Da5id Weatherwax

Aye, Amina, it is a worry. I hate the scum-sucking animated bad hair days on both sides of the pond but while I hope he's miserable as hell with it I also hope he recovers and doesn't pass it on to anyone.

Well damn... I lost my bet with my brother over whether Boris or Donald would catch it first....

ooh! A round of "coronavirus chopped".... I'd be reaching for the soy, ginger and rice vinegar to turn the jam into a fruity/spicy/salty glaze for the sausages which could be served over the cabbage which has been shredded, lightly steamed and then finished by tossing in butter with coriander and pepper

*takes notes and adds it to his ongoing project to build a cycles node-chain that blender will render "as close as possible to how it looks in SL with the same inputs"

Absolutely yes. There are "real friends" in SL who I knew from before IRL, those I didn't but do now, those who I've never met IRL but might one day, also those who I know I probably never will. They are all "real"

Thank you, @OptimoMaximo - that's a much more complete description and you accurately call out the need for a SL texture to degrade gracefully into minimal graphics settings which (in the low preset) default to disabling deferred rendering and materials are not applied, only the diffuse texture is used. It's worth mentioning that the environment maps and glossiness maps in the alpha channels are multiplied by the overall glossiness and environment values set for that face - a 100% value in the normal maps alpha channel will not give you 100% glossiness, it will give you the full value of that glossiness parameter. Similar for the environment amount and the specular maps alpha channel. The principle of non-metals always having a greyscale specular map is sound, but with the particular quirks (or bugs, perhaps) of SL shaders I've found that a minimal amount of color there seems to give (visually) better results, even though it's technically "wrong" There is a further quirk to using those alpha channels to convey additional maps. The usable range for those maps is 1-255 not 0-255. Whether it's in the programs used to manipulate the images before upload or in the uploader itself, the two conspire to almost always optimize out the color data in a pixel that has 0 alpha, assuming it to either be black or white depending on who coded it. There are settings in most graphics progs that say "retain color data in transparent pixels" but their reliability is questionable at best and the uploader will get you if the graphics prog doesn't.

Aww, lassie, yer making me blush here. While I do have a baritone voice my accent, such as it is after being corrupted by nearly 2 decades in the MidWest, is anything but posh. <shameless plug>If you want to hear it, come to one of my shows. Unless I actually catch the thing myself and it wrecks my voice, those will be taking place as listed in my gcal schedule </shameless plug> Those years in the USA did result in me being aware of the effect a british voice has on American ladies, but I never used it to unfair advantage apart from one time late at night in the middle of WI to persuade a lady state trooper to not give me a speeding ticket on a totally empty interstate....

Aye, @Marigold Devin The view from Morningside, up here in Auld Reekie isn't so bad either. There are zero delivery slots from any place but my daily (well, used to be daily but I've cut it down to every two or three days) 2-3 miles exercise takes me past Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsburys and I can time it to their delivery and restock times if I'm careful. I can also, since I live an almost monastic lifestyle and can pretty much guarantee I haven't been exposed to the bug, make grocery runs for others in the tenement I live in or for my brother and sister-in-law down the road. They both work at the uni here and while my brother is an IT and research guy, so most of the campus never knows he even exists let alone meets him, sister-in-law has a job that involves meeting students, faculty and the public... So when she developed a cough and fever a week ago the both of them closed up the house and hung out the plague flag. I'm a little more concerned for my mother who lives in a village on the edge of the Lake District where the local population is significantly older than the national average. She's well over 80, there are no shops in the village at all and - of course - no delivery slots available there either. Fortunately the local pub is also a fairly well-reputed restaurant in the area and while they are closed to diners they have made their catering supply channel available to the village - they take orders from the village, place the order with their restaurant suppliers and hand 'em out the following day at cost plus a few quid per order. For stuff like milk and eggs there's local farms.

/me grins and admits to sometimes referring to a discussion thread as needing surgery from a proktologist

I mean something exactly like that, @ChinRey although given the shading around the ridges I'd personally be tempted to decontrast the specular a bit too, to reduce that shadings depth in the map - even parts of something that are darkened by ambient occlusion will still reflect when direct light hits them. If I were playing with it from that starting point I would suspect - although I'm far from certain, it's always a bit of trial and error with local textures for me - that where I'd end up would be with a specular map very similar to the above, almost certainly reduced in contrast and maybe desaturated and lightened even further, possibly a really minimal bit of blurring... A specular map that's "too high" can always be fine tuned by toning it down with a neutral grey tint but if the map isn't high enough there's no post-upload manipulation you can do to add to it. You would end up using a glossiness value very low in the range and an environment number even lower, to simulate the marginally reflective but heavily corroded surface but neither would (quite) be zero. Now if you were simulating a clearcoat over that corroded surface I'd go a lot further in lightening and decontrasting it, making it really close to white but not quite so close you cant see the green/grey in it at all and a much higher glossiness

After my last comment, I should point out that there is incredible beauty to be found in Russian too. As a great example, the best recording ever of one of Sergei Rachmaninov's greatest works, the all night vigil, often titled the vespers in western editions... If you have or can make an hour to spare for one of the most beautiful unaccompanied choral pieces ever written, the time when you are stressing over all the crap going on outside your door (or even inside it) is probably the best occasion on which to find that hour.

Heck, you can recite a recipe for borscht and sound like you're invoking demons

*sigh* Yeah, @Qie Niangao - folks can't get it through their heads that "don't know" really does mean "don't know", that lack of data doesn't imply a negative conclusion, it implies no conclusion is possible at all. Folks who have never worked with statistics have never been exposed to the idea of "the null hypothesis", that you find something effective by finding actual evidence disproving the null hypothesis that "X has no benefit as a treatment for Y", which - certainly in medical situations where primum non nocere applies - is the default assumption.

Even in a PBR system, putting a too-bright diffuse color on shiny metals is perhaps THE most common mistake. The actual base colors - IRL even! - are much darker than anyone realizes. Grind silver and iron to a fine powder (thus eliminating even the smallest specularity from either) and they are both a mid-to-dark grey, with the silver only a fraction of a shade lighter. In RL, the iron will darken to almost black in minutes because it promptly oxidizes in the air, which the "noble metals" don't, but that initial grey is its true base color. Regarding "shinyness" in SLs rendering, you will get a much better result for a "highly shiny" surface using a specular map tinted to the same hue value as the diffuse but with a much higher luminance (and the implied lower saturation, even if the S parameter in the HSV color remains at 100%) - you can do that with a tinted blank texture rather than setting a "shiny" level if it applies to the whole face. The low/med/high shiny levels really should be avoided like the plague, because as animats pointed out they are additive, unlike mapped specularity which is multiplicative. They are also an exceptionally poor specularity algorithm with no ability to tint or tone down the reflected light, and most shiny surfaces actually should do both if they are to look right. Just use a blank white specularity map and play with the glossiness factor rather than using these if all you genuinely want IS plain white reflection highlights. (ETA: I bet, though, in practice you'll end up tinting the plain white specularity down a hair - even for a polished "white metal")

No matter how good you are, no matter what style you spin or perform, your baseline audience in SL is relatively tiny - even for the "bigger names" - Stop sweating it, stop caring if you're playing to an empty venue or not. Just put on a good show, one that you'd like to be at, and have fun doing it. It only takes one or two people really liking your sets for the word to start spreading. Even then don;t expect every set to be packed - but overall it will ramp up, because the corollary to my first statement is also true - whatever you play, however you play it, there is somebody out there that likes it as much as you do and you will be the artist they've been looking for their entire second life....

I know more than one brilliant research scientist who finds their work deepening their faith as they see more and more of the hidden beauty of their creator's work.... Faith (ANY faith) and science are not incompatible, unless you try to dip a brush into one of them and paint over the other. That new color never sticks....

Fairre, this person is endangering you, is making credible threats of committing a serious offense against you. Trust me on this, there is not a cop on any police force in the world who would not much rather you called now and let them sort the situation rather than them turning up on the blue lights after it escalates. At this point you do actually need their help, and they need to know about the situation. Every single emergency responder will tell you the same thing. I volunteered for my local RNLI station many years ago and there is one thing you never forget, it's that look you share, without saying a word, where the whole crew has that nasty cold feeling that "we might have been called too late on this one... " I saw the same look from time to time in the eyes of the cops and paramedics who were my martial arts students when I lived in the US too. Like them, I didn't say a word either, but I damn well knew that look. People often think "I'll get through this" or "I can handle this" or "This isn't serious enough to bother them with." All too often they are wrong. Please don't be one of those people. There is not an emergency responder on this planet who would not rather get 10 shouts where they weren't really needed than one where the "bad stuff" has already happened.

They are your freakin' family, we're your "freaky family" One or the other will always be there for ya

Under NO circumstances am I advocating refusing medical advice or suggesting anyone does not listen to their doctor with an open mind if they suggest an alternative therapy for a condition that is proving intractable. The medics attending you, personally, are the most knowledgeable professionals when it comes to how your body, your physiology, your genetics, react to a particular treatment for a particular condition. We put our faith in their clinical judgement because of their training and experience for good reason. And it's exactly the same reason why the fact that there's a questionable "study" out there should not sway opinion no matter how widely it's "reported." A junk study is still a junk study no matter how strongly it is seized upon by folks who think its bogus "conclusions" support their aims or ideology. The damage done by ex-doctor Wakefield springs strongly to mind at this point....

Of course it's not going to stop it, @FairreLilette - I'm not trying to "stop it"... I do have a grossly overestimated idea of my own significance in the world, of course, just like everybody else, but I promise you I'm not daft enough to think I'm capable of that. I do know how to read a scientific paper critically, though, thanks to the years I spent as a molecular biologist and this particular area is right in my wheelhouse since I spent those years studying the molecular biology of viruses. That makes it sorta incumbent on me, morally speaking, to take note of when something as daft as this is being cited in that "media hype" we both disdain, and get accurate info out there if/when it crops up in places I usually frequent - like here, for example. That much, I can do and should.

"The articles" that do not appear in peer-reviewed reputable scientific journals will make an excellent substitute for the bog roll idiots have swept off the supermarket shelves. This would apply to almost all the "media hype" you mention. Almost none of it is credibly sourced.

You have everything you need to start a sourdough culture. There's wild yeast in abundance all over your house, you just need to give it - and the equally-ubiquitous lactobacillus that makes the other half of the deal - a place to live. Ideally you will be using the same flour for this as you will for baking your eventual bread. You start with 100g flour, 100g (room-temp or slightly warm) water, for a 100% hydration mix. Stir the flour into the water, stick it in a clean jar, cover it in a cloth and leave it on a shelf in a place that's out of direct sunlight and won't get too hot or cold. Over the next few days, daily mix up another 50g flour and 50g water and stir it into the jar's contents. Within 2-3 days you'll see bubbles forming and it will start smelling yeasty. Once it's at that stage, its "daily feed" becomes combining (in a fresh jar) stirred-up mix, flour and water in a 2:1:1 ratio by weight, steadily working up until you have about 600g in total of active culture, still at 100% hydration. Baking day! Work out your percentages for the final dough hydration knowing that your culture is 100% hydrated. My everyday sourdough is a 66% hydration dough so for a couple of kilos of dough, enough for two really good-sized rustic loaves I use 1005g flour, 400g of starter and 595g of water. 5-10g of salt according to your preference. It will be a slower rise than commercial yeast but you can judge it well enough by eye and feel as it proves. This leaves 200g of starter in the jar. Combine this in a fresh jar with another 100g each of flour and water. Leave it overnight and then stick it in your fridge (remember that whatever you use to close the jar it can;t be airtight - personally I use a couple of thicknesses of foil and a rubber band). It will go dormant and will keep perfectly happily for up to a couple of weeks without feeding. For longer periods you will need to refresh and feed it or do other stuff that lets it keep longer. When you next want to bake, take it out of the fridge first thing on the day before. Let it warm up to room temp and feed it with 100g flour and 100g water (yes, you're back to 600g total again) The following day it should have picked up activity again and you can use another 400g of it for another 2 kilos of bread, leaving 200g to refeed, store and refresh just like last time.

More on that stupid anecdote about an antimalarial drug coupled with an antibiotic. I've now read the paper (it's pre-publication and has not yet passed peer-review) and with the greatest respect to the scientists making the study, it's garbage. The paper reports on a population of 36 people, of which 20 were experimental cases and 16 control. N=36 is WAY too small to draw any conclusions at all, but there are other problems with the "study" that render it worse than meaningless. Mean age of the two groups (experimental and control) was 51 and 37 respectively. This critical covariate was not adequately controlled for. The small size of the "study" is made even more questionable when you discover that the experimental group was originally 26 people, not 20 but 6 were excluded from the study. This is always a warning flag, because the one thing you can't do in studies like this is snag a bunch of people whose outcomes don't fit your theory and say "oh, but they don't count" - your reasons for excluding somebody after the start of the study must be absolutely ironclad.... So, what were they? One person said "Sod this, I'm out" and bailed. This is a valid reason to exclude them. One had a strong allergic reaction to the antimalarial drug being used. This is a known issue with this drug, that it can cause severe allergic reactions (among other side effects, some of which are themselves life-threatening). In a larger study one would scrutinize the numbers and make sure that the incidence of severe side effects was no greater in the experimental population than the known data for an otherwise healthy population. The low numbers in this study do not permit this so they had to be excluded. Marginally dodgy but still valid. But then we get to the other four. Three exited the study due to being admitted to the ICU and one died. These are outcomes that should feature in the study and which - if they had not been improperly excluded - would have resulted in the numbers indicating that treatment with this particular drug combo has no effect on the outcome of a COVID-19 infection at all and that there was no valid or ethical reason to continue investigating this as a possible treatment regimen. Excluding these four is the only reason that the paper is able to claim a wider study was justified and that claim will not stand up to either peer review or the editorial review of a reputable journal

When "moving" - ie grabbing and dragging - vertices around, nothing happens to the UV. But, if you are sliding edges or vertices blender can change the UV as you do it - it's the 'correct UV" tool option for edge and vertex sliding and is enabled by default in blender 2.8x. by judicious use of "snap to vertex" and sliding the edge verts on one part to match the other, so that they can be merged they should also slide that vertexes UV position an equivalent (proportionally speaking) distance along the appropriate edge. So, to merge a couple of edge verts on different parts, like that hood seam for example, a user was to slide the vert on one part to the intersection of the edges, then turn "snap to vertex" and slide the other vertex along its edge to meet and and snap to it, they should then be close enough that a "merge at center" or "merge by distance" to join them will not distort things and they would have their mutual positions correct on the UV map too As a side note, something that blender does not have and which I know I'm not the only person has missed... it can't do "edge slides" or "vertex slides" while editing the UV - sliding along edges can only be done while editing the geometry.

All good points. I have to admit I talk "one song into the next" because as a folk artist almost all the songs have history and traditions buried in them, I like to tell some of those stories or provide a link from song to song.. Lines like "...since we've touched on the subject let's be up-front and admit that in folk we sing a lot about death. Mostly in two ways, either dour and gloomy or upbeat and often almost dance tunes. Since I have two songs that show these two extremes and they happen to be in the same key I like playing them back to back..." (real example - used in last weeks set list to lead in from a ballad telling of a tragic accident to "Twa Corbies" & "Shaking of the Sheets") I would hope that there's a distinction between a mostly traditional repertoire and "nothing but covers" or I'm totally SOL. I write originals slowly and at infrequent intervals and not all of them ever make the cut to feature in performances. But is a traditional song that's been performed by hundreds of artists over several generations, each putting their own twist on it while it remains recognizable, still a "cover"? Reverb is a touchy one. Completely "dry", a live set streamed out of a room you've gone to some pains to make as "acoustically dead" as possible is, quite frankly, going to sound like crap, particularly an acoustic set. But that doesn't mean you need audible repeating echo either. A little chamber or hall reverb is great and almost needed to give the effect of being in the venue but it really needs to be minimal and should never stray over into becoming a "delay" or "echo" effect. Personally I put a really minimal level of small-hall reverb on the vocal track and a tiny bit more on the guitar channel - that's it. If you sound like you're in a medium sized hall you're probably ok but the moment you are echoing like you're down in a cave somewhere, back it off and step away from the fx controls....