Tag: perfect

Amazon commissions three new sci-fi shows: Lazarus, Snow Crash, and Ringworld

(credit: Image Comics) Finally, we have some good news for the end of the week. According to Variety , Amazon is going on a bit of a sci-fi binge. The streaming network, which has already given us delights like The Man in the High Castle and an excellent new version of The Tick, has commissioned three new series: the Larry Niven classic Ringworld, Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk Snow Crash, and (the one that brightened my day most)  Lazarus  by Greg Rucka and Michael Lark. Assuming all three remain true to their source material, each will be a very different vision of the future. Ringworld takes place nearly a thousand years from now in a post-scarcity culture. Written in 1970 and the first of a long-running series of books, the titular Ringworld is a vast habitat in space. In Ringworld, our hero is a bored 200-year old hired by some aliens to investigate this artificial world—a 600 million-mile (950 million km) ribbon orbiting a Sun-like star. It’s been awhile since I’ve read the book but it’s easy to see how previous attempts to adapt it for the screen have ended in failure. But with an Amazonian budget and and ever-more capable CGI, now might be the perfect time to try. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Amazon commissions three new sci-fi shows: Lazarus, Snow Crash, and Ringworld

Placing humans at center of computer optimization yields hot plasmas

Enlarge / It looks like science. (credit: Tri Alpha Energy ) If there is one thing I hate, it’s optimization. Computers don’t actually understand what they are optimizing. And that creates problems for everything from bicycles to nuclear fusion. The process goes something like this: you have a mathematical model of a bicycle. You want your bike to perform better, but there are so many things that can be changed, so you can’t imagine finding the best configuration on your own. So you write a script. The script will vary the configuration of the bicycle and evaluate whether it is improved. After many iterations, you have the perfect bike, right? No, you don’t. What you didn’t imagine was that the computer would remove the seat. Or that it would place, for no apparent reason, a third wheel between the (now removed) saddle and handlebars. Even worse, the stupid machine has got the chain passing through a bit of solid steel. Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Placing humans at center of computer optimization yields hot plasmas

Why Rick and Morty is the perfect show for our nihilistic…

Why Rick and Morty is the perfect show for our nihilistic age “Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody’s gonna die, ” 14-year-old Morty tells his sister on Cartoon Network’s Rick and Morty . “Come watch TV.” There’s something about a cartoon world that gives nihilism just the right conditions to flourish. Cartoon characters spend eternity wearing the same clothes, reciting the same catchphrases, and undertaking the same death- and physics-defying adventures. Their lives are pointless, but they don’t seem to know it. In this sense, Rick and Morty, whose two seasons on the air have earned it a dedicated cult following, is both a recognizable descendant of its animated forbears, and a horse of an entirely different color. Rick and Morty’s lives are pointless, and they do know it. Simply put, it’s a show that doesn’t succeed at mimicking real life in cartoon form as much as it does in showing us the cartoonishness of real life.

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Why Rick and Morty is the perfect show for our nihilistic…

Watch a Master Bladesmith Make a Kitchen Knife Out of Meteorites

Talk about an in-demand craftsman: After knifemaker Bob Kramer was first featured in Saveur Magazine  in the ’90s, he was so deluged with orders that it took him ten years  to catch up. Of all the certified Master Bladesmiths in the United States—there were 67 when he started out, and now just over 120 of them—Kramer is the only one who specializes in kitchen knives. “I have devoted my life, ” writes Kramer, “to the single-minded pursuit of crafting the perfect kitchen knife, and I am so grateful to those who appreciate my work.” When Anthony Bourdain went to visit the lone craftsman in his Washington-state shop, Kramer had something special in store for him. Not only would he make a knife before Bourdain’s eyes, he’d make it using a chunk of meteorite. Watch the master as he makes a knife from outer space:

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Watch a Master Bladesmith Make a Kitchen Knife Out of Meteorites