- We’ve got to the point where fully CGI characters can be near flawless, we easily forget that Caesar from Planet of the Apes, Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean or Gollum from Lord of the Rings are just visual effects creations, and accept the illusion without second thought. How did we get here? What makes good CGI characters good and bad CGI characters bad? Join me and Andy Serkis as we explore the development of motion capture and performance capture, and look at a few examples which demonstrate how to use this technology most effectively.
- What is Entropy? (johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com)
It’s easy to wax poetic about entropy, but what is it? I claim it’s the amount of information we don’t know about a situation, which in principle we could learn. But how can we make this idea precise and quantitative? To focus the discussion I decided to tackle a specific puzzle: why does hydrogen gas at room temperature and pressure have an entropy corresponding to about 23 unknown bits of information per molecule?