problems getting to compile as a project using KDevelop. I’ll may revisit this and make a newer version with new project files (thought I can’t promise when.)
Interestingly, the Linux version runs significantly faster than the Windows version does, even though it’s exactly the same code. I think Linux just works better from the standpoint of interfacing the OpenGL API with the hardware. I know I could do a lot more about optimizing the rendering pipeline, though. Right now the only thing I do is sort the polygons by material; this cuts down on having to use the GL material commands for every single darned polygon, and it sped things up a lot. It’s still not a really quick engine as engines go, but it’s quicker than it first was. I never even implemented tri-strips, and that would have sped it up at least double.
I’ve absolutely got to offer a caveat here as well: I wrote this engine as an exercise, and I stopped before I finished it. There are leftovers and leavings of various ideas in it that I never implemented. The object and scene loading classes themselves are fairly clean, however, and I did my best to keep that functionality as encapsulated as possible so they could be reused by somebody else if needed.
Could I write the same code now? No. If you don’t use linear algebra for 3D for a few years, you forget how. Could I learn to write the same code now? Absolutely. I did it before. I can do it again.
Update: It Runs on a Raspberry Pi
My Raspberry Pi 4 running OpenGL code I wrote over 20 years ago and ported to the Pi in August of 2016. The fastest of these windows is running 120 frames per second, and the CPU is barely warm to the touch.
For a lark, I decided to try compiling this on a Raspberry Pi, and to my great surprise, apart from a small tweak to one of the headers, it worked! Thinking on it, the Raspberry Pi is actually much more powerful than the big bruiser of a desktop machine I developed it on in the first place, yet the computer is no bigger than a pack of cards and draws only about 15w of power. The lightbulb in your refrigerator, if you still have one that isn’t LED based, probably draws more.
This is just too cool not to comment on. Yes, I’m geeking out here – this is an article on Make.com on how to create old-style Cylon armor as papercraft.
The reason this caught my attention is that one of my first jobs when I first started doing FX was building the Cylon suits for the Universal Studios Tour in a small shop in North Hollywood in 1979. I spent three months making parts out of fiberglass and prepping them to be vacuum metalized and made into costume parts. The interesting thing here is that the costumes we made looked a lot better than the real thing did that they used for the show. For the show, they used vacuum-formed plastic, and they used simple reflective mylar tape to make it all look chromed. We tried that for the stage suits, but it looked really dreadful because you could see all the tape seams that the cameras hid so well when they shot them for the TV show – so we were saddled with this laborious, painstaking process that would stand up under close scrutiny from three feet away. We had to fill every tiny pinhole, or when it was vacuum metalized, you’d see it. They had to be perfect.
— Gene Turnbow
PS1 deficient animals show complex gene expression changes in the brainAt E12.5, the PS1 deficient embryos, when compared to control littermates, showed 35 upregulated and 35 dowregulated gene transcripts (Table 1, A1 Among the group of annotated genes with decreased expression, we identified several transcripts that were http://www.cheapnfljerseyssu.com previously observed in independently generated PS1 KO animals, thus reproducing previously published observations.20,25 For example, at E12.5 we observed a decrease in protein tyrosine phosphatase Z (Ptprz; phosphacan; DSD1 proteoglycan), Notch1 and Hes5.20,23,25 At this Retro Joradns ShoesFake Oakleys age, genes with changed expression included members of the Notch (Notch1, Sfrp2) signaling pathway and many transcription factors (Lhx1, Uncx4.1, Sfrp2, Sall3, Pou3f4, Tbr1, Foxg1, Zfp312, Zac1, Eomes, Lhx8, Neurog2, Nfyb, Neurod6). Furthermore, genes contributing to normal neural/glial differentiation were also affected (Notch1, Tbr1, Eomes, Neurog2, Neurod6). Changes in the expression of transcription factors in early born neurons are likely to be related to a premature exit of progenitor cells from the cell division cycle.25 Finally, several extracellular matrix related gene products were also downregulated (Tnc, Chl1, Ptprz, Ptprd), while cytoskeletal genes showed both expression increases (Actb) and decreases (Mapt, Nfl, Nfm, Ina, Sncg). In contrast, decreased expression was reported for genes belonging to the same functional groups as observed in the E12.5 comparisons (transcription factors: Zfp36I2, Zhx1, Zfhx1a; Notch signaling: Notch1, En2, Dlx1, Hes5; lipid metabolism: Acas2, Pde1b, Scd1, Asml3a, Dhcr7; extracellular matrix: Ncam1, Chl1, Tnc, Ptprz, Ptprd). Interestingly, our analysis also found a reduction in PAF acetylhydrolase (phospholipase A2 transcript (a gene that has been associated with lissencephaly), possibly explaining the characteristic brain morphology that PS1 deficient embryos develop.27The Broncos have among the most loyal fans in the NFL, having sold out every home, non strike regular season game since 1970. The team has a waiting list for season tickets of 32,000 people and a 96% renewal rate on season tickets, despite going 4 12 in 2010 and posting 8 8 records the two previous years. The team continues to have problems selling its pricey club seats http://www.cheapjerseyssalestore.com though. Last year it cut club seat inventory by more than 700 wholesale jerseys seats and slashed prices 21%. The deal is worth more than $150 million over 25 years.Remember the SARS outbreak? That originated in China. The CDC and the World Health Organization put the clamps down on international travel the second it was found to have spread to North America. Flights were grounded, travel between borders was locked tight and only 43 people on the entire continent died.
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RayBradbury, one of the world’s most notable secular humanists and one of the greatest writers of all time, came to speak at the Simi Valley Senior Center last Sunday, and I took my wife and son to see him. It was a fundraiser for the city library – Mr. Bradbury’s a huge supporter of civic libraries. It was a small gathering, but I figured I probably wouldn’t get very many more chances to meet him. He’s rather elderly now, eighty-nine years old and he’s had a stroke that makes him wheelchair bound and makes communicating very difficult for him. He’s still writing, though, having just published We’ll Always Have Paris, a collection of his short stories – and working on a new book as well, despite the stroke.
I can think of few people who have influenced me in my life as much as RayBradbury. I’ve been reading his work since I was about fourteen years old, when The Martian Chronicles was assigned reading in school. I’ve met him on three occasions, each time about fifteen years apart. And each time, I came away with something new, something remarkable, that kept me going for the next fifteen years. This most recent time was no exception.
We gave him a standing ovation as the attendant wheeled his chair up onto the stage, another attendant pouring him a glass of red wine, which I have come to know is something of a tradition when he comes to speak anywhere now – or if not, then I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my implying that it is.
He gave the same speech he gave the last time I saw him speak, fifteen years ago. A lungful of air was only good for three or four words, and he was weary with the effort of speaking at all. But he pressed on, sometimes quiet, sometimes passionate, and the audience broke out into laughter or applause at various points. He closed his eyes, and tilted his head back and concentrated on his own words. He was clearly reciting his speech by heart – or was it his heart that was reciting his speech for him?
As this icon of two centuries spoke, telling us of his early days as a writer and how each of his major works came about, he kept coming back to one unifying thread: love. It was the power of love itself that kept him going through the entire lecture, and you could see that as he spoke, the reason he was able to do it was that the love of his craft propelled every word from his lips. As he spoke, he became stronger, not weaker, and the importance of every word rang true, both for him, and for us. He loves what he does, and he does what he loves, and this was itself the important message he wanted to bring to us.
“Do what you love, and love what you do. Nothing else matters. Love, you see, is everything.”
“If you want to paint, or direct, or act, or write, do it. Don’t just think about it, DO IT. If you do what you love and you love what you do, you won’t fail. Gather your courage and jump off the cliff! You can build your wings on the way down.”
We gave him another standing ovation as he left the stage.
It was a watershed moment for me. I’d just been given permission to believe in myself without reservation. I’d always wanted
to believe in myself that way, but you know how it is – you think to yourself, “I’m just me! Who am I to believe that everything will come out all right just because I think so?”
But right before he went up to speak, I’d drawn a sketch of Ray in pencil on the back of a program. I modestly showed it to him and told him I hoped it was okay that I’d done it. He took the paper from me, and marked it “A+”, autographed it and handed it back.
“A-Plus!” he said. “A-Plus!”, he said again, as he shook my hand.
A very very small OpenGL engine.
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