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Tom Waits on mankind
if there is one thing we can say about mankind, it is, there is nothing kind about man
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John Knoll on VFX industry
DS: You cannot talk about visual effects these days without talking about the rough business climate. There seems to be a tug of war between the studios and the visual effects houses, with considerable finger pointing and frustration. Are there any answers? Is there much more shake out to come? Where do you see things headed?
JK: All in all, the picture is a little grim right now. Unfortunately, there are a lot of companies that engage in really foolish and short sighted business practices. You can’t just blame the studios for wanting to pay less and less for the work.
What’s happening is that when a low target number goes out, somebody says, “Yes.” A lot of times companies are saying “Yes” to a number that they know is going to be below their cost. They know they are going to lose money, for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they don’t know that’s what they are doing.
They completely misunderstood what it is they are bidding on and their bid is based on a wrong assumption. They are going to take it in the shorts because of their naivety. Sometimes they are doing it for strategic reasons, thinking, “We will buy this first one and then…”
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No one could see the colour blue until modern times
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
The way humans see the world… until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a colour, we may not even notice that something it’s there.
Ancient languages didn’t have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew, not Icelandic cultures. And without a word for the colour, there’s evidence that they may not have seen it at all.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/211119-colorsEvery language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a colour to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the colour of blood and wine.
After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colours to appear in every language is blue.The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.
https://mymodernmet.com/shades-of-blue-color-history/True blue hues are rare in the natural world because synthesizing pigments that absorb longer-wavelength light (reds and yellows) while reflecting shorter-wavelength blue light requires exceptionally elaborate molecular structures—biochemical feats that most plants and animals simply don’t undertake.
When you gaze at a blueberry’s deep blue surface, you’re actually seeing structural coloration rather than a true blue pigment. A fine, waxy bloom on the berry’s skin contains nanostructures that preferentially scatter blue and violet light, giving the fruit its signature blue sheen even though its inherent pigment is reddish.
Similarly, many of nature’s most striking blues—like those of blue jays and morpho butterflies—arise not from blue pigments but from microscopic architectures in feathers or wing scales. These tiny ridges and air pockets manipulate incoming light so that blue wavelengths emerge most prominently, creating vivid, angle-dependent colors through scattering rather than pigment alone.
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