New Florence. New Renaissance.

MI Fallout : Impossible stunts

My wife is often the last person out of a movie theater. She likes to watch all the credits – where the movie was made, who played what roles, often post-credit scenes.

She came out of Mission Impossible 6 and said I think there were more credits with accounting titles than stuntmen. I said “no way” but then I realized Tom Cruise does his own stunts.

But wait – he broke his ankle during this movie’s making. Turns out doctors thought his ankle would take 9 months to heal. Not with the 55 year old Cruise “I went right into rehab. About 10 hours a day, 12 hours, seven days a week because six weeks later I had to be on set and twelve weeks later I had to be sprinting again”

There is only the water supply of the third of the world’s population at stake, and nothing will stop Ethan Hunt. So watch the movie while going ouch with every stride he takes – much of the filming was done after the ankle injury.

And the stunts would be jaw dropping even for a much younger, fully functioning human.

There is the skydiving scene at 25,000 feet  “It took Cruise 106 jumps to get the three takes they wanted, and a skydiver with a camera on his head, falling backward out of the plane so he could film Cruise. The trick for the cameraman was keeping the camera level with Cruise’s face because he shot it “with only a sense of instinct,” said McQuarrie. “The only place we could do this was the United Arab Emirates,” said Cruise about the legality of the stunt.”

There is the motorcycle chase with Cruise on a BMW RnineT going at one point against the flow in the normally crazy roundabout at the Arc De Triomphe in Paris

There is the bathroom brawl which is actually as funny as it is gory

There is the helicopter scene “Though it’s all seamless on screen, that chase and the film’s final cliff-side slugfest were shot in three separate countries under extreme conditions including subfreezing temperatures and an injured leading man.”

Actually, the only low-impact scene in the movie must be the one where Ethan is given his assignment. It is on an old-fashioned tape recorder hidden inside an edition of Homer's Odyssey

Not your daily commute

My wife and I flew commercial and got on a cruise ship last week. Been there, done that a few times.

But the side trips in Alaska opened our eyes to forms of commute most of us rarely experience.

To me a float plane was a curiosity – a throwback to Indiana Jones. They are actually a handy way to get around the rugged terrain in Alaska. We took a short flight on Ellison Air, in its 6 seater, Cessna U206G Stationair and experienced the convenience. Indeed, Lake Hood next to Anchorage’s international airport is the busiest seaplane port in the world with up to 600 takeoffs and landings every summer day. Throughout the cruise, we were getting buzzed by float planes.

We did a whale watching, "citizen science" trip on a “safari vessel” from Gastineau Guiding in Juneau. I was struck by the perimeter seating, the large opening panel windows, the padded armrests, exterior decks, handrails, restroom and other features on the 43 foot, aluminum hull Sounder. There were 17 guests, and 2 crew on the boat for about 3 hours, and you could easily plan a day-long offsite on a vessel like that.

I have not taken a bus for longer than an hour since my college days. So, I was not sure about a 4 hour ride (including immigration at the border) from the Port of Vancouver to Sea-Tac airport. The Prevost (part of the Volvo Group) H3-45 coach is a very comfortable ride. Floor to ceiling height of 6 1/2 feet, cargo capacity of nearly 500 cubic feet, flush-mounted, frameless windows all added to the experience. We sat in the first row with lots of leg space, panoramic views and continuous conversation with the Traxx Coachlines driver. 

I could get used to those means of commute every day!

Apple Pay progress

First introduced in October 2014, Apple Pay has become one of the leading digital payment services for U.S. consumers, but it doesn’t yet dominate the global market. Chinese competitors WeChat Pay and Alipay have a combined 1 billion users, followed by PayPal with 210 million users and Apple with 87 million, as of August 2017. Apple is aggressively working to close that gap using a number of different tactics, and it’s working—kind of.

To start, Apple has worked on expanding its base by improving its compatibility with local financial institutions and credit cards so that the service is available to more iOS users. Every few weeks, Apple has extended Apple Pay to new banks and credit unions, and now more than 2,700 institutions support the service. It’s also been expanding to new countries, most recently Norway and Poland. And it has expanded beyond retail purchases to peer-to-peer payments, largely the domain of Venmo. Apple introduced Apple Pay Cash in December. To facilitate adoption, Apple Pay Cash is built directly into the Messages app, making it a more convenient, built-in payment option for iOS users to turn to when haggling bill details via text with friends.

Slate

 

Roku speakers

The speakers are perhaps more Apple (AAPL) HomePod than Amazon Echo: In the announcement, Roku positioned them as high-powered audio devices rater than robot friends, saying they’re “meticulously engineered and calibrated to deliver powerful, premium” sound.

But they do come with a voice remote (as well as a tabletop one) that may help Roku device users get accustomed to conversations with their technology—and since Roku TVs come with audio apps, they might also induce users to keep them on, playing music as well as video programming. (The speakers are also Bluetooth-enabled.)

Barrons

 

Disney “Stuntronics”

Have you heard of Stickman? It’s a 7-foot-tall swinging robot performer who weighs just around 40 pounds, can execute backflips, and then decide on his own when to untuck and land flat on its back.

First revealed in May, Stickman was an early version of a fearless robotic performer, while the newest artificial acrobatic figure that Disney has shown off is in a category they call “Stuntronics.” They’re building flying machines like these for a couple reasons. First, these robots can achieve feats that would be too difficult or dangerous for a human to do.

Popular Science

 

Pokémon Go-lf

Courtesy of Frank Scavo, I saw this at SportTechie 

Golf Scope’s higher-tech solution is an iOS app that uses your phone’s camera to read the exact topography of a green. First you scan your phone around until the app finds your ball, then you walk to the hole, keeping the camera pointed at the ground you’re passing over. Once Golf Scope has that data, it generates a trajectory for the optimum putt, and overlays that on your phone’s view of the real green along with tips on where to aim and how hard to hit the ball. Forget Pokémon Go, think Pokémon Golf.

But despite the power that technology like Golf Scope seems to offer to lower scores, there is a snag to adoption in the pro game. Any types of artificial device or unusual equipment that measures anything on a course and might affect play is prohibited.

 

Instant pay apps take off

You know a platform or tech is successful when it becomes a verb. A payments app owned by PayPal joined the ranks of Google and FedEx(at least in verbal usage) a few years ago when millennials began "Venmo-ing" each other to settle bar tabs.

Mobile peer-to-peer payments now include Square, Apple Pay Cash and Google Pay, among others. Less than a year ago, Zelle entered the space and quickly became a huge player.

One reason for its success: Zelle is not a standalone app, like Venmo. Instead, it integrates with a user’s existing banking app.

CNBC

 

The Digital Factory

The contours of the digital factory are still evolving as technology advances, but in today’s nascent reckoning, it looks something like Fujitsu’s plant in Augsburg, Germany. At this site, an all-encompassing information technology backbone controls a supply “supermarket” where components for Fujitsu’s computers and other hardware products are stored. As customer orders are received, parts are picked for assembly by robots, loaded onto self-driving electric vehicles — which make up what’s known as the logistics train — and carried out to production stations using just-in-time and just-in-sequence processes. The specifications of each assembled product may differ and dynamic screens show workers precisely which components belong to each order and display detailed work instructions. Changes to product features can be made on the fly throughout the assembly process by on-site design and engineering teams, whose members are also available to respond to late shifts in customer requirements. Downtime is minimized because predictive maintenance procedures, based on historical and real-time data for each piece of equipment, automatically address incipient problems before a breakdown. The entire production process is paperless, the factory leaves virtually no carbon footprint, and the daily output of 12,000 PCs, laptops, and workstations and more than 1,000 servers ranks Fujitsu’s Augsburg plant among the most productive and cost-effective in the world.

Strategy+Business

 

Autonomous grocery delivery

Nuro, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on local deliveries, has partnered with 135-year-old grocery retailer Kroger to offer same-day deliveries. The two have yet to announce which market this will be live in, but the plan is to launch the several-month-long pilot this fall.

Nuro’s intent is to use its self-driving technology in the last mile for the delivery of local goods and services. That could be things like groceries, dry cleaning, an item you left at a friend’s house or really anything within city limits that can fit inside one of Nuro’s vehicles. Nuro has two compartments that can fit up to six grocery bags each.

TechCrunch

 

 

NASA and catastrophic asteroids

NASA has released a new report via the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) on its plans to build its asteroid detection and deflection technology over the next 10 years. 

Included in the plan are three concepts that could be deployed if an object like this were headed for the Earth. These include:

• Launching a large enough spacecraft to affect the object by gravitational pull
• A "kinetic impactor" that would basically crash a spacecraft into the object to veer it off its trajectory
• Deploying a nuclear weapon to either break an object up and/or deflect it off a course to impact Earth

Big Think