Kubrick posters by Tomer Hanuka

I'm a huge fan of Tomer Hanuka's art, and several of his prints hang in my apartment. The ones that don't are the ones that sold out before I could get my hands on one of them, much to my grief.

He's working on a series of posters for Kubrick's movies, four of which are done already.

The Divine, a graphic novel by Boaz Lavie with art by Tomer and his brother Asaf, ships next week. Looks great.

Hanuka also created one of my favorite New Yorker covers, the Valentine's Day cover in 2014, titled Perfect Storm.

Disrupting reality

Most television viewers don't realize just how much of what they watch contains a lot of visual FX, or “virtual reality” if you will. Check out this reel from Stargate Studios.

Sometimes, the only thing that's “real” is the main actor. Increased computing power and advances in visual effects software and techniques mean we're only going to see more and more productions turn to the trusty green screen. More and more, the cost of shooting against a green screen and drawing in a background is lower than shooting on location. That's a sea change that has happened more quickly than most viewers realize.

It's not a short step, but perhaps not more than a few vigorous hops and a few cranks of Moore's Law to imagine the same convenience tradeoff happening in our own lives, the swap of physical reality for virtual reality. As long as the quality is good enough, the lower cost/higher convenience solution wins out. For virtual reality, that bar is not to match reality exactly. It is simply belief.

We're finally at the point in history when we have an alternative to the shadow costs of the real world.

Reality is bloated.
 
It started off as a lean, mean MVP with a minimal feature set — hunting and gathering, procreating, a little story-telling around the fire, fighting for dear life — but now every last use case has been crammed in. There are so many layers of cruft on this thing, it’s a wonder we get anything done at all.
 
This is one of the ultimate drivers of consumer VR — not (just) to provide experiences we couldn’t have otherwise, but to replace many of the crappy physical experiences we slog through every day. Business travel. Middle school. Conferences. You know: pain relievers, not vitamins.
 
There’s been no choice until now, since we’ve been living in a platform monoculture where the monopoly provider hasn’t had any competition to keep it honest. Thankfully, that’s about to change.
 

That's Beau Cronin on unbundling reality. It's perhaps one of the greatest disruptions we'll live through this century.

Why are apes skinny and humans fat?

Scientists studied dead humans and bonobos in an effort to understand why humans became the fat primate. What happened when chimps and humans diverged? It's not clear, but the results thousands of years later are.

...humans got fat. Chimps and bonobos are 13 percent skin, and we're only 6 percent skin, but we compensate for that by being up to 36 percent body fat on the high end of average, while bonobos average 4 percent. That's a wildly disproportional fatness differential.
 

From an interview of one of the authors of the paper.

So what happened on the path from common ancestor to Homo sapiens?
One of the things is, you've gotta shift the body around and change the muscle from the forelimbs if you're a quadrupedal ape. Our ancestors—and most apes—can venture into open areas, but they live in forests. They're really tied to having tree cover available, because they get hot.
 
So we developed fat so we could get away from forests?
Compared to the apes, we have less muscle, which is an energy savings, because it's such an expensive tissue. Two important things about the way we store fat: We store it around our buttocks and thighs, but you want to make sure that you're storing fat so it doesn't interfere with locomotion. You don't want it on your feet, for instance. So you concentrate it around the center of gravity. And you also don't want it to interfere with being able to get rid of heat.
 
What was the benefit of having fat down low and weak arms?
If you're moving away from the forest and tree cover, you want to be able to exploit food in a more mosaic habitat that has areas of bush and a few forests around rivers. You want to be able to move into a lot of different areas. So you've gotta get rid of your hair, and really ramp up those sweat glands. Our skin has really been reorganized for a lot of different functions.
 
Do chimps and bonobos not have sweat glands? 
They have sweat glands. They're not really functioning. All primates have eccrine sweat glands in their hands and feet. Monkeys have them on their chests. [But] they're not stimulated by heat.

Prime Day

More than 90 years ago, holiday shopping found its official start the Friday after Thanksgiving, eventually becoming Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Over the years, Amazon has helped make Black Friday even more of a global online shopping phenomenon. Next week, Amazon turns 20 and on the eve of its birthday, the company introduces Prime Day, a global shopping event, offering more deals than Black Friday, exclusively for Prime members in the U.S., U.K., Spain, Japan, Italy, Germany, France, Canada and Austria. On Wednesday, July 15, new and existing members in the U.S. will find deals starting at midnight, with new deals starting as often as every ten minutes. They can shop thousands of Lightning Deals, seven popular Deals of the Day and receive unlimited fast, free shipping. Not a Prime member? To participate in Prime Day, Amazon customers can sign up for a 30-day free trial of Prime at amazon.com/primeday.
 

Amazon is creating its own shopping holiday. Economists and retailers have long debated what would happen if there were two Christmases a year instead of one. Would that just move consumer spending around or would it increase the share of the pie? Amazon doesn't have to worry about that here because they're just focused on their own revenue, and if this shifts retail spending share to them, all is good.

It can be dangerous for a retailer to become dependent on sales, but Amazon is a special case. Restoration Hardware has a twice a year sale on its towels, also on its lighting. Customers feel a bit silly buying those items from them any other time of year. Criterion DVDs go on sale at 50% off from time to time. To buy one at any lower discount feels like you're leaving money on the table.

Amazon has such a large catalog of items, and the items it puts on sale are so random, that it's immune to creating artificial seasonality with its sales. Its customers buy from them so often that it's not practical to wait until items go on sale to shop there.

Besides, the core of Amazon's value is everyday low pricing, so most customers feel like they're getting a great deal on most everything purchased there anyhow. A bunch of random deals on Prime Day are just gravy. And if this goes off well and becomes an annual occurrence, it may drive more people to join Amazon Prime, even better for Amazon because of the loyal customers Prime memberships create and the increase in shopping volume and frequency from that cohort.