I’ve hit the road with the fam to recharge the spiritual batteries before heading into the new year, throttling back the blogging just a bit. As we reflect on what’s happened & what’s to come, here’s a traditional Irish blessing I’ve always loved:

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
the rains fall soft upon your fields; and until we meet again,
may God hold you in the palm of His hand.

My alma mater used it quite nicely in an ad a couple of years back.

Of course, the mordant Irish wit is best expressed in a different toast:

May those that love us, love us.
For those that don’t love us,
May God turn their hearts.
And if He doesn’t turn their hearts,
May He turn their ankles,
So we’ll know them by their limping.

😉

Slainte (cheers),
J.

Man, I cannot tell you how much my panda-loving 7yo wants this thing to be real. 🙂

[YouTube]

“Envision a blimp flying over the country, and then we’re laying the cable from the blimp.”

I really enjoyed the latest piece from Google’s Nat & Lo, showing how networks are physically connected (interactive map) among continents.

The internet allows us to see videos, photos, and news from anywhere in the world almost instantaneously. But how?! In this video we learn about the hundreds of underwater fiber optic cables that connect continents, cities, and data centers all over the world –– and investigate how these cables are made, how they’re installed, and more.

[YouTube]

• The Google Photos team is hiring a User Experience Engineer to prototype new ideas for the product.
• The Photoshop team is hiring a computer scientist, and so is the Lightroom team. 
• Update: The Digital Video/Audio team is hiring as well:
• VR video editing engineer (ooh; see sneak peek)
• Premiere Pro engineer
• Premiere Pro engineer (LA-based)

Maybe this seems like a long shot, but the amazing Eric Chan (who’s now been a key part of Camera Raw for the better part of a decade) once saw a listing on my blog, so who knows? Good luck!

[Via David Lieb & Jeff Tranberry]

This documentary looks super fun and interesting—and not just for Afrika Bambaataa’s tremendous eye furniture.

808, the heart of the beat that changed music. The acclaimed documentary that chronicles the incredible legacy of the TR808 drum machine will be exclusively available on Apple Music December 9th 2016. Discover the iconic records, artists and producers influenced by the 808’s unique beats and find out the secret behind its sudden discontinuation.

[YouTube]

Check out the latest from all-time great Robert Hodgin (anybody here old enough to remember Flight 404?):

Taxi, Taxi! is 1 of 4 different pieces we created exclusively for the towering video wall. It uses NYC Open Data taxi data plotted against routes created with Open Street Map which is displayed within a 3D model of New York City. It is designed to run in realtime and was created with the Cinder C++ coding framework.

What’s the relationship between perception & creativity?

In this fascinating TED talk, Google’s Blaise Agüera y Arcas talks about everything from the structure of the brain to how the inflow of data can be reversed to synthesize really trippy imagery. Maybe if I watch it a dozen more times I’ll start to grok what’s happening here—but in the meantime, trust me, it’s well worth watching at least once:

We’re on the edge of a new frontier in art and creativity — and it’s not human. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, principal scientist at Google, works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this captivating demo, he shows how neural nets trained to recognize images can be run in reverse, to generate them. The results: spectacular, hallucinatory collages (and poems!) that defy categorization. “Perception and creativity are very intimately connected,” Agüera y Arcas says. “Any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create.”

[YouTube]