Reply From/To Siggraph About the Visual Effects Disaster

I got a reply from Siggraph about my suggestion to have other points of view on their news article about the layoffs in the visual effects industry.

It is a reasonable reply and suggests that I make use of their Facebook page.  Its a good thought.  Their reply and my reply to their reply will be forthcoming when I return from my little trip.

I find national Siggraph inscrutable.  Do they understand their role in creating the current disaster?   I doubt it.  If they did understand their role, would they change their behavior in the future?  I doubt it but by no means am I certain because, as I have said, I find Siggraph to be inscrutable.

I am still baffled that I was not permitted to run for office at Siggraph.  No one is more qualified than I am to run for office.   I have put in blood, sweat and tears into this field and had an impact and have a point of view.   Better than most, I know where we came from and have an opinion about where we should go.  Having been nominated, it is still up to the general membership to vote for me or not as they please, after all.

It is baffling, but as I say, Siggraph at the national level has always been inscrutable to me.

The Train To Los Angeles

The train from Escondido to Oceanside leaves every half an hour.  That means I need to allow an hour to get to Oceanside.  Then catch Amtrak that runs every two hours or so to LA.   Then take the Expo line that runs every 1/2 hour to Culver City.  A taxi on either side of this adventure so 4 taxi rides.  That will add up to about 10 + 2 + 60 + 5 + 10 + 10 + 2 + 10 = $109 round trip to LA.

Car battery is charging even if I could drive.

Should take all day and be home by midnight.

All this for one half hour appointment.

Wish me luck!

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

We are experiencing temporary technical difficulties.  The car battery is dead, the computer died and the bicycle needs a pump.   We will resume this blog shortly.

When All Roads Lead to Rome

A friend has just finished a chapter of his life and is making a pilgrimage to Rome as a reward of sorts.  My friend has tastes that lean towards the exotic and the esoteric.   He has studied well the ancient mysteries and is a worthy recipient of the ancient knowledge.  He has asked me what he might see when in Rome and I have come up with a tentative first list that does not begin to be exhaustive.   It is also a little terse and will hopefully be somewhat annotated and extended later.

Before you go to Rome, buy the Oxford Archaeological Guide to Rome.

Review the website listed below which is about underground Rome. http://www.romasotterranea.it/homepage.html

When in Rome, do these things:

Remember when you are there that the accursed Christians stole from everyone and desecrated the sacred buildings that were left in their trust.  Whenever you see ancient concrete you are seeing the foundations of a building that has had its stone and marble exterior and other accessories, windows, doors, lamps and so forth,  stolen.

Remember that there have been styles of restoration over the last few millennia and that it can be very hard to tell without guidance how old certain things are, what is a restoration, what is authentic etc.  

Some of the most hated architecture is from the Fascist period of the last century.  But this posed hatred is an affectation and history will probably judge their work better than the art snobs of a few years ago.  Or maybe not, I am just biased against art snobs in principle and haven't really looked that closely.

When the Roman Empire "fell", it did not actually fall and lasted another 1000 years or so in the East, and that nothing architectural really went away.  The population dived from a high of about one million to a number that is quite small, quite possibly a few tens of thousands.

The entire city then was a ruin and a garden.  As time went by, some of the rich families acquired great tracts of Rome and made them their private gardens.  And why not?  No one else was taking care of things.  If only they had not destroyed so many antiquities in the process of making their gardens.  See the Farnese Gardens here at Wikipedia.

Remember that Rome is not open all the time, things have weird hours, sometimes an attendant or guard will let you in if you ask nicely or perhaps provide a tip or honoraium.  Apparently you need to make a reservation in advance to see the Vatican.   Same with the Borghese gallery which comes highly recommended.

Many of the originals of things you see are in museums and what is in situ, on the street as it were, is a restoration.

See the Museum of Roman Civilization which has among other things a recreation of the 2nd century Rome from the Forma Urba..

Count how many words in this post are standard English and yet are also perfectly good Latin.   

Climb the victory tower of Trajan which inside has a spiral staircase to the top. 

See one of the vast caverns inside the hills of Rome left over from quarrying the local tufa before they built their monuments out of marble, an affectation they picked up from the Greeks.   I keep reading about these caverns but I have never heard of anyone who has actually seen them.  Possibly they are closed or just dangerous.

Constantine giving the "finger"

When you see a giant marble head, or hand or foot, recall that Romans often made their cult statues (the image of the God for the temple) in a way that economized on the marble or other stone required. The head, hand, and feet are what was exposed of the statue, the rest might be in a toga and therefore did not have to be carved (not to mention quarried, transported, etc).

See the black stone from the 6th century BC and ponder the meaning of the archaic Latin.

Walk the floor of the original Roman senate (not the one that Augustus built) and stand where Julius stood when he was murdered by his fellow senators in the name of freedom, which really meant to preserve the privileges of their class.

See the aqueduct switching center and distribution system.

Find the recently discovered Orbs of Imperium hidden by Maxentius when he was defeated by the traitor Constantine at the Milvius Bridge.

Horatius at the Bridge.   Find the bridge.

Make contact with those who are attempting to revive the old religion in Rome against the hated Christians and perform some ceremony with them.

Go to the Kings House (the Regia) and ponder what it means about the origins of Rome, the kings of Rome and what is true and what is not.

Go to the bridges of Rome and remember that the leading religious figure was the Pontifex Maximus and that bridges and early Roman religion are somehow connected. (The Pope is still officially the Pontifex Maximus of Rome).

Go to the House of the Vestals and light a fire.

Go to Alba Longa and wonder if the brother-murderer Romulus really came from there.

Trace the route of the Lupercalia. Best to do so naked while wearing a thong made of the sacrificed goats or dog.   The Lupercalia was probably an initiation rite of young men to a brotherhood from the time of the earliest Rome or before.

Trace the route of the Triumph.

Go to where the Sibylline books were kept (in the archives of one of the Temples) and lament the loss of important knowledge in the various fires and tragedies of Rome.

Go underground at one of the Baths and see how the plumbing worked.

Go to Ostia / Portus and see the port of Rome which has much more of an authentic Roman city from the late empire.

Go to Pompeii/Herculaneum before they are destroyed by being exposed to the weather and the light and ask yourself why the roads had those stepping stones.

Go to the tombs and memorials of the murdered Gracchi Brothers and learn about the Social Wars and then think about the future of America.

Find the Milvius Bridge and realize that this is where Western Civilization was destroyed  by Constantine who fell into superstition and began to worship the hateful murdered god/king of the Christians.

See the Parthenon and imagine what it looked like before the wretched Christians got there.  It has stood for 2000 years and we can't make buildings that last for 100.

Tour some of the catacombs and realize that they were not just for Christians and that Christians never really worshipped there in secret.  The catacombs were a response to the lack of space in and around Rome and its expense.  So they dug underground and put their crypts there.    Many of the catacombs have not been explored (or at least we are told that).

Realize that the Romans were not permitted to bury the dead within the sacred boundaries of the city (the Pomeranium) so they built their tombs on roads leading out of the city. Therefore go to the Appian way and outside the formal walls of Rome see some of the tombs.   In a prime spot outside the walls of the city is the tomb of the Scipio Family, the family of the famous Scipio Africanus.

When in Rome keep your eyes open for the family name Colonna.   I am friends with Kerry Colonna who worked with us at deGraf/Wahrman.   The Colonna mansion and private art collection, one of the three most prestigious private art collections in the world, is open for tourists on Saturday morning each week.  Go see it.

See the tomb of Augustus and imagine what it looked like before the Christians plundered it.  (Note: I read that the tomb will have some restoration work done to it after all these years of being essentially ignored. Something to do with the 2000 year anniversary of the death of Augustus).

See the Golden House of Nero underneath one of the Christian Slave Churches.

See the secret library of the Vatican where both truth and lies are told.

Visit the Etruscan tombs.  What were the "mirrors" for?

The Cloaca Maxima was originally above ground and used as drainage for rivers that flooded what would become the Forum.   It was started in the 6th century BC and many workers were killed building it.

See the great sewer of Rome, the Cloaca Maxima, built in the time of the Kings.   A good article on the history of the Cloaca Maxima can be found here.

Remember that the Cult of Mithra was a a late empire cult, mostly in the army. Perseus slaying the Bull probably refers to the secret information involving what the soul must do after death to pass safely among the stars. This Mithra may or may not have anything to do with the religions of the East, although they are certainly an Eastern import.

Ave Imperator, Morituri te Salutant.

Read about the time I first saw a Roman ruin in this post.

Using the GPU for Real Work: A Postmortem

After doing about a dozen projects with CUDA/GPU for my own edification, I made the mistake of trying to help out some friends on their project.

After working through various issues / problems I am came up with a list of somewhat obvious conclusions. I knew some of these going in, but some of them were a surprise and some were confirmed as being really true, not just sort of true.

I showed this to a friend who has spent a great deal of his career designing graphics hardware and he confirmed these and added a few of his own. I showed this list to another friend who has used the GPU commercially and he tells me I am all wrong. He always got 50-100 times speedup without any problems and things just work.

So you are on your own, kids.

Believe these or not as you please.

1. An algorithm that has been optimized for a conventional computer will be so completely unsuitable for the GPU that you should not even try to port it. One is much better off abandoning what you did before and rethink the problem for the GPU.

2. A major part of any GPU solution is getting the data to and from the GPU. Depending on what else you are doing, this could have a serious impact on the performance of the application and its design.

3. In general you should not expect to just tack a GPU program/shader/whatever onto an already existing program. You should expect to have to do major work to rearchitect your program to use the GPU.

4. Do not expect to be able to do a lot of magic things with the display and still be able to do intensive work on the GPU. Under those circumstances, plan to have a second GPU for your compute work.  I am still not completely clear on how NVIDIA shares one GPU with two very different tasks (the computers window system and your program, for example), but it does, up to a point.

4. As part of planning to use the GPU in your application, you should budget/allocate time for the core developer to work with your GPU programmer to hash out ideas, issues, problems. If your core developer does not have the time or the interest, do not try to use the GPU.

5. Debugging GPU programs is much harder than debugging normal programs. Think microcode but a little better than that.

6. Performance for the GPU is something of a black art. Small differences in algorithm can have impressive differences in the received performance. It can be remarkably difficult to predict in advance what kind of performance you are to see ultimately on your algorithm and project, even after optimization.

7. Not all GPUs are created equal even if they are software compatible.

8. And of the unequal GPUs, GPUs for laptops are particularly unequal.

9. Although the technology of GPUs and their programming is maturing, and NVIDIA has done a very good job, things are not perfect and when you run into a problem you may spend weeks and weeks getting yourself out. Examples upon request.

10. When you add a GPU to a mix of a larger application, you have complicated testing, deployment and support. If you do not have the budget for this, do not try to use the GPU.

In conclusion, GPUs are not a magic solution that just makes things faster. Under the right circumstances, performance of GPU can be impressive, but lots of things have to go right and nothing is free.

Unless you are my friend who says that GPUs just work and speed things up. In that case, I guess they are free.

The Infinite Mystery of NVIDIA Linux Device Drivers 2/2

In our previous post we outlined what you have to do to install the NVIDIA graphics device driver under Centos / Redhat Linux 6.5 and similar systems.

In this post we go over each item in boring detail.

I am pretty sure there is a mistake in here somewhere (builds confidence, doesn't it?) because I distinctly recall doing an /sbin/telinit 3 and 5 at some point in the process, but obviously I have edited this out of my longer term memory.  But have no fears, if this doesn't work exactly I am sure you will get the general idea and improvise as necessary.  You have my greatest faith in your abilities.

Remember, before you begin you are expected to sacrifice a goat at least and say the proper prayers spreading the prayer cloth and so forth.

1. Are you already running the NVIDIA driver? How can you tell for sure?

The way I do this is by running "nvidia-settings" from the shell. If a window comes up, everything is installed and working. If it can't find it or it doesn't run, you do not have the driver installed and should proceed.

    nvidia-settings

2. Install the development tools.

Become su and run the command

    yum groupinstall "Development Tools" --skip-broken

Notice the quotes and capitalization. Say yes when it asks you if its ok. Then go get coffee and come back in 15 minutes.

3. Figure out the model of your graphics card.

As su, use the command

    /sbin/lspci -nn | grep VGA

The reported line will have the model of the card. It will probably begin with the word "Geforce" or "Quadro".

4. Figure out if your Linux is 32 or 64 bit

Run the command

    uname -m

and it will tell you.

5. Download the driver from Nvidia.

With your browser of choice, navigate to www.nvidia.com and click on "Drivers". You should find a menu which will ask you which OS you are running (e.g. Mac, Windows, Linux 32, Linux 64), which series of graphics card (e.g. 9 series, 8 series, 200 series, 600 series, etc) and the specific model.  Fill these in and hit search and it will find your driver. A 9xxx card is the 9 series, but a 4xx card is a 400 series.  If you do not find the model of your card then you gave it the wrong series and you should try again.

Click yes or agree on the license agreement and save the driver some place you can find it again. Get another cup of coffee and go play with your dog or something. Come back in a few minutes.

6. Put that driver someplace easy to get to, like /tmp and make it executable.

I used to skip this step but it was too much work. Copy the file you just downloaded to someplace easy to type, like /tmp. Then make it executable with the command

    cp NV* /tmp

    chmod 755 NV*

Ok, now we get to the weirder stuff.

7. Change /etc/inittab to bring the system up at level 3

    su

    cd /etc

    cp inittab inittab.orig

    vi inittab

and change the "5" in the last line to "3".

8. Blacklist Nouveau, Part 1

    su

    cd /etc/modprobe.d

    cp blacklist.conf blacklist.conf.orig

    vi blacklist.conf

and add three lines to the bottom of the file which say

    # get rid of nouveau driver

    blacklist nouveau

    options nouveau modeset=0

and save the file.

9. Blacklist Nouveau, Part 2

    su

    cd /boot/grub

    cp grub.conf grub.conf.orig

    vi grub.conf

and add the word "rdblacklist=nouveau" to the end of the lines that specify the kernel to boot. These are the longest lines in the file and begin with the phrase "kernel /vmlinux-blah-blah-blah".

Dont fuck this up or you wont be able to reboot the system without some major help.

10. Reboot the system

11. Log in as root

12. Verify the location of the system kernel libraries

    cd /usr/src/kernels

    ls

You should see some horrible name that starts with 2.6. You either want to remember that name, or if you are like me, you want to save it as a shell variable. I use csh or tcsh, if you don't then you will have to figure out how your shell does this.

    cd 2.6<esc>

    set kernelpath=`pwd`

Notice the funny direction of the quotes on that set command.

13. Install the Nvidia driver

You should still be root. Change directory to /tmp or where you put the nvidia driver and say

    cd /tmp

    ./NV<esc> --kernel-source-path=$kernelpath

You will need to use the mouse, agree to the license agreement, and watch with your breath held while it jumps through hoops. When it asks you if it can create a new X11.conf say yes. When it asks you if it can install 32 bit compatibility say yes.

If it completes without complaining much we are almost done.

14. Restore the /etc/inittab runlevel to 5

Still as root say

    cd /etc

    cp inittab.orig inittab

It will ask you if its ok to overwrite a file, say yes.

15. Reboot the system

Hopefully the system will come up and the window system will come up, and you will log in.

16. As su, run "nvidia-xconfig"

    su

    nvidia-xconfig

17. Run "nvidia-settings" and save your work.

Say

    nvidia-settings

and goof around with the different options and screens and set things to your liking. Or just say ok and quit.

That is it.

You are done.

The Infinite Mystery of NVIDIA Linux Device Drivers 1/2

We are now going to do a series of boring technical notes that nevertheless fulfill a more noble purpose.

Those of us who are interested in doing or fostering independent production with computers and computer animation have a lot to be grateful for with Linux, particularly with Centos/Redhat Linux. It is stable, scalable, various applications work with it and it is remarkably Unix-like for something that isn't Unix.

And it has so far avoided the insane Linux-of-the-day bullshit of Ubuntu, praise Allah.

But we do not live in a perfect world and a well-tempered Linux is going to be running the NVIDIA device driver with a solid, respectable NVIDIA graphics card and we are going to discuss why and then dive into the crazy shit you have to do to make it all work.

The only manufacturer out there that really supports Linux is NVIDIA, in spite of what you may have heard of Linus fingering NVIDIA. His frustration is real, but it is bullshit. For a variety of reasons NVIDIA is not able to put their device drivers in the open source because it contains proprietary information they just do not want to give their competitors. So that means that certain purists can not include it with the standard distributions. That means you have to install it yourself.

With Centos / Redhat, one also has the option of using the so-called "nouveau" driver which supposedly supports NVIDIA. I have crashed my system so many times using the nouveau driver that I do not recommend you use it for serious work. Since I also do things like CUDA/GPU development, it isnt a serious option anyway.

So we are going to install the NVIDIA driver, and it is a little wacky to do so. There are three fundamental reasons why installing the driver is so convoluted and they are (a) you can not install a graphics driver if you have graphics running, (b) in particular you have to get rid of the nouveau driver and its non-trivial to do so, and finally (c) you have to be able to "compile" the NVIDIA driver against your current Linux and that means having the development environment loaded.

There is one more reason too that this note was written. There is so much craziness on the Internet about what to do with graphics drivers that I am adding my own opinion to the mix, along with clear instructions.

In order to follow these steps, you need to know how to do basic Unix/Linux things like ls, cd, chmod and so forth, have the su/root password, be able to use a text editor like vi that can work without X running, have access to the Internet, be able to use a web browser to download files, and be able to follow instructions.

In this post, I am just going to outline what you will have to do to install the driver. In the next post, I will fill in the details of how to actually do these things.

So hold on everybody, here we go!

1. Are you already running the NVIDIA driver? How can you tell for sure?

2. Install the development tools.

3. Figure out the model of your graphics card.

4. Figure out if your Linux is 32 or 64 bit

5. Download the driver from NVIDIA.

6. Put that driver someplace easy to get to, like /tmp and make it executable.

Now we get into the more tricky stuff.

7. Change /etc/inittab to bring the system up at level 3

8. Blacklist Nouveau, Part 1

9. Blacklist Nouveau, Part 2

10. Reboot

11. Log in as root

12. Verify the location of the system kernel libraries

13. Install the Nvidia driver (say yes to compatibility mode if you are asked)

14. Restore the /etc/inittab runlevel to 5

15. Reboot the system

We are almost done, hang in there!

16. As su, run "nvidia-xconfig"

17. Run "nvidia-settings" and save your work.

My goodness, that was annoying wasn't it?

The next post will have the mere details of how you actually do these things. The only thing really, really arcane is the blacklist of Nouveau.

Order Out of Chaos in Pi (1998)

NB: The following does not contain a spoiler but it does refer to one of the fundamental concepts of the movie Pi (1998)..

There is a sequence in the movie Pi which I am very fond of and which I wish to bring to your attention.  The purpose of the sequence is, imho, to explain to the audience what is meant by the idea of nature exhibiting mathematical principles.  This is a rather abstract concept for our filmgoers who are used to a steady diet of giant robots and teenage lust dilemmas.

The heart of the movie Pi (1998) by Darren Aronofsky is the search by a mathematician for a number, a number which describes the underlying structure of reality. In a sense this missing number would be to chaos theory what 3.14159 is to geometry but even more profound, it would be the single number that is the key to understanding the chaos that is our universe. Finding such a number would bring meaning to randomness, and order out of chaos. It would change everything: one could predict the weather or know which way Wall Street was going to go, and this very same number may even contain the secret name of God, according to some orthodox Jewish mystics.

Of course no such single number exists, that we know of, but its still an amusing premise and Aronofsky extracts some entertaining plot points from the idea.

The filmmaking problem becomes how do you explain to a general audience what it means to say that there is mathematics underlying the structure of reality. The audience for Pi will be a bright independent film going crowd, but likely math is not their strong subject. Probably most of the audience gets no closer to number theory than figuring out how to calculate the mortgage on their house or the interest on their student loan. So how do you explain this to them?

Well, one way to do this, and the way I think would also be entertaining, would be to stop the movie, bring up a white board, and have a famous mathematician give a short lecture on the origins and meaning of chaos theory. But there is this age old bias against this sort of thing in the conventional and anti-intellectual motion picture business, so giving a lecture in the middle of the film is out.

How else would one present the idea that that there is math everywhere in nature?

I put the 2:28 minute sequence up on Youtube and the right thing to do is to watch it before I say anything more. The mathematician is the guy sitting at the counter reading the paper.

The sequence is at http://youtu.be/wQnaMUoC1G8

 

                                  

So Max, our mathematician, is at the counter in a coffee shop trying to get some work done when someone he has recently met, but doesn't really know, comes in. Its Lenny, the orthodox student of Jewish mysticism who proceeds to explain the number theory of the Gematria (1) to Max. The idea is that Hebrew is all numbers and the Torah is a long series of cyphers and crossword puzzles. As Lenny starts to add up the "garden of Eden" and the "Tree of Knowledge", while Max looks on, he comes up with two numbers in the Fibonacci sequence. Max hijacks this discussion of numerology in the Torah and moves it to more standard high school math.   The Fibonacci sequence is one of those concepts that keep mathematicians happy because there are so many uses and weird coincidences, but the only one that Max/Aronofsky goes for here is that you can use the Fibonacci sequence to calculate Theta which is a number that describes a kind of spiral.   So we go effortlessly from Torah numerology to Fibonacci numbers to spirals and boom we are home.   All that is left to do is smoke your cigarette or pour cream in your coffee and the point is made.

"You see", says Lenny, "there is math everywhere".

I still think having a mathematician give a lecture would have worked, but this is probably more concise and any excuse to discuss numerology is OK by me.

__________________________________________________

For an introduction to Fibonacci numbers see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fibonacci_number

An introduction to Numerology in general

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology

A reasonable introduction to Gematria and Jewish Mysticism in general

http://www.inner.org/torah_and_science/mathematics/gematria/index.php

A Gematria Calculator

http://www.gematrix.org/

Pi (1998) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/

____________________________________________________

Notes

1. Actually he fails to explain the Gematria to Max, getting a variety of things wrong but hey its good enough to get the point across.

The Subtext of the Animated Explanation in The President's Analyst (1967)

NB: This post refers to a key point in the climax of the film The President's Analyst (1967).

There is an obscure sub-genre of animated shorts that has the role of explaining a science-based plot point in a major motion picture. In general it is considered bad form to stop the action of a movie to explain something, but many great movies have done this in spite of the low esteem with which this technique is held. As a variation on this otherwise discredited approach, filmmakers have occassionally used the animated short to do the explaining for them.

An important example of this technique in a major motion picture was Jurassic Park (1991) in which an animated character is used to explain how DNA extracted from a drop of blood preserved in amber can be used to create an entire franchise of films without ideas. This classic animation was done by Kurtz & Friends Animation and they have a pencil test of their work online at this link.

Classically cute DNA Fragment

Another example is that fabulous but sadly overlooked film from the cold war, The President's Analyst (1967). In the climax of the film, the villain reveals himself to be the CEO of TPC, The Phone Company, and explains to our hero, James Coburn, the psychiatrist to the President of the United States, why they need his help to get legislation passed to require the implant of a new communication device in everyone's brain.

This sequence is more than just an explanation, although it is an explanation, it is also the climax of the movie, everything else is mere gun fights and denouement.

The Cerebrum Communicator happily does its thing.

In order to completely appreciate both of these sequences there are two important things that the audience should realize, and which will become more and more obscure as time goes by. You see these shorts are more than mere animated explanations with cute animated characters, they are in fact double-barrelled nostalgia aimed directly at the baby-boomer demographic, and thus as this demographic ages and then departs, these nuances will be lost on all but the most informed audiences.

The first and overt nostalgia item are the films themselves, which are clearly references to the Bell Laboratories Science Films. Readers will recall that many years ago there used to be a company called AT&T which had a state-enforced monopoly on certain kinds of telephone service in this country. The profits from this monopoly were so extraordinary that the company was able to finance an important scientific laboratory known as Bell Labs. This now defunct entity was responsible for many, many key inventions in our daily lives before we turned R&D, and every other vital function, over to the Red Chinese in a desire to be "more efficient" and increase the profits of the rich.

But back in the day, and that day was the late 1950s and early 60s, we were involved in something called the Cold War, and the nation was concerned about having enough scientists and engineers in order to build nuclear weapons and the rockets to propel them, so there was an emphasis on science education. And to help serve that need, Bell Labs created films for young students to introduce them to important scientific concepts. Thus, the Bell Labs science films such as Our Mr. Sun (1956) and Hemo the Magnificent (1957) to name two. As you might have guessed by now, or recalled if you were there, these films featured a combination of live action and 2D (hand-drawn animation) in a dialogue with each other to explain some scientific concept.

The Sun and Father Time have a few words

Michael Sporn has an excellent discussion of this film on his blog at this location.

But if we reach a little further we can find yet another point of obscure nostalgia that these science films, and hence our animated scientific explanations, appealed to. Back when those of us who saw these films in their proper environment, which was about 4th - 6th grade in elementary school, one did not regularly see videos whenever one wanted. In fact, you did not see video much at all, except on broadcast television and then not in color unless you were rich or had a rich friend. Anything that was video-like was actually projected on film, normally 16mm film, with all the shades drawn to make the room dark.  This was a real treat for those of us in the early days of being educated. What a relief this was compared to the normal curriculum!

Even more obscure, the films were shown on the esteemed "multimedia" or "A/V" (as in audio/visual) cart, a cart that contained a 16 mm projector, a slide strip viewer, and an overhead projector, and was rolled from classroom to classroom as needed.

The classic form of the A/V Cart

The Bell & Howell 16 mm Film Projector

All of this goes through the mind of the baby boomer as he or she watches these animated explanations and that is the subtext that will be lost as these films are viewed in the future, assuming they are viewed in the future, that is.

We can only hope that there will be the equivalent of liner notes to explain these critical issues to the audiences of that distant time that they might understand our culture and context a little better.

_________________________________________________________

Notes

Perhaps the best known of the Bell Labs Science films is Our Mr. Sun, directed by Frank Capra, staring Eddie Albert. It is one of the first uses of front projection in narrative film.

You can download Our Mr. Sun from the following web site:

https://archive.org/details/our_mr_sun

The sequence from The President's Analyst (1967) can be viewed at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PebCB0IIANI

Kurtz & Friends Animation web page on Jurassic Park

http://kurtzanim.wordpress.com/entertainment/jurassic-park/

Our Mr. Sun (1956) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0159620/

Jurassic Park (1991) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107290/

The President's Analyst (1967) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062153/

Bell Laboratory Science Films on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Laboratory_Science_Series

WebGL on Second Thought and a Brief Note on OpenGL ES 3.0

This is a brief note to say that after all the sturm und drang expressed on this blog while learning WebGL 1.0, that it has become my favorite way to write little graphics programs.

I now realize that it is very unusual to be able to do anything dynamic in HTML/Browsers without always having to deal with the server for information. And yet I am able to write very complicated WebGL (or at least reasonably complicated) WebGL programs without using the server at all (except for saving images).

The "framework" mess in writing "dynamic web pages" for browsers is astounding, but I would not necessarily count on finding a framework that worked well with WebGL. Such a thing may in fact exist, but it is far outside the normal range of what the frameworks are intended (and tested) for.

Even Javascript has grown on me such that it has become a pleasant language to write in.

I think this is moderately funny given the amount of noise I made learning these two things (javascript development and WebGL).

On a related matter, I spent a half day or so reading the specification of OpenGL ES 3.0 and it is far different from WebGL 1.0, no matter what you hear. Although the shading language part is nearly identical, the OpenGL part is richer in capability. OpenGL 4.x, however, upon reading is vastly more complicated and a completely different beast.

So the takeaway information of this post is: WebGL is very useful if a little annoying to learn, and WebGL is remarkably different from OpenGL ES 3.0. The power of WebGL comes from its shader language, its integration into the browser and HTML, and the interactive nature of Javascript and Javascript development.

I apologize for lapsing into optimism and a positive attitude in this post.   I will no doubt resume my normal negative approach in future posts.