Cool! Is there any way to automate some of the painting over for rotoscopy or is the task too complex? I seem to recall After Effects being programmable in JavaScript. A friend of mine has done some cool stuff using primarily the AF' shape recognition and motion tracking capabilities.

example below, sorry, don't know how to link stuff

You can just paste the URL, but if you want to make something like This Link to Hubski the syntax is:

[This Link to Hubski](https://hubski.com)

You can see more examples by clicking the 'markup tips' above every input box. Or by clicking this link.

I feel a bit awkward writing this when everyone seems to be doing much more important stuff, but ¿Maybe it's ok

It's absolutely OK!

Anyway, what are you using for making your animation? What's the workflow when it comes to actual projects like yours? I tried my hand at it a few years ago but never went past Blender tutorials.

My kingdom for a badge!

Done. And I'm not even going to take it as literally as I tend to do normally. :P

The Primer seems to be truncated

So it seems, thanks for pointing it! Here is an archived version that isn't cut short.

mk - To your attention.

Is there some unwritten rule that decrees any website receiving praise must change its current interface to something inferior within several weeks' time?

They want to find the change in praise and therefore make it derivative, duh!

Brother update:

His vision in both eyes has returned, stereoscopic vision improves ever so slightly each day. His prognosis is very good and after the MRI last week it's now confirmed: the tumour is only about 40% of its original size. The operation is now only a matter of him recuperating enough from chemo for surgeon and anesthesiologist to deem it as safe. Might be as early as mid-November.

I want to thank you guys once more for all the support. Both in private and in public. Y'all rock.

Books:

In eighty-odd pages, I'll finish Durant's vol. 1. My GEB review is constantly going through rewrites so I don't want to put a deadline on that one.

Chess:

I won the first round of the tournament. It's ranked and I'm nervous as all hell. I want to get the 1st category in a year or two so it's time to suck the anxiety up.

Institute stuff:

The professor still insists that I should go and do theoretical work. I talked with the guy a lot and it just feels wrong. It's like he thinks I'm going to suddenly realise this work is beneath me and regret the time I must have 'wasted' here. I can't make it clearer that I want to work here without something as dumb and shallow as "operating fuck-off lasers and spectrographs >> writing symbols on a greaseboard or paper ~= what I'm already doing in my spare time." Give me a firefighter's helmet on top of that and I'm basically living the dream.

WTF do I do when my adviser seems to have an impostor syndrome?

Yeah, there's nothing fancy about beurre à la bourguignonne. :P

Thing is, I wasn't yet given any opportunity to conduct actual experiments. All I've done was teaching some of the less prepared undergrads and gave my solutions to the problem. If that's enough to gauge me as someone better to work on theoretical physics than experimental, then I guess he's right. I think it's a premature conclusion.

His arguments are mainly about how much attention I paid to conduct a rigorous proof, taking various factors into an account and working on a steadily more complex model until reaching one that's not a 'spherical cow in a vacuum' if you catch my drift. He also remarked that I'm very well prepared for the mathematical side, almost to the fault where instead of just getting satisfied with an approximation I went out of my way to prove a lack of the analytic solution in one case. The experiment design I put forward was "fairly standard" and admittedly the least impressive part of my draft. In my defence, I was only informed about putting some actual experiment design about five days before the deadline (I had a month).

Anyway, I admire theoretical physics. I don't feel dissed by suggesting I might do better in it. Fact that a much more challenging (for me) venue that is experimental physics can be such easily judged as a bad choice did feel like a bit of a diss. I don't know if I have what it takes to excel in either, but I relish the challenge of experiment a lot more than the theoretical side of what I've been doing so far.

Sorry for a stream of consciousness type of response, but I wanted to put more background in place for future discussion. I might have reacted poorly or used a wrong word (diss does feel a bit strong), but I think that the professor's decision is premature.

Institute stuff:

My throat is pretty much shut at this point. I've done more talking throughout the last few weeks than the previous part of the year. And I'm almost certain it's not an exaggeration.

I might not be doing my diploma project here after all. When the professor finally finished reading my solutions he asked if I wouldn't feel better doing theoretical work. He even offered to recommend me to some of his colleagues. I'm not sure how to read it, really. In a way, it feels like I'm being dissed.

Health:

My routine blood tests came back. The fasting concentration of glucose was low even for me at 47 mg/dL. I have no idea what's up with that. I wasn't feeling any less lucid than usual when the blood was being collected. The growth hormone and the rest of its band are still high as all fuck. I feel fine, it's the numbers that are bumming me out.

Done. Thanks!

I wrote it a while ago as sort of a cross between commentary on lazy poems and to boost my own levels of pretentiousness. :P

  Some prose that's
    roundabout,
  with a line
  break
    or
      two,
          your 'tab' key
          abused here
      or	<- there
        and
      crawling
  with s p a c e s
    at random
      p l a c e s,
    is not what

            TRANSFORMS
      it
        into
      the
    Poetry.

- E.E. Devac

Let me guess: too tongue-in-cheek?

Scipy lectures are a solid place to start, just as Think Like a Computer Scientist which is also worth recommending. Both are free and feature a Python tutorial. Same goes for Dive Into Python. After that, I can point you to Pandas (Python for Data Science framework) to get yourself going. They have some solid tutorials in their documentation section.