More Rendered Images 08/09/2024

Not that any of this particularly matters, here are some images rendered with Arnold that are going up on Instagram.

SIGGRAPH 2024 and Denver Report

This was perhaps one of my most enjoyable and useful SIGGRAPH's for years.  Here is a synopsis of some of the high points.  

A special thank you to Paul Debevec who invited me to a half dozen parties and encouraged me to go to them, and to the exhibit floor, and to papers that I knew nothing about.

Also special thanks to Julian Gomez who somehow found me a technical pass.  The Technical Program costs about $1,000 these days and without it you can not go to the heart of SIGGRAPH. It was wonderful to have.  Some of its value comes from not feeling less than the other participants.

If people is the heart of a SIGGRAPH then this was an excellent SIGGRAPH.  From NYU there was Ken Perlin, Denis Zorin and Aaron Hertzmann.  From UNC we had Henry Fuchs, Turner Whitted, Mary Whitton, Nick England and Mark LeVoy.  From WETA and the ASWF, Kimball Thurston.  From Autodesk we had Marcel de Jong and Frederic Servant (manages Arnold).  From SCAD we had Gray Marshall and Christos Sfetsios (who had a good theory of alien UFOs).  Briefly sat near Debbie Deas.

I made a point of reading every poster and taking pictures of some of them.  Every third poster had the author standing there and you could ask questions.

The good news and the bad news is that there were at least two papers whose ideas I have had and that furthermore I had done work on, but was told they could never be papers.

From the Pioneer's event we learn that Thad Beier passed away several months ago.  

Finally, I stayed at the Motel 6 downtown for about $80/night.  It was not too bad either.  The Uber cost between the hotel and the convention center was about $15 each way.  There is a great train between Denver International Airport and Union Station.  It takes a long time but that is because DIA is way the heck out there.  It turns out there was a decent little cafe in the back of the Hyatt and one can also get healthy food at Target of all places.  The downtown area was all ripped up because of construction.

Denver has a lot of interesting old construction left over from the mining days, I presume.  Too bad it has been discovered, it would be a good place to buy an old house and fix it up.   The Meow Wolf venue was entertaining.  Denver seems to be a "meat town".  It was hard to find decent healthy food for vegetarians.

I came home, of course, and had COVID.

A proud author

Doug Kay and George Joblove

A happy Poster

Robo Doggy

Meow Wolf

A modern data glove

COVID Again

Came back from SIGGRAPH, felt lousy, took a COVID test and guess what?

Pictures for Siggraph

 How can you go to Siggraph without bringing pictures?  Well you can't.  Here are a few rendered pictures and maybe I will do a few Midjourney pictures as well.  Csn you get which one is which?

Suggestions for Kamala's Platform

In light of the threat to American Democracy posed by Trump and his fellow conspirators, we humbly present to you some ideas for your still-evolving position platform.  

Many people have noticed that many Democrats dont seem to want freedom as much as the Republicans want tyranny.  I hope that you, my fellow Democrats, will be serious and resolute in opposing Trump and all his works.

This is in no particular order.

- Encourage Justices Thomas, Alito and Roberts to resign in light of their outrageous behavior designed to delay any trial of former president Trump. This partisan political behavior is unworthy of the Supreme Court.

- Work with the Department of Justice to see that former president Trump receives a fair and timely trial for the criminal charges related to Jan 6 and for his apparent abuse of highly classified material.

- Encourage Justice Cannon to resign in light of her partisan behavior in the classified document case or face impeachment.

- Work with Congress to encourage other fascists put in place in our justice system by McConnell and other right wing nuts to resign or be impeached

- Work with Congress to see that important government activities such as the federal budget and the promotion of military officers not be held hostage ever again to the Republican right or any one member of Congress.

- Increase aid and support to Ukraine

- Trump-proof our foreign policy alliances so no one president can destroy our country’s alliances

- Sponsor and pass legislation to guarantee reproductive rights to women

- Sponsor and pass legislation to eliminate the so-called “right to work” states

- Sponsor and pass legislation to restore the Voting Rights Act

- Sponsor and pass legislation to eliminate “Citizens United”

- Sponsor and pass legislation to require some version of objective truth to the news media. End the Fox News and One America abominations. Free speech is not the same as actively lying, slandering and working to destroy democracy.  You know what I mean.  Its pretty crazy.

Picture of convention by Midjourney:

100th Anniversary of the Planetarium

 This week is the 100th Anniversary of the Planetarium.  The International Planetarium Society is meeting in Berlin.

Picture courtesy of Midjourney

As a friend points out, in two years in Japan.

https://www.ips-planetarium.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1874313&group=

Anarchy, Oligarchy and Tyranny c/o The Financial Times

The Financial Times has a good article on the failure of the American Republic using analogies to the Greek political science terms of anarchy vs oligarchy vs tyranny.  You can read the entire article here (although it may be behind a paywall).

https://www.ft.com/content/a7eea0af-bf9f-4635-812b-271c30620e72

Here are two paragraphs that I thought were entertaining:

The anarchy can seem fun, at least for a while. With some luck, chaos can bring political fruit. At a convention, where one spectacle soon displaces the next, these different guises of democratic collapse can give one another cover. The strongman act of Trump and Vance distracts from their blatant dependence on the wealthy. Their threat to deport migrants shrouds the reality that none of the relevant oligarchs was born in the US, that Trump married two migrants and that Vance married the daughter of migrants.

In practice, though, the Republicans’ anti-republic is contradictory. The different variants of repression can be equally celebrated so long as they are all directed against an imagined enemy. But the plan to fire tens of thousands of civil servants (anarchy) would get in the way of deporting millions of people (tyranny). As the billionaires claim power ever more openly (oligarchy), they put pressure on the aspiring authoritarians who are supposed to be the strongmen (tyranny). The people who want a strongman don’t want him to be a puppet. Signs of strain were certainly evident at the convention. 

Image courtesy of MidJourney

Cost of Housing Notes 7/21/2024

As I was moving from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles, the issue of housing costs and options came up.  There are a number of reasons for this but it all comes down to money and how you want to live your life.  And I think there was a lot of wishful thinking going on about what kind of housing assistance exists, who is eligible for it, and so forth.  So, since I need to know this stuff here are my notes so far on this topic.  All useful information is in the next paragraph.

The executive summary is as follows.  Santa Barbara is expensive perhaps, but the quality of life is very high.  California overall is very expensive and SB rents are not worse than other parts of California on the coast.  One way to get housing costs down in these areas is to do something like rent a three bedroom house and have two roommates with all the inconvenience that implies.  The Housing Authority in SB is a resource to the community but demand far exceeds supply, the process is opaque, and it is not at all clear when or if housing will be provided.  It is not a viable solution to anyone who is on a deadline.  Finally, my research says that there is acceptable single room occupancy housing in other cities in places like Providence, RI or Pittsburgh, PA or parts of Western MA in the range of $1,500 / month or about 1/2 to 1/3 of what you have to pay in California.

The rest of this post is just details.

I was looking for a single bedroom, arguably a studio with kitchen and bath. It is completely possible for this to be a shared space where each person has their own bedroom but the kitchen and bath is shared.  For me, it is better to be in a place where I can work all hours of the day and not bother other people.  It is better to be in a place where I am not constantly subjected to environmental insults (smog, car fumes, etc) and where crime is under control.  I hate to move, so some sort of stability is good.  It does not have to be a particularly big city, but it is useful to be within mass transit distance or driving distance of a fairly big city due to the need to work with specialist doctors.  

There is some belief that there are housing programs for "the poor".  My experience from Santa Barbara says that theoretically such housing exists, but in practice it does not. The SB housing authority does a terrible job of presenting a rational and responsive front to people in need, but the hard facts are that there is more demand for housing than there is supply. The housing that is available is preferentially given to certain demographics that I do not qualify for, such as being a single mother or a veteran.  The process is opaque.    There should be zero surprise that the SB Housing Authority efforts did not work out.   In fact, they would not even return my calls.  It is possible that if we had filed when I first arrived in SB that there would have been a different outcome but I am not sure.

Images courtesy of Midjourney

There is a belief that SB housing is unusually expensive.  My research says that this is not exactly true.  SB is expensive, but so is all of coastal California.  LA is very expensive and much less desirable than SB.   San Luis Obispo and San Clemente and Santa Cruz are also very expensive.  Santa Cruz may be more expensive than SB.  There are places in CA that are less expensive than SB but they are still not cheap and of course the quality of life goes down, often dramatically.  

I am surprised at how much I miss SB.  I would much rather live in SB and drive to LA to make use of its cultural resources, international airport and medical facilities.

There are cities where the rent is less than half of what it is in California.  So, one can probably rent a place for $1,300 to $1,500 in places like Providence, RI.  Multiply that out, your recommended net salary comes to $60K/year.

So what is the conclusion?  I would not expect to spend less than about $1,500 per month if you are a single person but only if you are not in California.  California is roughly 2 - 3x more expensive.  In SB, a small 1 bedroom starts at about $3,000 a month and goes up from there.  And it is not entirely clear who they will rent to if you do not have, and prove you have, a good job and excellent credit rating.  There are exceptions to this and I have benefitted from special deals more than just about anyone.  But when those special deals come to an end, and they always do, then you have to pay market rates.

Thats just the way it is.

Another image from Midjourney

Trump and Judge Cannon Celebrate Courtesy of MidJourney and AI

 
Trump & Judge Cannon celebrate their great victory over justice and the hoax they have played on the American Public.    So much of the detail here seems to be "out of nowhere". 

The prompt was probably something like: "A room of corrupt politicians and a woman judge celebrate their victory over justice at a dinner party where a pig has been slaughtered and roasted with an apple in its mouth.  The politicians are dressed as clowns.  --ar 16:9"

Alternates:

Scenario for Trump Judicial Coup d'Etat

draft draft draft

I propose in this post that Trump will seize power, legally or illegally, in November.  To show this, lets review the various election result scenarios.  Check my logic here.

As we all know, it does not matter if the Democrats win the popular vote at the national level.  It is only the electoral college that matters and that is normally decided by the popular vote at the state level.

In our first scenario, Trump legitimately wins the electoral college and therefore becomes the next POTUS.  He did this in 2016 and I think he has a good chance of doing it in 2024 based on where we are today.  But even if he does not win the electoral college he will still be awarded the Presidency as we will see.  The general strategy here will be "judicial challenge, appeal, delay and deny". 

1. The Republicans have stated that they plan to challenge any state results where they lose. This challenge will be in the form of a lawsuit and if they do not win the lawsuit they will appeal. 

2. Not all of the judges at the Federal level are Republican partisans but a substantial number of them are. At the state level, again its a mixed bag, but many of the judges from Red states are partisan Republicans. These justices have shown that they will rule in the Republican's favor no matter what the evidence or the law might call for.  This happened most recently when Judge Cannon of Florida stalled and then dismissed the case about the classified documents for the most disingenuous reasons.

3. Therefore a certain percentage of election results are likely to be overturned by Republican judges and awarded to Trump.  If a sufficient number of these exist, then the election is thrown to Trump and we are done.  This is the "local", e.g. by state, version of what the SCOTUS did in November 2000 to throw the election.

4. But if for any reason this is not sufficient to throw the election to Trump, in other words they can not get enough electoral votes, then the SCOTUS will step in and rule in Trump's favor and Trump will have won the election.

5. We know this will happen, if necessary, because the SCOTUS has already thrown one election to the Republicans in 2000 even though the Democrat, Al Gore, won the popular vote and was on his way to winning the electoral college when the SCOTUS intervened.

6. We also know the SCOTUS will intervene to put Trump in power because of how they handled the immunity matter.  In that situation they could have declined to hear the issue of presidential immunity because the Appeals court had already considered the issues and written what many people believe to be a reasonable opinion.  Not only did the SCOTUS insist on reconsidering the issue, they delayed doing so until the last possible minute, therefore making it impossible for Trump to be tried for his crimes before the election.  And then they ruled that Trump does have immunity for most crimes that he commits as president.  There is no justification for this ruling.  But there doesnt have to be.  Whatever the theoretical issues may be, practically Trump has been given blanket immunity because there is no time for a trial before the election.

7. Therefore the SCOTUS has proven that it will always intercede in the Republican's favor whenever it can get the opportunity.  And since any disagreeable result in the election will be appealed to the Supreme Court, they will certainly get the opportunity.

As a footnote, of course within moments of becoming nominal president he will instruct his Attorney General to dismiss the charges against him.

Whether or not this is what happens, I propose to you that what has been described here is reasonable given the people and institutions involved.

Therefore, I think it is fair to say that Trump becomes the next President of the United States and you should make your plans accordingly.