Daily Archives: 8/11/2005

A’s Lead the AL West

Athletics lead the AL WestFor the second day in a row, the A’s pull out a come from behind victory over their rivals in the AL West, the Somewhere Angels from Some Other Place. The A’s trailed 0-4 going into the bottom of the 7th, but scored four times to tie the game. Then, in the bottom of the ninth with Kendell on third, Crosby on second, and two outs, Anaheim reliever Francisco Rodriguez was getting a toss back from the catcher, but it ticked off his glove and rolled behind him. Kendell was alert, and bolted for home, and scored on a slide ahead of the throw of the recovered ball. The box score reads:

J. Kendall scored on fielder’s indifference, B. Crosby to second on F. Rodriguez’s fielding error

The A’s lead their division for the first time this year.

Rockin’.

Best of Show from Renderman Users Group Meeting

Each year Pixar tosses a Renderman User’s Group meeting at SIGGRAPH. In the past few years, we’ve invited some of our users to present some of their techniques to a wide audience in a portion of the program we call Stupid RAT (Renderman Artist Tricks). Each year, there seems to be at least one presentation that really captures your attention, and this year the award goes to Hal Bertram and The Interaction Trick.

The trick was actually pretty simple: to use the raytracing capabilities of Renderman (essentially a batch process) in an interactive viewer. It’s brilliant really. Try watching the videos and reading the notes. We are all very impressed.

The Tears of Saint Lawrence

This weekend marks the annual return of the Tears of Saint Lawrence: better known to those of us in the amateur astronomy community as the Perseid Meteor shower. If you haven’t trekked out somewhere dark recently to gaze at the annual shower, try reading Sky and Telescope magazine’s coverage.

The sky will be moonless, so the view should be pretty good. Rates often hit one a minute. I’ve seen some amazing fireballs in the predawn hours of this shower, so get out and have a peek at one of the cool sights available from our small terrestrial vantage point.