According to a press release by NASA, the ozone layer is still being depleted, but the rate at which it is occurring is on the decrease. Although not yet to the point where we'll be getting back to the pre-CFC state, it does show progress in reversing man-made pollution. There …

Since I've got a DVD version of the 2003 Electronic Theater presentation, I figured I'd do a showing of it before I leave to go to the Canyon. The plan is to do the showing next Sunday (8/10) afternoon at 5pm. Please RSVP if you are interested in coming …

Finding Nemo, Pixar's summer release, has broken $315M in gross revenues, giving it the number one spot for 2003, trumping The Matrix Reloaded by almost $40M so far. Here are some other interesting facts: Nemo has now surpassed Fellowship of the Ring (by a couple million bucks) Nemo is now …

I know, you're sick of hearing me complain about these guys, but here are some more choice complaints from users and musicians. A lengthy article of complaints from a Windows 2000 user who has bought tracks from BuyMusic.com enumerates the following problems: You must download each track in an …

An article from ComputerWorld relates the story of the Rolling Stones use of WiFi networks while on the road. The band and their entourage uses 1.5-3Mbps connections at each venue to update their website and connect to business associates, as well as handle personal email and other communications. Their …

The New York Times is reporting that the ACLU, along with a set of six Muslim groups, is taking the US to court over the USA Patriot Act. The groups contend that the Act violates the privacy, free speech, and due process rights guaranteed by the constitution.

This paper session seemed to be a bit of a catch-all, covering everything from a new UI for editing 3D objects to machine-created architecture and then finally the simulation of complex environments with texture depth maps. Twister: A Space Warp Operator for the Two-Handed Editing of 3D Objects Twister is …

There were four papers presented on points at the conference, each of which dealt with handling large numbers of points or re-sampling polygonal data for representation with points. Considering the use of large scanned data sets, this area of study is very important to current practice in film. Combining Edges …

Light fields and visibility papers concentrated mostly on shadows , light source acquisition, and the fast determination of visibility for real-time culling and rendering. Ray Space Factorization for From-Region Visibility The technique described in this paper concentrated on determining which parts of the scene are visible from a region (as opposed …

The human bodies papers covered a variety of topics, from reconstructing heads from skull data, to building character skins from metrics, to capturing skin deformation using video cameras. Reanimating the Dead: Reconstruction of Expressive Faces from Skull Data If you've ever seen a modern forensic TV show, they are pretty …

There is definitely such thing as too much of a good thing. After four days of fascinating papers, I had to skip out on what looked like a really interesting panel discussion on robotics tonight to just vegetate a little. Today's paper sessions (covered elsewhere) were great, starting with Human …

Those interested in checking out Quark 6 before making a buying decision can now download a demo (a rather big demo, 100MB) from the Quark site.

This is total geek fare, but if you need to administer your unix box (or Mac for that matter) from your telephone, here's an SSH client for the Sony Ericsson P800 phone. If that's not sick enough, there's also a VNC client.

A good article from the Washington Post about the current status of José Padilla, the US Citizen being held incommunicado in a South Carolina military base because he was declared an enemy combatant last year. By way of refresher, Mr. Padilla was arrested at Chicago's O'Hare airport after Defence Department …

Those of us with an affinity for the Python programming language will be happy to hear that version 2.3 has now been officially released. For Macintosh users, the number of fixes is large, and you can get the MacPython install today, or grab your own copy of the source …

Good news for people who like to see outside viewpoints and multi-platform views with the Macintosh includes. The folks at arstechnica have launched a new column, Mac.ars. The first article was published today. Go read it yourself and see if they've hit the mark or left you pining for …

The first paper session on Tuesday covered character animation of the human form. The papers in this section were quite good and may lead to some interesting technologies for folks such as Alias (formerly Alias|Wavefront) and others to consider in new products for topics such as synthetic dance and …

This section contained a number of different talks, only two of which I will comment on, due to lack of space and interest in the other two. The two that were interesting involved printing with metallic ink patterns and a very interesting new way to compare trees of data. Reproducing …

The final paper session that I attended Tuesday covered shadows. The results of most of the papers were pretty impressive and all focused on trying to squeeze realistic shadows out of today's computers and GPUs in real-time. Shadow Matting and Compositing This paper centered around compositing of shadows between two …

When I read the article from the Washington Post relaying that a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson had indicated that Al Qaeda was preparing for more commercial hijackings, I was puzzled... why was this being announced? It may well have been a move to cut off panic if it was …