The watch now belongs to my dad. Cause he is awesome.
lucasfilm
Happy Halloween /
I have been a Star Wars fan since I was 7, I went to work for Lucasfilm as a 3d painter and sculptor and this was one of the best opportunities to grow and become an artist and a craftsman. George Lucas was not only a very generous employer but also created an environment where the artists had a great deal of ownership in the final product. Lucasfilm was created by an artist and was largely run by artists. I am sure once Disney took over this changed. George threw annual 4th of July and Halloween parties with costume contests that had no equal in the Silicon Valley. The most famous story was that one year ILM pushed the whole Pirates of the Caribbean ship, created as part of the movie set, into the party, complete with a pirate crew.
One year, a group of ILM's visual effects artists came up with the idea to dress up as Living Room Transformers - here is the couch ( with Jett Lucas in the background ):
Math for Artists: Exponents and Radicals /
A friend of mine I used to work with at Lucasfilm recently shared this.. He is a brilliant technical mind, the guy behind the most advanced technology of special effects simulations created by Pixelux Entertainment. Naturally, artists and engineers at Lucasfilm were locked in eternal friendly battle of the minds, where engineers of course always had the upper hand since entertainment industry today is essentially a high-tech industry. So we had many inside jokes regarding the math abilities of artists. Math is a language, and choosing Peet Mondrian's colors is no accident, for Math is not only an abstract language but also a visual language. Visualization in mathematics, or mathematical notation, was invented in the 16th century and it immensely liberated mathematical discovery. Like musical notation, modern mathematical notation is strict and a few symbols could convey very complex ideas.
I went to mathematical high school and participated in a few Mathematical Olympiads, although I am the worst student of math as I relied mostly on my pattern recognition ability rather than study. When I moved to the States I did some of the comprehensive IQ tests and scored pretty high; but my pattern recognition was the highest at 147. I have my own definition of pattern recognition and it's the ability to predict an outcome based on two or three reference points. As in life and math, trouble is if you think you have two or three reference points but in fact only one is a solid ground and the rest.. simply conjectures.
