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5 Million Plastic Hangers A Week

This is a shocking video from Dan Mace. Old Navy in America throw away an estimated 5 million plastic hangers each week. They don't reuse the hangers after someone buys the clothes. That's 6350 tonnes of plastic hangers in landfills each year.

Environment

Life

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3D Ken Burns Effect From Single Image

#177

Researchers at Portland State University and Adobe have demonstrated being able to generate a 3D Ken Burns effect (parallax) using a single image. The system uses neural networks to generate depth predictions and object boundaries, and context aware in-painting to generate the missing pieces of the video to simluate a moving point of focus. We can tick another Star Trek TNG sci-fi concept off the list.

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The Comet

#176

Motion Designer Christian Stangl and Composer Wolfgang Stangl used the 400,000 images released by the ESA of the comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko taken by the Rosetta spacecraft to make a short film. The footage uses digitally enhanced real footage from the probe.

Space

Video

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Filmmaker Mode

#174

In the next step in the war against TV motion smoothing, top filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and James Cameron have worked with the UHD Alliance to petition and work with TV manufacturers to create a Filmmaker mode, which removes all post processing to keep the image as close to the source as possible.

Video

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3D Slam Mapping With Smartphones

#173

Augmented Reality startup 6D.AI have demonstrated the creation of a 3D scale map of an environment using regular smartphones. The demo shows the mapping of a 5000 square foot space taking 3 minutes with 4 smartphones (without depth sensors) scanning the area to create the SLAM AR map.

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Ali Spagnola

#172

This week I discovered the amazing Ali Spagnola on YouTube. Among other wacky pursuits, Ali recreates popular songs in the style of a different popular music artists, from scratch! Plus she is abosultely mental, in the best way :-)Check out her mashup of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody in the style of Billie Eilish!

Music

Video

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Sting & Shaggy!

#168

Sting and Shaggy, a match made in Tiny Desk heaven! You may not initially think that the silky smooth Sting groove would go well with a generous helping of Jamaican timbre from the sensational Shaggy, but you would be wrong my friend! :-) Sit back, relax and crank up the volume on this class Tiny Desk performance! (They also have an album out called 44/876)

Music

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Flying Car Drone

#160

Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel have created a drone that can seemlessly transition from flying to driving. The FStar drone uses the same 4 motors to power the flight propellors as well as the wheels, and it can also adjust the height at which it drives.

Innovation

Tech

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TV Review: The Best of Enemies

#159

This week I watched the Netlix documentary Best of Enemies. During the 1968 American Presidential campaign, the tradition among the TV networks was wall to wall coverage of both democratic and republican national conventions, where the party presidential candidates are decided. The ABC network was far behind NBC and CBS in market share, popularity and financial resources. As a result, they downgraded their coverage to nightly summaries, but need something else to attract viewers.

Review

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