Mathew Tizard

We won a Webby Award for our Changdeok ARirang project! A collaboration between Google PI, Nexus Studios and SKT. nexusstudios.com/insight/we-won… #webbys @thewebbyawards @nexusstories @sktelecom @GoogleARCore @BuiltwithARCore #arcore @GoogleARVR @joshto

Alright friends, my new video is up! It’s a synth wave fueled tale of The Connection Machine – the 80’s AI supercomputer that saw thirty years into the future. This one was so much work 🤯 Go watch, subscribe, share! youtube.com/watch?v=GaNuVR…

The Ring (Montreal) — Dormant Memories series New alternate scene, and an iteration on the UX and flow. Starting from a volumetric capture of a real location in Montreal, reconstructed as 3D Gaussian Splats, I then used @theworldlabs' Marble to generate alternate versions of that same space. Running in real time using @sparkjsdev. #GaussianSplatting #3DGS #pointcloud #sparkjs #threejs

This video was a complete joy to make. Here's a short preview, but next time you're looking to sit down for 45 minutes of math and art, take a look at the full version on YouTube.

@TSoS_ Yes this is a pity. The Mentats and the Spacing Guild deserve more time.

One of the few things I'm still slightly bitter about in Villeneuve's Dune is how little of a space the mentats occupy. Thufir is barely in Part One & completely absent from Part Two. I get compromises had to be made, but I LOVE the mentats and wish we had seen more of them.

@RenaudFoucart @MLStreetTalk She was my favourite professor when doing my MSc at Sussex, and was as lovely as a person as she was fierce as an intellectual and academic.

New rule: if your insightful comment on AI was already in this super cool 1977 paper about "AI is becoming so powerful it will change the world as we know it," you lose. (1/10)

Former astronaut Ron Garan returned from space convinced that humanity is “living an enormous lie.” During his 178-day mission aboard the International Space Station in 2011—spending nearly six months in orbit and covering over 71 million miles—Garan experienced the transformative “Overview Effect.” From 250 miles above Earth, the planet appeared as a single, delicate blue marble suspended in the void, with no visible borders, nations, or divisions. Political lines vanished; instead, he saw a fragile, interconnected biosphere wrapped in an astonishingly thin atmosphere—the sole protective layer sustaining all life against the deadly vacuum of space. This perspective shattered his prior worldview. He observed an iridescent, teeming world of life but no trace of the global economy that humans prioritize. Garan realized the “enormous lie” we perpetuate: the illusion that we are separate from one another, from nature, and from the planet itself. Our systems treat the Earth’s life-support mechanisms—air, water, ecosystems—as mere subsidiaries of the economy, when the orbital view reveals the opposite truth: the planet comes first, then society, then economy. In his words, this realization highlighted how crises like climate change, deforestation, and biodiversity loss stem from this fundamental misperception of separation. Garan argues that embracing this unified, fragile reality—seeing ourselves as crew members on “Spaceship Earth”—is essential for collective survival and effective global stewardship. The view from space didn’t just change his outlook; it underscored an urgent call for humanity to realign priorities with the undeniable interconnectedness of our shared home.

The Election Decided by a Dying Star. In 2003, a small local election in Schaerbeek, Belgium, was thrown into total chaos. A relatively obscure candidate named Maria Vindevoghel suddenly received an impossible surge of support at the polls. Officials quickly realized something was mathematically broken. Vindevoghel had somehow secured exactly 4,096 more votes than there were actual registered voters in her entire precinct. Investigators immediately assumed it was a sophisticated cyberattack or rampant voter fraud. But when computer scientists painstakingly analyzed the voting machine's internal memory, they found the culprit wasn't human at all. A single, high-energy cosmic ray, likely born from an exploding star deep in the universe, had struck the machine's microchip at the exact wrong microsecond. This microscopic impact flipped a single binary bit from a zero to a one. Because binary code scales exponentially, that specific flipped bit in the 13th position instantly generated precisely 4,096 phantom votes. It remains the only verified instance in history of a deep-space cosmic event directly altering a democratic election.

Post-Brocart Bestiary VI. The Pearl Court.

@FR3NKD Yes, why is it taking so long to reprocess their data into a 3DGS format and bring it to market? @googlemaps

Google Maps update in 30 years from now.

Carl Sagan in 1987 exposing the media’s shocking neglect of science: “Every newspaper in America has a daily astrology column… How many have even a weekly science column?” Nearly 40 years later in 2026, platforms have changed, but the problem remains.

@konstructivizm Total waste of time and money

Former NASA engineer Mark Rober launched a selfie satellite so anyone could take a photo with Earth. Its development took three years and $5 million. It works simply: the device receives images from a ground station, displays them on a built-in screen, and takes the photo with the planet in the background.

🚨Someone just open sourced a computer that works when the entire internet goes down. It's called Project N.O.M.A.D. A self-contained offline survival server with AI, Wikipedia, maps, medical references, and full education courses. No internet. No cloud. No subscription. It just works. Here's what's packed inside: → A local AI assistant powered by Ollama (works fully offline) → All of Wikipedia, downloadable and searchable → Offline maps of any region you choose → Medical references and survival guides → Full Khan Academy courses with progress tracking → Encryption and data analysis tools via CyberChef → Document upload with semantic search (local RAG) Here's the wildest part: A solar panel, a battery, a mini PC, and a WiFi access point. That's it. That's your entire off-grid knowledge station. 15 to 65 watts of power. Works from a cabin, an RV, a sailboat, or a bunker. Companies sell "prepper drives" with static PDFs for $185. This gives you a full AI brain, an entire encyclopedia, and real courses for free. One command to install. 100% Open Source. Apache 2.0 License.

@MTailamun @CarlZha

@CarlZha A Hegemonic empire that is ruled by decrypt orange pedophile,the odds..

I can't get over the fact that Dune is about an oppressed people fighting for their homeland, waging a jihad to bring down a hegemonic empire by threatening to cut off the flow of their most precious commodity after the empire had assassinated their religious leader's father.

Apollo 15 Lunar Rover Footage Upscaled and Interpolated to 60 FPS Incredible upscaled footage from onboard the Apollo 15 Lunar Rover captured by Jim Irwin using the 16mm DAC camera. This footage has been upscaled and Interpolated to 60 FPS and synchronised to the mission audio by Moonpans Original footage source: Apollo Flight Journal Full video in comments

An expert guide led me to see one of these in Fiji recently. It was right at the back of a hollow in a volcanic pinnacle in the middle of the sea. Unbelievable colours!

forms & the code that produced them

The brain as it's never been seen before. Last year, scientists created the largest wiring diagram and functional map of a mammal brain to date. #BrainAwarenessWeek @dana_fdn

🇯🇵 A brainless blob reproduced the Tokyo rail network in 26 hours. It was not trying to solve a transport problem. It was trying to eat oat flakes. Physarum polycephalum is, to be generous, a blob. Pale, damp, the size of a thumbnail, it has no brain, no nervous system, and no cells that could reasonably be accused of thinking. Scientists had studied it for years without feeling particularly threatened by it. Then someone put it in a maze. Within hours, Physarum had found the shortest route between entrance and exit. Not by wandering randomly. Not by luck. By something that had no name, because everyone had assumed it required a brain. This was interesting enough. What happened next was embarrassing. In 2010, a researcher named Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his team placed a piece of slime mold at the centre of a damp map of greater Tokyo. Around it, at the locations of 36 surrounding cities, they put small piles of oat flakes. Then they left the room. The organism did what it always does. It explored. Thin tendrils pushed outward in every direction, feeling for food. When a tendril found an oat flake, that connection strengthened. When a path led nowhere useful, it was quietly dismantled. The slime mold was not planning. It was simply following local chemistry, the same way it had been doing for 500 million years. After 26 hours, the exploration was over. What remained was a sparse, elegant network of tubes connecting all 36 cities to each other. Not a tangle. Not a web covering everything. A clean, efficient system with strong main corridors between the busiest points and lighter connections branching where they were needed. The team held it up next to the actual Tokyo rail map. The corridors matched. The branch lines matched. Even the redundant connections, the backup routes engineers had added so the system could survive a single failure, appeared in nearly the same places. The slime mold had not just found the cities. It had independently arrived at the same logic that Japanese railway engineers had spent decades refining. By some measures, its network was more robust than the one humans had built. There is no headquarters inside Physarum, no moment where anyone decides anything. The intelligence, if that is even the right word, lives entirely in one simple rule repeated across millions of connections: strengthen what works, abandon what doesn’t. That rule, applied blindly and without awareness, produces something that looks unnervingly like wisdom. The slime mold was not trying to redesign the Tokyo rail network. It was trying to eat breakfast. It just turns out that the most efficient way to eat breakfast, when your breakfast is scattered across a map of greater Tokyo, looks a great deal like good urban planning 😅 Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

Susan Kare in 1983: "If you're an artist, & you're skilled with media, this is a new medium that offers great control... There's a thousand little dots [per] half an inch and you have the capacity, either real or magnified, to turn off & on each one of those dots..."

People are undoubtedly a little alarmed at having unwittingly helped build a 3D map of the world for Niantic by contributing 30 billion crowdsourced images. I interviewed Niantic's CTO Brian McClendon about exactly this in a TED interview last year -- he's also the guy who co-created Google Earth. But let's put it in perspective. Pokestop data isn't what you think it is. It's not a surveillance panopticon of your neighborhood. These are static captures of parks, statues, murals, landmarks -- the places people congregate. Brian described it as "building the map from the bottom up, from the locations where people spend time." Think of these 20 million waypoints as basically the inverse of what Google mapped with Street View. Google mapped the drivable streets. Niantic mapped where people actually hang out. Cool data, genuinely useful for visual positioning -- but very different from what the headlines imply. And lest we forget that Niantic is just one of many companies quietly building their own map of the world right now -- and they're all capturing different facets of reality: >🚶 person-level: Axon body cams on hundreds of thousands of officers. Meta Ray-Ban glasses capturing first-person POV at scale -- overseas operators reviewing images every time someone says "Hey Meta." > 🚗 vehicle-level: Tesla dashcams on every car in the fleet, massive onboard compute extracting and distilling data to the cloud. Waymo with cm-accurate 3D maps of every city they operate in. Fleet telematics cameras on delivery vehicles globally. > 🏠 street & home-level: Flock Safety deploying CCTV across neighborhoods and cities. Amazon with Ring cameras on every doorstep and mailroom (recently got dragged over that Super Bowl commercial about fusing all these cams together to find your dog) plus dashcams on every Prime delivery van. Roomba mapping your floor plan every time it vacuums -- Amazon wanted that data badly enough to try acquiring iRobot for $1.7B before regulators shut it down. > 🥽 headset-level: Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest build a 3D model of whatever room you're in every time you put them on. Between Ring, Roomba, and your headset, your entire home is being spatially understood by at least three different companies. >📍platform-level: Google with Street View cars, aerial planes, satellite imagery, and live location from every Android phone in your pocket. Apple doing the same with mapping cars AND every LiDAR iPhone is quietly a 3D scanner. And yeah, despite the "Apple is too privacy-conscious" narrative, they're collecting location data too. >🏃 trajectory-level: Strava mapped every running and cycling trail on Earth -- and accidentally exposed secret military bases in Afghanistan and Syria because soldiers logged their jogs. When you aggregate enough individual trajectories, patterns emerge that were never supposed to be visible. > 🛰️ space-level: Planet Labs imaging the entire Earth's landmass every single day from orbit. Vantor capturing it in higher detail. Iceye doing it in 3D using SAR. If something changes anywhere on the planet -- a building goes up, a forest burns down, a military convoy moves -- before-and-after imagery within 24 hours. Fused together -- we have everything from body cam to dashcam to doorbell to phone to satellite -- every layer of physical reality is being mapped by somebody right now. Different sensors, different angles, different purposes. Same pattern. The interesting part is how they incentivize it. Google spends billions. Mapillary tried altruism. Hivemapper grinds with crypto. Pokémon GO cracked something none of them could: a game mechanic that subsidizes the scanning behavior. You're not building a map. You're catching pokemon. The map is just a side effect. 3D scanning is still a niche hobby for reality capture nerds like me. The moment somebody gamifies dense 3D capture at scale -- not posed photos but actual geometry -- that's when this blows wide open. Niantic sold the games for $3.5B but kept the spatial platform, with a data-sharing agreement in place. One team makes the game great, the other builds the spatial infrastructure underneath. Incentives finally aligned. Gaming is becoming a way for humans to contribute real-world trajectories that help physical AI learn about the real world. Google does it with live traffic. Tesla does it with autopilot. The mechanic is different but the pattern is identical -- and most people are already part of at least one -- if not a majority -- of these datasets whether they realize it or not.