Here's a posting for all computer graphics folks.
Siggraph sketches are a great, lightweight way to publicize/recognize new developments and ideas in graphics (plus you get a Conference Select uber pass!). Some folks mistakenly think of sketches as "papers lite" but they're much more. They cover all aspects of the Siggraph sphere, including workstation, education, entertainment, mobile, fine art, supercomputing... Last year's sketches ranged from image-based modeling; to innovative display paradigms; to real-time illumination; to letting police see around corners; to production of films like "Star Wars" and "Madagascar"; to spontaneously beaming romantic music from your phone to the cute stranger at the other end of Starbuck's.
Deadlines are in just a couple of weeks, but preparation is not difficult. Here's the "CFP":
The Sketches program is one of the most dynamic programs of the annual SIGGRAPH conference, which will be held this year 30 July - 3 August 2006 in Boston, Massachusetts USA. Sketches provide an opportunity for researchers, artists, and practitioner to share new results, show live demonstrations of their work, and participate in a unique forum for new and thought-provoking ideas, techniques, and applications in computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Accepted sketches will be archived in the ACM Digital Library as well as on the SIGGRAPH Conference DVD and Conference Abstracts and Applications CD-Rom. During the conference, the authors will be given 20 minutes to present their work. We are seeking submissions that provide a single page PDF summary of provocative speculations, nascent academic research, industrial development, practical tools, and behind-the-scenes explanations of commercial and artistic works. Submissions covering any topic which would excite the interest of a computer graphics audience are welcome.
Sketch summary PDF submissions must be written and presented in English.
Paper length should not exceed one single-sided page in letter format,
should include the collaborators names together with their affiliations
and must be formatted according to the SIGGRAPH publication style. In
addition, you MUST provide a .jpeg image which acts as a visual
remainder of the sketch. The image can be any size, however, the
submission system will resize it to a 150x150 pixels image.
Supplementary material such as videos, images and/or further
documentation may also be submitted electronically and will be made
available to reviewers. Please, refer to the submission website for
more details and keep in mind that the total size of all uploaded files
must not exceed 40 MB.
http://www.siggraph.org/s2006/main.php?f=cfp&p=sketches&s=how
Submissions deadline (5 pm PST) | April 12, 2006 |
Notifications to authors | May 9, 2006 |
Camera ready sketches | May 15, 2006 |
Sketches Presentations at SIGGRAPH | July 30 - August 3, 2006 |
Hanspeter Pfister, MERL
International Sketches Jury
Does this match my experience at GDC?
I had a great time, though it was a tad wearying I worked in the NVIDIA booth, in the Playstation 3 portion of Sony's booth, spoke at a sponsored session on FXComposer 2.0 in game production pipelines, and then on Friday gave a art track lecture on texture and shading interactions. The last one surprised me I expected a last-day meager turnout, but instead the long double-sized conference room was filled to capacity with people sitting on the floor 15 minutes before the talk even began! I felt really excited and glad to be able to speak with all those game artists and programmers.
The slides representing my talks will be available in PPT/PDF form on the NVIDIA Developer Website.
(Hey, wait a minute... "slightly imaginative"? Aww, who pays attention to these lame-assed personality quizzes, anyway?)
I know, I know. Inbox Zero is a great plan. But for some of us it's not practical to be continuously at zero, and especially when there are numerous input channels.
Right now I have three primary email inputs, and one #1 email kvetch:
One glance at Craig's List and 20 minutes later I was in possesion of another G, from a fellow just a few blocks away and dirt-cheap. So now I've got a Canon G5 to replace the long-suffering, taped-together, and now deceased G1, and as a quiet digital companion to my Contax G2.
Dumb? Hmm, just last week I picked up an LX1 (aka Leica DLux2) for the wide lens and the 16:9 aspect ratio (looks cool displayed on the Sony PSP a great way to carry a catolog of images, added to my other catalogs on the celphone and ipod)
I forgot to include my other G in this snap: the old Canonet G-III. Ah well.
First impressions of the G5 over the G1: manual use is incredibly improved, along with strobe handling. Sounds like it's time to revise some of the Botzilla Canon pages, now that the G5 has been out of production for months...
<geek>So we're riding down the San Tomas & one of Y's kids asks: "Are Pokemon aliens?" a question which I knew had merit but I think I've figured out a better explanation to questions raised by the collision of several data points:
My hypothesis, then: Pokemon are not aliens. Humans are aliens. The human characters in Pokemon are the descendants of human space travellers who have settled on the World of Pokemon, who have some memories or education about their original home but who now spend their energies exploring and taming this new world of unusual animals. In fact they may be only indirect descendants, perhaps the original humans of that world (if not everyone?) are clones, which would also then help explain the ongoing presence of identical Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny characters.
Happy now?
(Next, I'll have to explain my more-elaborate theories about how the Flintstones and the Jetsons are not similar shows set in fanciful renditions of the past and future, but that they are both different parts of the same future that the Jetsons are the rich sky dwellers and the Flintstones live a terrestrially-bound third-world existence that apes the lifestyle of the people up above the clouds..... or maybe my crypto-technical theory of why one can hear the sounds of movie ray guns and spaceship engines in a vacuum)</geek>
When Rebecca was 12 we were especially bombarded with cute personality quizzes. But it seems that people just can't resist them, whether they're 12 or 30 or 60, whether it be Meyers-Briggs coding, the Cube, the Strawberry Field quiz, the Three Wishes, the Twin Brothers, the Synaesthesia ball,... and the internet makes them so, so, easy to propogate (and to mutate). Hi Mom!
Measured in "blog years" perhaps I haven't posted for a while, but it's good to keep it in perspective. Consider the timeline above, for instance, which describes part of our relationship to foods.
Each horizontal pixel in the timeline represents 162.5 years, and I've only run it back as far as the advent of modern humans people who are physically the same as you or I. The timeline could have gone further for example, to the beginnings of fire and cooking, which vary in estimation from 500,000 to 1.7 million years ago anywhere from five to fifteen times as long as the current chart (or 2125 years per pixel, which would place the advent of agriculture a mere four pixels from the end of the timeline).
As you can see, the "classic staples" of our diets breads, cultivated fruits, domesticated animals, imported foods and spices didn't really show up until fairly recently, in that last portion of the timeline. Our bodies (including the brains), which have been evolving towards their own maximized ecological niche for a very long time, were developed and balanced for a well-defined and pretty consistent diet long before agriculture cropped up.
Almost everything we're familiar with today, eating-wise, fits into that very last pixel on the right. The past 162.5 years have seen the adoption of canned foods, refrigeration, aluminum foil, mechanized harvesting, supermarkets, plastic wrap, artificial flavors and preservatives, and this one is key corporate production and marketing of most everything we put in our mouths.
If we set aside questions of how to maximize convenience, or how to best-enrich the coffers of corporate food producers, what should we eat? The bodies that we have are still designed to make ther best use of the foods and environment in which they evolved. Primitive man may have had a life expectancy of 30 years, but when you remove the effects of predation (so far, none of my immediate relatives have been eaten by leopards) and severe infant mortality, the differences begin to dissolve. The human body was born eating simple foods, eating sweets only when in season, not being exposed to concocted flavors or near-infinite supplies of processed and addictive grains. The fossil record itself shows a shift when grains (which are relatively high in silicon and other minerals from the earth they've grown in) were added to the human diet the teeth of the fossils at that point in prehistory suddenly become worn, ground-away.
Not all modern foods need to be harmful, of course. But it's good to be aware of what they are, and to always be aware that the interests of your health are only marginally connected to the (financial) interests of those who feed you.
For myself, I'm sticking to foods not far from early man's tree at least 95% of the time anyway (exceptions mostly focus around social circumstances, such as always accepting hospitality another core human trait is the ability to share!). The result is pretty-much a copy of modern low-carb fare: meat, eggs, veggies, only a small number of sweet foods, avoidance of refined flours and sugars. I don't need to run from predators, but I give my elliptical machine a regular spin and inflict painful crunches on my abs. I take some modern advice by using cholesterol-free egg products, and keep just a few lingering industrialized vices: coffee, wine, and diet coke.
The net results after the past year or two of this eating philosophy: my doctor says I'm healthy, I feel great and energized, and I'm back to the clothing sizes I enjoyed in my youth quite literally, I've recently found my best source of bluejeans is Gap Kids. Thank you, Alley Oop.