The Best Optical Illusion

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Whenever awards are given from criteria that aren’t quantitative, it’s pretty easy to question their validity. The above illusion won the Best Illusion of The Year 2007 as sponsored by the Neural Correlate Society, and while it’s interesting, perhaps 2007 was just a slow year. Still, this is what was said:

These images of the Leaning Tower are actually identical, but the tower on the right looks more lopsided because the human visual system treats the two images as one scene. Our brains have learned that two tall objects in our view will usually rise at the same angle but converge toward the top—think of standing at the base of neighboring skyscrapers. Because these towers are parallel, they do not converge, so the visual system thinks they must be rising at different angles.

Exclusive: Tupac Coachella Hologram Source Explains How Rapper Resurrected

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The Coachella festival is a place where minds routinely get blown, usually due to an awesome set or a killer reunion from one of your favorite bands. But on Sunday night it was thanks to the ghostly re-appearance of West Coast rap legend Tupac Shakur. He materialized on stage alongside his old friend Snoop Dogg during a crowd-pleasing set by the Doggfather and Dr. Dre, which also featured appearances from Eminem, 50 Cent, Wiz Khalifa and Warren G.
The resurrection of 'Pac, who was murdered in 1996, would have been a face-melting surprise had word about the stunt not leaked out just a few days before the set. But the 100,000 or so fans who were on hand still couldn't believe it when Tupac materialized on stage to rip off "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted."


"What up, Coachella?" the shirtless, pants sagging MC asked the crowd before bouncing into the classic single "Hail Mary."
"We worked with Dr. Dre on this and it was Dre's vision to bring this back to life," said Nick Smith, president of AV Concepts, the San Diego company that projected and staged the hologram. "It was his idea from the very beginning and we worked with him and his camp to utilize the technology to make it come to life."
According to a spokesperson for Dre, the lifelike image of Shakur was created by Hollywood effects house Digital Domain, the Oscar-winning CG factory that made CG images of Brad Pitt in "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," Jeff Bridges in "TRON: Legacy," Kevin Bacon in "X-Men: First Class" and Rooney Mara in "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo." The virutal 'Pac was the vision of Dre, who worked with his longtime partner Philip Atwell of Geronimo Productions and Dylan Brown of The Yard.
Smith said he wasn't allowed to talk about the creative aspects of the production — including how the hologram was able to seemingly perform the set in synch with Snoop and whether all the vocals were 'Pac's — but he did say that his company has the ability to recreate long-dead figures and visually recreate them in the studio. "You can take their likenesses and voice and ... take people that haven't done concerts before or perform music they haven't sung and digitally recreate it," he said.
The hologram was the latest visual magic pulled off by AV, which is also behind the 2006 Grammys performance featuring Madonna and the holographic members of the Gorillaz, as well as holograms used in concert by Celine Dion and the Black Eyed Peas.
The Tupac hologram was several months in the planning and took nearly four months to create in a studio and though Smith was not able to reveal the exact price tag for the illusion, he said a comparable one could cost anywhere from $100,000 to more than $400,000 to pull off. "I can't say how much that event cost, but I can say it's affordable in the sense that if we had to bring entertainers around world and create concerts across the country, we could put [artists] in every venue in the country," he said.
The life-size Tupac was amazingly realistic, down to the late rapper's signature tattoos, Timberland boots, jewelry and movements, all of which were also recreated under the direction of Dre and his team.
The hologram, of course, already has a Twitter page and more than 3,300 followers at press time

Physicist uses math to get out of a traffic ticket, publishes findings

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Image
When most folks get ticketed for running a stop sign, most people wind up writing the court a check. UC San Diego physicist Dmitri Krioukov wrote a mathematical paper instead. Rather than throw his fallible human opinion on the mercy of the court, Krioukov uses a series of equations and graphs to prove that the accusing officer confused his car's real space-time trajectory "for a trajectory of a hypothetical object moving at approximately constant linear speed without stopping at the stop sign." In other words, the officer was wrong, but Krioukov stresses that it isn't the officer's fault. "This mistake is fully justified," he writes, pointing to the math. "As a result of this unfortunate coincidence, the O's perception of reality did not properly reflect reality." And to think, you probably never thought you'd use this kind of math in the real world.

Millionaire Smartest Person

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Indian uses Google Earth to find long-lost mother

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Separated from his family at age 5, Indian man uses the Web tool to track down the name of his village -- and ultimately reunite with his mother.


Google Earth helped Saroo Brierley find the village he left as a child, right down to the waterfall he used to play in as a child.
(Credit: Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)
Sometimes Google Earth can help you find your way home after decades of not knowing where home is.
That is what apparently happened for an Indian man who was separated from his family as a 5-year-old. Saroo Brierley tells BBC magazine that he was traveling with his older brother in 1986 when the two became separated. Brierley was accompanying his brother on a train trip when he fell asleep and awoke 14 hours later in the notorious slum of Calcutta. Without his brother.
At first, he lived on the streets, joining legions of children begging for their livelihood. Brierley would eventually be taken in by an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia.
"I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia," he told the magazine.

But as he grew older, the desire to know where he came from also grew. With vivid memories of -- but not the name -- of the town he was born, he started searching the Internet for clues. Brierley multiplied the 14 hours he knew he had been on the train by the average speed of trains in India to determine how far he traveled that night. He then drew a circle around Calcutta and determined that Khandwa was the town he was looking for.
"When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up," he said. "I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play."
He would eventually make his way to Khandwa and locate a familiar house. The family had moved but he remembered their names. With the help of passers-by, Brierley was taken the house where is mother lived.
At first he did not recognize his mother, who was stunned into silence by his reappearance. She took him by the hand into her house.
"She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost."
His older brother was not as fortunate; his body was found on the railroad tracks a few months after Brierley disappeared.

Indian uses Google Earth to find long-lost mother

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Separated from his family at age 5, Indian man uses the Web tool to track down the name of his village -- and ultimately reunite with his mother.

Google Earth helped Saroo Brierley find the village he left as a child, right down to the waterfall he used to play in as a child.
(Credit: Screenshot by Steven Musil/CNET)
Sometimes Google Earth can help you find your way home after decades of not knowing where home is.
That is what apparently happened for an Indian man who was separated from his family as a 5-year-old. Saroo Brierley tells BBC magazine that he was traveling with his older brother in 1986 when the two became separated. Brierley was accompanying his brother on a train trip when he fell asleep and awoke 14 hours later in the notorious slum of Calcutta. Without his brother.
At first, he lived on the streets, joining legions of children begging for their livelihood. Brierley would eventually be taken in by an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia.
"I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia," he told the magazine.
But as he grew older, the desire to know where he came from also grew. With vivid memories of -- but not the name -- of the town he was born, he started searching the Internet for clues. Brierley multiplied the 14 hours he knew he had been on the train by the average speed of trains in India to determine how far he traveled that night. He then drew a circle around Calcutta and determined that Khandwa was the town he was looking for.
"When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up," he said. "I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play."
He would eventually make his way to Khandwa and locate a familiar house. The family had moved but he remembered their names. With the help of passers-by, Brierley was taken the house where is mother lived.
At first he did not recognize his mother, who was stunned into silence by his reappearance. She took him by the hand into her house.
"She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost."
His older brother was not as fortunate; his body was found on the railroad tracks a few months after Brierley disappeared.

alien spacecraft or boat??

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From laying carpets to making a business out of them, this IIM Ranchi graduate has come a long way

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satish chandra the boy who was a bell boy and made it big in the placement
Satish Chandra Buriuly, student, IIM Ranchi class of 2012

You could call this a different kind of ‘rags to riches’ story. Only, there were no rags and there are no riches either. Satish Chandra Buriuly’s story is about how a commonplace person from a tribal area in India can start making it big and compete with the rest of the world using sheer grit and hardwork. Satish (32) was a hotel attendant boy and a school van driver before he got an admission to the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ranchi and is today receiving a Rs 10 lakh job offer during placements.
“But I may not take up the Rs 10 lakh job as I have one more offer from a company that gives work to rural artisans. It makes carpets. This company has not yet described the job profile or the money but I would like to do something for rural people,” Satish told PaGaLGuY.
Satish is from Jhinkpani in the interiors of Jharkhand, a place centered around an ACC cement plant. The biggest town close to Jhinkpani is Chaibasa which is largely tribal in nature. Born to a modest family, Satish lost his mother when he was very young. “My stepmother brought me up with so much love and affection that I owe much of what I am today to her,” he says proudly. The rest of the credit Satish gives his girlfriend who has stuck to him and been with him at the oddest moments in his life.
And the odd moments have been many.
Satish’s father died in 2000 and Satish being the eldest in the house, decided to take up the responsibility of the family. But he had little to start with: an SSC degree (with 51% marks) and an intermediate degree (50%) in 1999. He did not have the finances to study further so he took a break and started working at any and every job that came his way.
Some of the first jobs that he did were those of a computer teacher in a local institute and a house attendant in a hotel. “I had learnt computers since that was the basic skill required for any job. And hardly had I learnt computers that I was asked to teach computers. The salary at the computer institute was a little over Rs 1,000 so Satish juggled both the jobs (the hotel boy one was well) at the same time.
“I was house boy by night and a computer operator by day. I had to do all the odd jobs in the hotel including taking the guests’ bags to the room. I did that for a while but could not continue it because I was not sleeping enough and falling ill frequently,” said Satish.
Some more less flattering jobs followed. These included that of a school-van driver and a door-to-door salesman. Satish’s three younger brothers were still studying back then. “Both my mother and I wanted them to study and that was the best thing to happen to me. It gave me time to consider various options to go ahead with,” the IIM Ranchi graduate said.
The family owned a few small-sized paddy fields but they were not enough to support a growing family. “Life was hard but my mother made sure that I and my brothers did not lose hope. After my father’s death, a lot of my time was spent in just running around to get my father’s pension money,” he said.
In 2006, Satish got a better job as a computer operator in Noamundi. This job paid better, though not great. Satish then bought a second-hand van and started driving children to school and dropping them back to their homes. This earned him some extra money but also took a toll on his psyche. He often just broke down with mental fatigue and physical stress.
“My girlfriend and mother were there by my side all the time and they made sure that I never gave up,” said Satish. That was the time when his girlfriend who is a teacher in a local school pushed him to resume his studies. He took admission in Tata College in Chaibasa. At the same time, he also took up English speaking lessons. “I knew that if you have to move ahead in life, English was a must,” the Satish added.
When IIM Ranchi opened in his state Jharkhand, it gave Satish hope and he dared to dream to take admission there. In 2009, Satish took the Common Admission Test (CAT) and scored in the 80.08 percentile. “But the fees were still high for me. It was my friends, my brother and my girlfriend who all came together and chipped in Rs 1.1 lakh for the fees and thus my dream got a face and a direction,” Satish said.
Today, with an MBA degree in hand, Satish has two offers to choose from — a huge contrast from the days when he did every job that came his way. “I come from a tribal background and I know what it is like to originate from there. With no opportunities at all, life is very hard. I want to give back to society since society has given me much so will work with the company based in Jaipur that helps artisans made carpets,” he says.
Satish also has one more errand to complete. To get married to the girl who has been with him all these years and waited for him to get settled in his career, the one who made him fulfil a lost dream.
Prof MJ Xavier, director of IIM Ranchi is extremely happy with Satish’s performance. “He is a humble and soft-spoken boy. Very polite and it is good that he is going to do so well in life,” the director told PaGaLGuY.
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