Went for a run in 20 degree weather this week and my phone shut off half way in. I thought the battery was empty. But later when I was back home the phone turned on and there was still 37% of charge left. I guess it was too cold for the precious phone and it decided to shut itself off. Very annoying when you use the phone to track you steps as well as listen to podcast while running. From now on, I will put it in my fleece not in the outside pocket of the jacket. I am still not sure what I hate most, running when it's really cold or running when it's really warm.
I am still reading Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson, this will take me another week or two to finish
I noticed that Duolingo added Chinese to their app this week. I will have to give that a shot to see how it compares to a book and CDs
Went to my sister in law for Thanksgiving, hardly any talk about politics this year. What was discussed however was bitcoin... interesting..I guess bitcoin has hit mainstream now.
Worked only 2.5 days this week.. have a bunch of tasks waiting for me to do next week, this is also the last week of the current sprint
Took the kids to the mall on black Friday.. wasn't as busy as I expected.
Read the following: People Who Speed-Listen to Podcasts
For myself, it depends on the podcast.. something like twit, Joe Rogan, motley fool, stuff you should know, Jocko podcast I listen to at 2x speed and I don't lose anything at that speed(at least I believe I don't). Hardcore history I listen to at 1.5x speed , I listened at 1.0x before but I noticed that 1.5 is fine... everything else is at 1.5 as well. It is interesting to hear Joe Rogan sometimes at 1.0 speed...I then check if something is wrong because Joe sounds so weird and slow :-)
See also the comments on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15741428
This Week I Learned
MedicaneHeard this one on CNBC, decided to look it up because I thought it was some made up stuff or someone misspelled medicare.
Mediterranean tropical-like cyclones, sometimes referred to as Mediterranean hurricanes or Medicanes, are rare meteorological phenomena observed in the Mediterranean Sea. Due to the dry nature of the Mediterranean region, formation of tropical cyclones is infrequent, with only 100 recorded tropical-like storms between 1947 and 2011
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_tropical-like_cyclone
Sfumato
The technique is a fine shading meant to produce a soft transition between colours and tones, in order to achieve a more believable image. It is most often used by making subtle gradations that do not include lines or borders, from areas of light to areas of dark. The technique was used not only to give an elusive and illusionistic rendering of the human face but also to create rich atmospheric effects. Leonardo da Vinci described the technique as blending colours, without the use of lines or borders "in the manner of smoke".
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfumato
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro originated during the Renaissance as drawing on colored paper, where the artist worked from the paper's base tone toward light using white gouache, and toward dark using ink, bodycolor or watercolor. These in turn drew on traditions in illuminated manuscripts going back to late Roman Imperial manuscripts on purple-dyed vellum. Such works used to be called "chiaroscuro drawings", but are more often described in modern museum terminology by such formulae as "pen on prepared paper, heightened with white bodycolor". Chiaroscuro woodcuts began as imitations of this technique. When discussing Italian art, the term sometimes is used to mean painted images in monochrome or two colors, more generally known in English by the French equivalent, grisaille. The term broadened in meaning early on to cover all strong contrasts in illumination between light and dark areas in art, which is now the primary meaning.
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiaroscuro
Rhombicuboctahedron
In geometry, the rhombicuboctahedron, or small rhombicuboctahedron, is an Archimedean solid with eight triangular and eighteen square faces. There are 24 identical vertices, with one triangle and three squares meeting at each. (Note that six of the squares only share vertices with the triangles while the other twelve share an edge.) The polyhedron has octahedral symmetry, like the cube and octahedron. Its dual is called the deltoidal icositetrahedron or trapezoidal icositetrahedron, although its faces are not really true trapezoids.
I am not sure if I forgot what a Rhombicuboctahedron is or if I never knew.
Here is a Rhombicuboctahedron as drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, this is the one that made me look this up
Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=355440
Below is also a rotating model of a Rhombicuboctahedron
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombicuboctahedron and here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyhedron
Squaring the circle
One of the tasks Leonardo da Vinci had set for himself was to learn how to square a circle
Squaring the circle is a problem proposed by ancient geometers. It is the challenge of constructing a square with the same area as a given circle by using only a finite number of steps with compass and straightedge. It may be taken to ask whether specified axioms of Euclidean geometry concerning the existence of lines and circles entail the existence of such a square
More here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squaring_the_circle
This Week I tweeted
This man is about to launch himself in his homemade rocket to prove the Earth is flat
Hahaha, I can't believe that this is happening in the year 2017. One of my buddies left me a good comment
the ironic thing is that, if it fails to launch: conspiracy. if it launches and he dies on impact: conspiracy. if it launches and works and he claims the earth IS round: conspiracy
Why You Should Be Photographing Your City At Blue Hour
Like the golden hour, blue hour occurs twice a day. In the early morning as the sun casts light on the atmosphere, but has not come over the horizon. In the evening it is the short period of time after the sun has set and before pure night sets in. Both have a very distinct and different feel to them. The morning blue hour is a time of calm and quiet. There are very few people and cars around, buildings are often unlit, leaving only the street lights illuminating the city. It is a wonderful time to be a photographer and a wonderful time to shoot the normally bustling streets of a city.
Amazon’s Seattle campus is using a data center next door as a furnace. It’s pretty neat.
This makes sense, why not use all that heat to do something useful with it
Tesla to be its own first electric semi truck customer with cargo route between Fremont and Gigafactory 1
While orders for the Tesla Semi electric truck are piling up, Tesla’s VP of Truck programs, Jerome Guillen, confirmed that Tesla will be its own first customer and that it will use the trucks to carry cargo between its factory in Fremont, California and its battery factory in Nevada.
Eating your own dogfood :-)
Some cool stuff you might enjoy
Legofy
To make a design from a picture so that you can build it in Lego. The code is on Github: https://github.com/lucaswo/legofy
Here is an example
Top left is the Vermeer painting, top right is the output from the code, the bottom one is the lego built based upon the top right output
You can also read the blog post for this here: http://lucaswoltmann.de/art%27n%27images/2017/04/08/the-girl-with-the-brick-earring.html
Some pics I took
Took this after I finished my run this morning
What you see is the Raritan Delaware Canal, this canal runs behind my home and there is a trail that runs alongside the canal.
This was a picture I took in Manhattan, you can clearly see the bokeh in this pic
This is the PATH station around 6:20 AM, this reminds me of a the station in West World
The elves are back, they are watching to make sure that my kids are behaving. I hid the elves this morning and it took the kids 30 minutes to find them. They got all worried... especially after I told them that since they were behaving badly, there was no need for the elves to stick around any longer :-()
