modeled

How do we begin to describe Regina George in Mean Girls? Played by Rachel McAdams in one of her best movies, Regina George is the Queen Bee of North Shore High who fights sneaky, steals your crush, and makes sure to come out on top in everything. A real “fetch” fact about how the leader of The Plastics pulled off her meanest “moves” actually comes from the mother of the film’s actress and scriptwriter, Tina Fey.Mean Girls is not only a movie that teachers can relate to on some level about how teenage girls think, but a…

A love letter to your thumbs 8BitDo, the purveyor of fine third-party controllers, has revealed the design for their next controller. This one is more than just a slight nod to the Neo Geo CD’s legendary mash-up between arcade stick and joypad. By “more than just a slight nod,” I mean it’s pretty much exact. In fact, the company themselves say it is “a perfect recreation of the original SNK NEOGEO controller.” That’s sort of inaccurate since they added shoulder and extra function buttons, but I think they’re referring…

Human Swarm experiment: (a) Groups of 10 to 20 participants were asked to walk around a large hall, turning left and right while staying together as a group. Their head positions were recorded with 16 motion-capture cameras (b) Head trajectories were reconstructed using a computer program. The visual model predicted the trajectories of individual participants, using the visible motions of their neighbors as input. Credit: William Warren…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain What is the common thread among mRNA vaccines, genomic drugs, NASA's mission to the moon and the harnessing of nuclear power? They all have been products of science convergence, where knowledge from multiple scientific disciplines is integrated into new overarching knowledge that propels modern civilization. In the last 70 years, convergence has achieved more than what science achieved in all its…

Yesterday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis announced that the US economy contracted by 1.4 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the first quarterly drop in GDP since the pandemic hit in 2020. That’s an alarming-seeming but ultimately misleading number; most of it is accounted for by changes in international trade (imports, which reduce GDP numbers, rose as businesses knew war in Ukraine was coming) and the shrinking of inventories held by businesses as consumers bought them up. “Final sales to domestic purchasers,”…