am i allowed to say stuff on here?
As someone who does cross stitch/needlework I can say that embroidery animation is impressive but also a completely nuts thing to do
There's probably a few million stabs on that
Some forms of embroidery can be done by machine which makes it faster, but it's still bonkers
yeah truly! I kinda hope they did have a machine to help because honestly. it takes long enough to make a clean drawing when you're doing it with a pencil...
The animator's name is Huw Messie, here's their website. It appears that yes, indeed, the embroidery in this case was computer controlled, and the patterns were designed procedurally. You can see other loops in the series on this page.
This page and this page give a detailed explanation of the process. The animation is designed in Java and Python, resulting in a PES format file which can be read by embroidery machines.
This video shows the embroidery in process:
The animation itself is a mix of procedural and hand authored it seems like. For example in this piece, the author generated 20-something frames with one simulation method and then switched to a different algorithm, embroidered it, photographed the frames, then added foley:
Really cool project all around.
y'all ever reach the end of google
I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.
I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.
This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests
@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.
Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches
And THEN.
I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.
HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.
I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."
Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.
I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.
It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research
There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA
Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."
The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.
It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.
I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.
Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.
The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.
Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.
it's called the Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant and there are, in total, 11 known sites where it still grows.
in general i'm feral over the carnivorous plant variety of the Southeastern USA. we have SO many super-rare carnivorous plants!!!
Protect the wetlands. Protect the canebrakes because the canebrakes protect the wetlands.
Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I'd been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like "unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man", and I went "nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything." But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it's very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it'd be helpful, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.
For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?
Good Lord. Arundinaria isn't just a better option, it's perfect.
I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.
The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.
It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.
plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.
There's a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.
Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.
The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.
This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.
Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it's a lot easier than you'd think to do for plants and it's honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?
I know about reproducing plants from cuttings, rhizome cuttings have proven doable with this species.
Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It's been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I'm trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?
A lot of people are asking how to distinguish Rivercane from invasive bamboo species. This link should help you!
Here's some distinguishing traits I've observed myself:
- River cane has a really full, bushy, leafy look that makes it really hard to recognize as bamboo from a distance, because the stems are harder to see. The shape of the individual cane with its branches and leaves is narrow, because the branches spread out very little, but the foliage is DENSE. It's like a plume.
- River cane is stronger, denser and heavier than invasive bamboos I've seen.
- River cane stems are always green all the way around, no yellow (unless the plant's been dead for a good long time)
- River cane stems feel smooth like plastic to the touch. The common invasive bamboo I've seen here, when you run your hand upwards along it, the stem feels awful like sandpaper.
- The biggest way to distinguish them: River cane grows 6-4 feet tall when it's in little patches, and up to 10-12 feet when it's in a large size patch (like, the size of a backyard) It is known to reach up to 15 feet tall nowadays and historical records claim heights of 30 feet or more in fertile river valleys. I really want to stress that it's RARE for it to get big. A canebrake will almost always be many times wider than it is tall (sometimes they grow in very long strips along fence rows)
- The best time to look for it is in winter before things leaf out, because it's evergreen and grows in dense masses, making it easy to spot.
Some more cool stuff i've found out—River cane was a common food of bison! Earliest European settlers reported canebrakes so big that "100 bison could graze on a single canebrake." Apparently it used to make extremely high quality forage for livestock, before it was mostly destroyed.
European settlers apparently set their pigs loose in the canebrakes purposefully to destroy them, because the pigs would root up the nutritious rhizomes and kill the plant. Thinking of the relationship between Bison and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Eastern Native Americans and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Plains Native Americans and Bison...it seems like a pattern, huh?
In the case of both bison and canebrakes, they were a fundamental part of their ecosystem, and fundamental part of the indigenous cultures that used them for every material, their musical instruments, their homes, their most advanced arts, and even food (Rivercane shoots are edible just like other bamboo, and supposedly the seeds are edible too!) but European settlers purposefully destroyed the species almost completely. I can't help but wonder if there was a similar motivation.
Books that talk about Rivercane:
- Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry by Sarah H. Hill talks about rivercane a LOT and gives tons of details of its uses and history.
- Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks has a whole chapter about Rivercane.
- Venerable Trees: History, Biology and Conservation in the Bluegrass is a book about Kentucky, but it talks about rivercane's importance including its relationship with bison. It's only a couple pages out of the whole book but it's still great information.
By the way, though, if you read any very early European account of Kentucky, the word "cane" is everywhere. It's just such a nondescript word it's hard to realize its significance.
On a more personal note...god, I love this plant. Here's another photo I took. When you're in the canebrake, it feels so cut off from the rest of the world; it's shaded, quiet, cool, and someone 10 yards away couldn't even see you.
i actually talked to my neighbor that I learned owns the canebrake. She had no idea what it was but she was excited to learn about it! It was a lovely conversation.
Apparently, she knew I had been down there a bunch of times and thought nothing of it. She said "Yeah I told my husband, If you see her down there, just leave her alone she's doing her thing." In the most sincere way possible, God bless this woman
She said I could transplant all I wanted, too. This was great! ...but I quickly learned how RIDICULOUSLY HARD it is to transplant from a canebrake of this size. The rhizomes are so big and tough, a shovel can hardly get through them, and unless you're at the edge of the canebrake, there's a thick mat of them going every which way. I was driving my whole weight down on this shovel and it kept just denting the rhizome and glancing off.
I did get some transplants but each one took like half an hour because I was fighting for my life!
Also, with a canebrake this size, it doesn't grow little canes that will later become bigger—it shoots up tall canes in a single season. The youngest canes, more accessible and toward the edge of the canebrake, were significantly taller than I was. I cut the top off of one transplant for ease of handling—I had a pair of hand pruners with me that were usually perfectly useful for small limbs, but I could barely get these things through the cane, it's just so strong and dense.
Someone research the material properties of this stuff ASAP. It's insanely strong.
Hi everyone, it's the river cane post again!
Here is some YouTube videos that talk about river cane!
- Roger Cain of Keetoowah/Western Band Cherokee shows and talks about Rivercane. This video has a BIG canebrake, the mature canes look as if they could be 15ft tall, but he says it's only a fragment of what they used to be!
- Stan the River Man visits a Canebrake in Northern Kentucky. This channel only has 22 subscribers, I feel like I've discovered a rare and priceless treasure
- River Cane Renaissance, Episode 1. This guy has devoted a large part of his life to studying Rivercane and now works with the eastern band Cherokee to try and bring it back.
- Chattooga river conservancy video on Rivercane, haven't watched the whole thing myself but it looks really good and detailed
These videos barely have any views or comments, but y'all can help! We can spread the knowledge.
Map of Baltimore to give a sense of the geography (I think you can probably infer where the bridge collapse is). The port of Baltimore is going to be shut down for the foreseeable future.
Context: a container ship lost propulsion while leaving the port this morning and drifted into the bridge.
It was really bad and they're still searching for survivors.
1) the bridge was not low enough to be crashed into. Large cargo ships come in and out of the port of Baltimore all the time. It's the second busiest port on the eastern seaboard. The boat struck one of the supports, which all bridges have. And numerous engineers have pointed out that there's no protection in existence that can hold up to force of a cargo ship.
2) there was little to no warning. If you watch the video, the boat loses power, tries to get it back, then hits the bridge, which collapses in about 30 sec. There were only a couple minutes to react, and the crew immediately notified authorities as soon as they realized what was going to happen. The bridge operators did shut down traffic entering the bridge as soon they got that message.
3) the bridge was 1.6 miles long. There is no way to quickly and easily evacuate cars or people off that or any other bridge like this. Right now, the missing people are construction workers who were doing standard repairs. And again, it collapsed incredibly fast. Even with the best systems in place, there was no feasible way to evacuate.
4) the ship did attempt to stop by dropping anchor, but the sheer mass of a cargo ship that size could not be stopped fast enough.
5) the only way to have prevented this is a) reduce the standard size of cargo ships so they can't destroy everything they bump into, and/or b) devise an inspection that can catch this kind of power failure before it happens and then enforce them.
The Dali has failed two inspections before, one regarding its electrical systems. But replacing a ship of that size is incredibly expensive. It wasn't bad infrastructure that caused this, nor was it inadequate safety precautions. It was corporate greed pushing for larger and larger cargo ships while ignoring break downs because it's cheaper than fixing it.
For the record, the Dali was 95,000 TONS, that shit does not turn fast let alone STOP. Tons. It hit the support directly, and the bridge went down in seconds.
The Dali has failed two inspections before, one regarding its electrical systems. But replacing a ship of that size is incredibly expensive. It wasn't bad infrastructure that caused this, nor was it inadequate safety precautions. It was corporate greed pushing for larger and larger cargo ships while ignoring break downs because it's cheaper than fixing it.
I have a question for Engineering Tumblr, is it normal/unavoidable that such a long bridge fully collapses when one of its many supports is removed?
Not an engineer so I can't give you a detailed answer with math and such, but basically the answer is that removing a major support from any type of bridge is going to result in at least a partial, catastrophic failure with a good chance of total failure. Truss bridges, like the Francis Scott Key bridge, are especially susceptible to total collapse after the loss of one component (even one far more minor than a major support pylon) because of how the truss structure carries weight (you can get an intuitive sense for this in the video of the collapse; the truss structure on the stricken portion essentially drags the rest of the bridge down with it). This is a significant reason they haven't built new truss bridges in the United States since the 1980s or there abouts (Francis Scott Key opened in 1977, likely making it one of the last major truss bridges built in the United States or perhaps the world).
However there's no bridge design in which a ship of this tonnage directly hits a major support and doesn't take down a significant portion of the bridge. The only protection is to have barrier pylons or artificial breakwaters that would deflect or ground an errant ship before it could strike. Once a collision occurs physics are in charge and Sir Issac Newton is a motherfucker.
This is like installing Windows on a Mac.
I am physically required to reblog this or my heart will stop beating.
oh my god
Today I learned 3D animation is a horror show outside the camera's field of view.
There is now a spiritual successor to this nightmare fuel...
I think we can update the expression "you don't want to know how the sausage gets made" to "you don't want to see the reverse perspective of 3D animation."
Oh god, what if they animated sausage making?
I often think about that post that was a fake dating profile for a cat that was all about chickens, like wanting someone with posable thumbs for opening chickens.
This is one my favourite things the internet has ever made.
!!!!!!
This remains one of the great art objects of modern times and nobody will convince me otherwise.
absolutely lost in the sauce
Hmmm
I occasionally hurt my back when I sleep wrong. And Ive been sleeping just about the same for the past week yet my back still is off. And I'm starting to think maybe I put the wrong pillow Into the wrong pillowcase. So my sleeping right has not been right at all
I've swapped them so now all I have to do is sleep and see if it gets better
hbo max blocks screenshots even when I use the snipping tool AND firefox AND ublock which is a fucking first. i will never understand streaming services blocking the ability to take screenshots thats literally free advertising for your show right there. HOW THE HELL IS SOMEBODY GONNA PIRATE YOUR SHOW THROUGH SCREENSHOTS. JACKASS
somewhere out there is a guy who meticulously takes screenshots of every individual frame of his favorite tv shows and then painstakingly etches each one onto a roll of film which he puts into his old timey projector and recreates the footage as a silent film with his own lavishly hand-lettered dialogue cards and original score that he plays on his upright piano and charges audiences one shiny penny a play. at last, big media has finally outsmarted ol' Zachary Zoetrope
PSA for everyone who doesn't know, explained simply
this is NOT because of blocking screenshots, it's because of HOW streaming sites use your computer's hardware to optimise performance, which means the thing rendering the video and the thing capturing your screen aren't the SAME thing. so they can't talk together.
you can fix this by going to your browser settings, searching for "hardware acceleration", and turning that off.
This also fixes screen sharing to other screens. It has been GODSEND
type this in the toolbar to find this setting in firefox: about:preferences#searchResults
If I remember correctly from a different post, this works because the "accelerator" in hardware acceleration is the GPU (graphics processing unit). The thinky bit/brain or CPU (central processing unit) just offloads the whole task of "figuring out the image" to the GPU and puts up a black box where the image is supposed to go and let's the GPU figure it out. It doesn't have to think about what goes there anymore. The GPU is displaying everything else already so no skin off its back
So when you take a screenshot, that's a CPU task. And what does the CPU have in the window? Why a nice black box that's exactly what you wanted :) no need to ask what the GPU is doing for this
So turning off hardware acceleration forces the CPU to do the image figuring out so it can see the thing to screenshot
fuck personality tests reblog this with the position u sleep in and how u like ur eggs cooked
People reblogging this with “on my back” and “hard boiled” are to be feared
please unmute this
So if I’m understanding it right, this is basically the equivalent of stopping by a coworker’s house to pick up something and next they disappear and their toddler comes out of some room with a sticky toy phone and hands it to you and you’re just left there like an idiot like UHHHM THAT’S NICE and THANK YOU? and also ANYWAY IS YOUR DAD AWAKE YET? HELLO? ANYONE? and walking into a door as you try to get away.
Some cold, wet mornings, you’ll find the hornbill, sitting atop the termite mound that the Mongoose have taken refuge in over night, waiting for it’s band of companions to rouse. A little impatiently it seems, it sometimes taps on the mound, quite insistently. Before long, the band of mongoose start to emerge from the warm interior, ready to start searching for a morsel or two.
As they forage through the shrubs and grass, the hornbill perches on branches above, snapping up any unfortunate insects, disturbed by the mongoose. What does the mongoose get out of this, apart from a rude awakening? Well, since the hornbill gets an easy meal, the mongoose gets in return, greater safety that the hornbill’s higher vantage point gives them. Should the hornbill spot something dangerous, an eagle or another ground predator, it will utter an alarm calls, sending the mongoose scurrying to the nearest shelter.
This is known as mutualism. Both species are benefiting from the other with neither being negatively affected.
Today's Card Is: Sorry Your House Burnt Down
The discovery that we had it backwards and that more realistic cave paintings are generally older than more abstract ones is exciting from an anthropological perspective, because it demonstrates that art movements have existed for as long as art has, but I have to imagine there’s some poor biologist out there somewhere going “you mean to tell me that our Paleolithic ancestors had the ability and means to record realistic, highly detailed depictions of contemporary flora and fauna the whole time and simply chose not to?”
Well everyone knows what these things LOOK LIKE, Thag, why would you just COPY them?
Surely the trick is to evoke what they are at SOUL, Thag. If I want to look at a mammoth I can just GO FIND A MAMMOTH. DUH.