10 Lights-Out Production Lines
1. It's strangely fitting that Children of Men's history is intertwined with Harry Potter's.
"When I ask Cuarón if he thought much about Children of Men while he was making Azkaban, his response is swift: 'All the time,' he says. 'Even more. I was in London full-time, going through not the prettiest side of London.' What’s more, a director’s responsibilities are circumscribed on a carefully managed corporate property like Harry Potter, so he had time to himself. 'I was reading like crazy. Talking to people. Taking pictures. It starts to be a tapestry of information. Everything was around one centerpiece, and that was this Children of Men.' The project hadn’t been fully abandoned — screenwriter David Arata had been brought in to make additions and changes in order to keep the movie on life support — but Newman and Abraham had low expectations that it would ever get off the ground. 'And then, one day, Alfonso called me,' Newman remembers. 'And he said, ‘I’m in post [-production on Harry Potter] and I’m really happy with this movie, but I want to make Children of Men. It’s never gone out of my mind.''"
+ I'd take 247 seconds of CoM over whole seasons of most sci-fi shows.
2. It is sort of charming that machines, like humans, see faces where they don't exist.
"The use of facial recognition software for commercial purposes is becoming more common, but, as Amazon scans faces in its physical shop and Facebook searches photos of users to add tags to, those concerned about their privacy are fighting back. Berlin-based artist and technologist Adam Harvey aims to overwhelm and confuse these systems by presenting them with thousands of false hits so they can’t tell which faces are real. The Hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face."
3. And they are already at phase 3 in several facilities.
"Foxconn Electronics is automating production at its factories in China in three phases, aiming to fully automate entire factories eventually, according to general manager Dai Jia-peng for Foxconn's Automation Technology Development Committee. In the first phase, Foxconn aims to set up individual automated work stations for work that workers are unwilling to do or is dangerous, Dai said. Entire production lines will be automated to decrease the number of robots used during the second phase, Dai noted. In the third phase, entire factories will be automated with only a minimal number of workers assigned for production, logistics, testing and inspection processes, Dai indicated...There are 10 lights-out (fully automated) production lines at some factories"
4. Roughly 2 billion dollars went into robotics companies this year, up ~50% from 2015.
"25 unmanned aerial systems companies got the biggest number of fundings followed by 15 agricultural robotics startups, service robotics for businesses, service robots for personal use, vision systems providers, self-driving systems and mobile robotics and AGVs companies, plus a whole bunch of smaller categories."
5. Unless you are deeply familiar with throat-singing techniques, this is some mindblowing stuff.
"Hello I am Anna Maria and I'm an overtone singer and I'm going to tell you something about polyphonic singing today. Overtone singing is a voice technique where one person sings two notes at the same time."
+ Come for the sound, stay for the spectrograms.
1. vulture.com 2. theguardian.com 3. digitimes.com 4. therobotreport.com 5. youtube.com | @aatishb
10 Lights-Out Production Lines