Recent posts (page 3)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Check out this amazing video of Bob Hoskins clowning around on a blue-screen stage to do the Toon Town scene of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Early blue-screen cinema, I guess, so he doesn’t even really have props or sight guides to play off against.
I can’t remember where I saw this, possibly Important If True, back when that was a thing.
Political alignment
Speaking of Mario:
Thanks to Art House Politics for making me lol.
Super Mario Brothers
Note: video contains immediate profanity.
This obviously isn’t mine, and my guess is it wasn’t made by this person either. (If you know the providence, please comment or contact!)
BLDG BLOG BACK
Geoff Manaugh’s speculative landscape and architecture blog BLDG BLOG has reopened its doors. Always worth reading.
Dating: Dos and Don'ts
I invite you to watch this highly instructional film on dating from 1949.
The Internet Archive is a real treasure trove.
New preprint: "Understanding the role of linguistic distributional knowledge in cognition"
I have recently submitted a paper based on some work I have been doing at my job at the Embodied Cognition Lab at Lancaster University. In it, we look at a large set of linguistic distributional models commonly used in cognitive psychology, evaluating each on a benchmark behavioural dataset.
Endeavor over LA
I absolutely love this photo of space shuttle Endeavor, low over an LA city street. Yep, even though it looks like an exquisite Simon Stålenhag painting of an alternative 1970s America, this is actually a real event.
New(ish) paper: "Entrainment to the CIECAM02 and CIELAB colour appearance models in the human cortex"
Not so long ago I had a paper published in Vision Research. It’s on some work I did some years ago with my friend and collaborator Andrew Thwaites. In it we look at the entrainment of magnetoencephalographic activity in early visual cortex to colour information in visual stimulus using two competing computational models of colour. In other words, when and where people’s brainwaves directly track the colour of moving images they were seeing on a screen, using two theories about how colour could be represented in the brain.
The paper is in Elsevier’s “open archive”, which hopefully means you can read it for free. If not, hit me up.
I don’t talk about my work too much here, but if you’re interested you can read more about what I do on my more professional website.
Podcast Viewer
I made a tool to convert a podcast’s RSS feed into a webpage on which episodes can be easily streamed.
When you visit the page, you’ll see a box in which to paste the RSS feed’s URL:

Stick in a feed’s RSS URL, and you get all available episodes in a list, reverse chronologically by release date:

Titles are links taken from the feed’s metadata. Images are hotlinked from the host. Click-to-listen links bring up an embedded player:

The feed is stored in the page’s URL, so it should be sharable. Currently no way to identify a given episode, but you should be able to do that with the episode title links, which should go back to the source.
Source code is released to the CC0 public domain, and can be found on Codeberg, where you can also report bugs or help me make it better.
If you use it, let me know!
How to link to a specific scene in a Hype document
If you’ve made a multi-scene Hype document which is hosted online as a web page, you can link directly to a named scene in that document using this handy script:
