Media
Given a satellite image, machine learning creates the view on the ground
Leonardo da Vinci famously created drawings and paintings that showed a bird's eye view of certain areas of Italy with a level of detail that was not otherwise possible until the invention of photography and flying machines. Indeed, many critics have wondered how he could have imagined these details. But now researchers are working on the inverse problem: given a satellite image of Earth's surface, what does that area look like from the ground? How clear can such an artificial image be? Today we get an answer thanks to the work of Xueqing Deng and colleagues at the University of California, Merced.
Sci-Fi Invades Netflix--as They Both Invade Your Home
Has Netflix's sizeable investment in original science-fiction movies been a bust? By one popular metric, Rotten Tomatoes, the answer would seem to be: Categorically. Since 2017's Okja, a feisty ecological fairy tale by Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, Netflix has put out seven back-to-back stinkers, their average "freshness" score rounding up to 30 percent. Only one of the seven can be called unwatchable: Duncan Jones' Mute, an overlong and sexually confused nightclub noir that trips over itself to imagine a neon-colored vision of future Berlin peopled by the likes of a mustachioed Paul Rudd. This is terribly sad, considering the director's first two films, Moon and Source Code, were the exact opposite--careful, contained stories that played out in modest settings.