Neatorama |
- A Super Mario 64 Cartridge Sells For More Than $1.5 Million
- AI Generated Art Scene Rises
- Real Life Ice Man Challenged The Limits Of Endurance
- Fossilized Remains Of A Killer Animal Found
- Emoji in the Olden Days
- Why Is This Weird Ship Shaped Like a Fat Wedge?
- Wombats and Their Weaponized Hamslammers
- Candle Clocks and Other Early Alarms
| A Super Mario 64 Cartridge Sells For More Than $1.5 Million Posted: 13 Jul 2021 10:24 PM PDT
Anyone got a spare $1.5 million? A sealed copy of Super Mario 64 for the Nintendo 64 sold for a whopping $1,560,000 at Heritage Auctions. This record-breaking sale beat the recently-established record held by the purchase of The Legend of Zelda for the NES, which sold for an eye-popping $870,000 at auction. The Verge has more details: Over the past 12 months, the record for the most expensive video game ever has risen dramatically. Here's the timeline of the record, as far as I am aware: July 10th, 2020: copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for$114,000 November 23rd, 2020: copy of Super Mario Bros. 3 sells for$156,000 April 2nd, 2021: copy of Super Mario Bros. sells for$660,000 July 9th, 2021: copy of The Legend of Zelda sells for$870,000 July 11th, 2021: copy of Super Mario 64 sells for$1,560,000 It's not just video games that have skyrocketed. The value ofPokémon cards has been on a tear, too, and eBay even announced a feature for its app to make iteasier to scan trading cards to sell on the auction site. The prices ofNFTs, a form of digital collectibles,seems to be dropping, though. Image credit: Heritage Auctions  |
| Posted: 13 Jul 2021 10:24 PM PDT
Thanks to an OpenAI model, a new art scene has exploded. Hackers have been modifying an OpenAi model to make image generation tools. To get an 'artwork' from these tools, all you have to do is prompt them with a description of the image you want to see, as Vice details: While the new CLIP-based systems are reminiscent of GPT-3 in their "promptability," their inner workings are much different. CLIP was designed to be a narrow-scoped tool, albeit an extremely powerful one. It is a general purpose image classifier that can decide how well an image corresponds with a prompt, for example, matching an image of an apple with the word 'apple.' But that is all. "It wasn't obvious that it could be used for generating art," University of California, Berkeley computer science student Charlie Snell,who has been following the new scene, said in an interview. But shortly after its release, hackers likeRyan Murdock, a machine learning artist and engineer, figured out how to connect other AIs up to CLIP, creating an image generator. "A couple of days after I started messing around with it, I realized that I could generate images," Murdock said in an interview. Image: Mordechai Rorvig |
| Real Life Ice Man Challenged The Limits Of Endurance Posted: 13 Jul 2021 10:23 PM PDT
Dutch photographer Jeroen Nieuwhuis teamed up with the real life 'ice man', Wim Hof. Hof is a multiple Guinness world record holder for his cold weather endurance feats. Jeroen and his team spent time with the record holder during his daily endurance routines to capture his skills on camera. The Phoblographer gets in touch with the photographer to learn about his experience with the 'ice man': Jeroen's work takes him all around the world, photographing commercial clients and personal projects in varying conditions. However, when Covid-19 regulations prevented him from traveling abroad, he decided to take a road trip with his team to photographWim Hof doing one of his endurance routines. Proper preparation and one-to-one discussions with Wim ensured that Jeroen captured the real essence of the endurance of the Ice Man and his superhuman abilities. Despite shooting professionally for over 10 years, I still find myself getting nervous at times when I arrive at a site. There's always the fear at the back of my head that something could go wrong, and in many cases it does. Preparation is key to any photoshoot. This doesn't just involve prepping gear and sketching out a storyboard. A lot of times you also need to prepare your mindset to seamlessly execute a shoot on location. Sometimes you need to instantly come up with a plan B when plan A doesn't work out. I can't remember who it was, but a legendary photographer once said that even the most experienced photographers run into unexpected hurdles when they're on shoots; the best among them know how to adapt and move on with the shoot as if nothing happened. Image credit: Jeroen Nieuwhuis |
| Fossilized Remains Of A Killer Animal Found Posted: 13 Jul 2021 10:22 PM PDT
The Endoceraswas an oversized predator that preyed on early fish species and trilobites. Thanks to fossil remains of the creature, experts have determined that the sea creature's home turf, so to speak, was in Australia. Senior curator of Earth Sciences for the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Dr. Adam Yates, believes that the Endoceras existed in a time before any dinosaurs or any animal with a backbone lived on land: "It is probably not widely recognised amongst our ordinary everyday people that Central Australia was home to these marine animals and their fossils can still be found in places like the MacDonnell Ranges." Several years ago Dr Yates came across a section the Endoceras when the museum shifted premises. "This particular fossil was found lurking in the basement of the old space where the collection was temporarily stored for many years before we finally moved into the new museum at Megafauna Central in the centre of Alice Springs. At closer inspection Dr Yates realised that significance of the specimen. "It came from an exceptionally large nautiloid," he said. "It would have been about two-and-a-half metres long, which makes it one of the largest animals alive at the time. "The segment of fossil that you see is only a part of the whole creature," he said. Image credit: ABC Alice Springs: Emma Haskin |
| Posted: 13 Jul 2021 10:20 PM PDT
Those five channels were NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and the local UHF channel. The last of these was usually my favorite as a child, especially when it ran a 3-day Star Trek marathon when I was 8 years old. I never felt deprived, even when I had to tweak the aluminum foil around the TV antenna to improve the reception. |
| Why Is This Weird Ship Shaped Like a Fat Wedge? Posted: 13 Jul 2021 10:17 PM PDT
Why is this ship built so oddly? It's not sleek, like it's supposed to slice through the water. That's because it has one specialized purpose: to tow up to 24 sensor arrays that search for oil and gas hidden beneath the ocean floor. It's called the Ramform Titan. The operator, Petroleum Geo-Services, describes its capabilities: Ramform Titan has 24 streamer reels, 16 abreast with a further 8 in a second row. The back deck layout is augmented by six independent source array handling booms. Together these enable faster deployment and recovery, with increased flexibility and safety, which make it possible to fully utilize the operational weather window. Steerable sources and streamers, combined with automated gear-handling systems increase flexibility and efficiency. This is an ideal platform for ultra high-density 3D acquisition, and reliable, compatible 4D projects. -via Super Punch | Photo: PGS |
| Wombats and Their Weaponized Hamslammers Posted: 13 Jul 2021 08:43 PM PDT
Wombats are Australian marsupials, which you know come in all sorts of strange shapes and lifestyles. You might be surprised at how large a wombat can be, or how fast they run. Wombat poop is oddly cube-shaped, and research has figured out how that happens. Matthew Inman at The Oatmeal explains a lot of weird things about wombats in a rather comprehensive comic, with facts that get weirder and weirder as it goes along. The real focus is on the wombat butt, which is quite unique in the animal kingdom. If you don't already know about wombat butts and how they are used, you should go and read the while thing. Or even if you already know, go see it because it's entertaining. -via Metafilter |
| Candle Clocks and Other Early Alarms Posted: 13 Jul 2021 08:42 PM PDT
At My Modern Met, Madeline Muzdakis describes clocks, with and without alarms, from millennia ago. A common one, first described in China in about 520 AD, uses candles that burn evenly. By marking the drop in the wick, users could note the passage of time. To make this candle clock into an alarm clock, place nails into the candle. When the wax around a nail melts, the nail falls into a metal tray, clattering noisily, and hopefully getting the attention of the user. Read about other ingenious early clocks, most notably those that could keep track of time on seagoing vessels, at My Modern Met. Photo: Benutzer:Flyout |
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