As the Cold War simmered between the United States and the Soviet Union, both nations proposed some pretty outlandish ideas—but one of the most mind-boggling was the once-classified plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon before humans had ever stepped foot there.

After the U.S.S.R. made cosmic history by sending the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to space in 1957, the U.S. hoped to follow up with an unprecedented display of power. “Specific positive effects would accrue to the nation first performing such a feat,” according to a 1959 report that was declassified in 2000.

These bizarre plans might have remained under wraps to this day if not for Carl Sagan, celebrated astronomer, science popularizer, and pioneer in the hunt for extraterrestrials. Sagan, at the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, was recruited by Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper—the namesake of the Kuiper belt of icy objects that form a massive disk past Neptune’s orbit. The U.S. Air Force had enlisted scientists from the Armour Research Foundation (ARF) lab, based in Chicago, to spearhead what became known as Project A119.

“The main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth,” Project A119 physicist Leonard Reiffel told The Observer in 2000. “The U.S. was lagging behind in the space race.”

Read more: “How the Cold War Created Astrobiology”

Reiffel warned Project A119 planners of “a huge cost to science” by “destroying a pristine lunar environment.” In fact, the bomb’s crater might have disfigured the face of “the man in the moon.” But the brazen feat was technically feasible at the time, he noted, using an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile—one equipped with a warhead roughly the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or larger.

Sagan was tasked with determining whether researchers could “gather scientifically useful information by detonating nuclear weapons on the moon,” and he also explored the potential effects of radioactive fallout on the moon, according to the 1999 biography, Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson.

Ultimately, the U.S. Air Force put the kibosh on Project A119. The exact reasons remain unclear, but some theories suggest that the government wanted to avoid potential harm to Earthlings, or had concerns that the moon would become radioactively contaminated.

But stories of the aborted plan would live on thanks to Sagan, who shared details on the project in 1959 when applying for a graduate fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley—a slip noticed by Davidson when researching the book. Sagan’s friends “believe he never would have wilfully revealed classified information,” according to The Observer. Later on in his career, though, Sagan communicated the dire risks of nuclear war: It could “destroy the global civilization and conceivably … could end the few million year old experiment, human experiment, on the planet Earth,” he said in a 1987 speech.

Carl Sagan is famous for having cracked open the cosmos and made the mysteries of the universe accessible to the common person through clear and compelling storytelling. Among these astronomical accomplishments, it seems, is inadvertently disclosing the harrowing tale of a Cold War show of force that could’ve marred lunar exploration for generations to come.

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Lead image: Internet Archive Book Images / Wikimedia Commons

Welcome! Glad you could join us for another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is our slate:

• 1) Digital animation on film stock.

• 2) Animation newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1 – The hybrid

Toy Story used to look different. It’s a little tricky to explain.

Back in 1995, CG animation was the topic in the industry, and Pixar was central to the hype. The studio had already shifted Disney to computers and won the first Oscar for a CG short (Tin Toy). Giant movies like Jurassic Park incorporated Pixar’s software.

The next step was Toy Story, billed as the first animated feature to go all-CG.1 Even after Pixar’s successes, that was a risk. Would a fully digital movie sell tickets?

It clearly worked out. Toy Story appeared 30 years ago this month — and its popularity created the animation world that exists now. A new process took over the business.

But not entirely new — not at first. There was something old about Toy Story’s tech, too, back in 1995. Pixar made the thing with computers, but it still needed to screen in theaters. And computers couldn’t really do that yet. From its early years, Pixar had relied on physical film stock. According to authors Bill Kinder and Bobbie O’Steen:

[Pixar’s Ed] Catmull recognized that his studio’s pixels needed to merge with that world-standard distribution freeway, 35 mm film. Computer chips were not fast enough, nor disks large enough, nor compression sophisticated enough to display even 30 minutes of standard-definition motion pictures. It was axiomatic that for a filmgoing audience to be going to a film, it would be a... film.2

Toy Story was a transitional project. Since Pixar couldn’t send digital data to theaters, every one of the movie’s frames was printed on analog film. When Toy Story originally hit home video, that 35 mm version was its source. Only years later, after technology advanced, did Pixar start doing digital transfers — cutting out the middleman. And Toy Story’s look changed with the era.3

While making Toy Story, Pixar’s team knew that the grain, softness, colors and contrasts of analog film weren’t visible on its monitors. They were different mediums.

So, to get the right look, the studio had to keep that final, physical output in mind. The digital colors were tailored with an awareness that they would change after printing. “Greens go dark really fast, while the reds stay pretty true,” said Toy Story’s art director, Ralph Eggleston. “Blues have to be less saturated to look fully saturated on film, while the oranges look really bad on computer screens, but look really great on film.”4

The team checked its work along the way. In the words of Pixar’s William Reeves:

During production, we’re working mostly from computer monitors. We’re rarely seeing the images on film. So, we have five or six extremely high-resolution monitors that have better color and picture quality. We put those in general work areas, so people can go and see how their work looks. Then, when we record, we try to calibrate to the film stock, so the image we have on the monitor looks the same as what we’ll get on film.

Behind the final images was a “painstaking transfer process,” according to the press. Leading it was David DiFrancesco, one of Pixar’s early MVPs, who began working with Ed Catmull before Pixar even existed. He broke ground in film printing — specifically, in putting digital images on analog film.5

He and his team in Pixar’s photoscience department used their expertise here. Their tools were “commercial grade” film printers, DiFrancesco noted: modified Solitaire Cine II machines. He’d invented more advanced stuff, but it wasn’t viable for a project of Toy Story’s size. Using the best equipment would’ve taken “several terabytes of data,” he said.

Their system was fairly straightforward. Every frame of Toy Story’s negative was exposed, three times, in front of a CRT screen that displayed the movie. “Since all film and video images are composed of combinations of red, green and blue light, the frame is separated into its discrete red, green and blue elements,” noted the studio. Exposures, filtered through each color, were layered to create each frame.6

It reportedly took nine hours to print 30 seconds of Toy Story. But it had to be done: it was the only way to screen the film.

In 1999, Pixar made history again.

Its second feature, A Bug’s Life, reached theaters in 1998. Once more, the studio designed its visuals for analog film (see the trailer on 35 mm). Its people knew the ins-and-outs of this process, down to the amount of detail that film stock could accept and a projector could show. That’s partly how they got away with the movie’s tiny 2048×862 resolution, for example.7

Still, the team struggled with one thing: the dip in image quality when film got converted to home video. That’s how Toy Story was released, but there had to be a better way.

For the home version of A Bug’s Life, Pixar devised a method of “go[ing] from our digital image within our system … straight to video,” John Lasseter said. He called it “a real pure version of our movie straight from our computers.” A Bug’s Life became the first digital-to-digital transfer on DVD. Compared to the theatrical release, the look had changed. It was sharp and grainless, and the colors were kind of different.8

A digital transfer of Toy Story followed in the early 2000s. And it wasn’t quite the same movie that viewers had seen in the ‘90s. “The colors are vivid and lifelike, [and] not a hint of grain or artifacts can be found,” raved one reviewer. It was a crisp, blazingly bright, digital image now — totally different from the softness, texture and deep, muted warmth of physical film, on which Toy Story was created to be seen.

Quickly, digital transfers became a standard thing. Among others by Pixar, The Incredibles puts off a very different vibe between its theatrical and later releases (see the 35 mm trailer for reference).9

Pixar wasn’t the only studio to make the leap, either. Disney did as well.

Like Toy Story, the Disney renaissance work of the ‘90s was transitional. The Lion King, Mulan and the rest existed as files in computer systems — and the idea was always to record them on analog film at the end. Early home releases were based on those 35 mm versions. Later releases, like the ones Disney streams today, were direct transfers of the digital data.

At times, especially in the colors, they’re almost unrecognizable. And the images feel less cohesive — like something’s missing that was supposed to bring all the elements together. These aren’t quite the same films that ruled the ‘90s.

For a number of years, there’s been talk in film-preservation circles about Toy Story and the Disney renaissance. This work sits in an odd place. The world was still pretty analog when the computer animation boom arrived: out of necessity, these projects became hybrids of new and old. What’s the right way to see digital movies that were designed for 35 mm film?

The studios themselves haven’t quite figured it out. On Disney+, the colors of Toy Story feel a bit raw — searing greens that were meant to darken on film, for example. Meanwhile, the newer Toy Story Blu-ray shares more in common with the original colors, but it’s still an altered, colder look.

When digital transfers first showed up, people were thrilled, including at Pixar. Movies became “crisper, clearer and more stunning on home video systems” than in theaters, some claimed.10 Even so, it’s a little disquieting to think that Toy Story, the film that built our current world, is barely available in the form that wowed audiences of the ‘90s. The same goes for many other movies from the transitional era.

The good news is that this conversation gets bigger all the time. In those film-preservation circles, a dedicated few are trying to save the old work. More and more comparison videos are popping up on YouTube. If you get the chance to see one of the old Disney or Pixar films on 35 mm, it’s always worthwhile.

These companies, ultimately, decide how Toy Story looks today. Still, for some, it’s nice to see the original version of the film again — the version Pixar originally intended to make. It’s evidence that the film did feel different back then. The memories were real.

2 – Newsbits

• I Am Frankelda continues its strong performance in Mexican theaters. Analyst Edgar Apanco reports that 658,000 people have gone to see it, surpassing the popular Chainsaw Man movie. Revenues are over $2.15 million and climbing — having fallen just 17% in week two, and an estimated 20% in week three.

• In Japan, Goro Miyazaki revealed that his father is still going to Studio Ghibli to draw for a few hours each day.

• An exhibition in Taiwan brought the films of Karel Zeman to the country, reportedly for the first time. The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and Invention for Destruction are showing, among others.

• In Nigeria, animator Gabriel Ugbodaga had a televised interview about his well-received film Vainglorious (watch) and the state of the country’s industry. “When it comes to 2D hand-drawn animation,” he said, “there’s a lot of talent in Nigeria.”

• If you missed that Baahubali: The Eternal War teaser this week, see it here. It’s an Indian feature presented by S. S. Rajamouli (RRR).

• In Germany, Werner Herzog’s animated film The Twilight World picked up “€100,000 for production preparation support,” reports Cineuropa.

• Infinity Castle will reach China next weekend, and forecasters believe it could earn a billion yuan (over $140 million) and become the highest-grossing anime film in the country.

• Also happening in China next weekend: the latest edition of Feinaki Beijing Animation Week. The festival posted 55 trailers for its selections this year.

• The Japanese journalist Atsushi Matsumoto is raising concerns that the anime boom of the 2020s could be a bubble. (Meanwhile, despite huge industry profits, analysis suggests that studio closures are set to rise for the third year in a row.)

• In America, for those in New York, there’s an interesting series of stop-motion screenings at the Eastman Museum this month — including The Wolf House.

• Last of all: we wrote about a handful of recent, free films worth seeing.

Until next time!

EdReports, which describes itself as “Consumer Reports for school materials,” has rejected five different editions of Big Ideas Math textbooks, partly for failing to “develop conceptual understanding.” Meanwhile other curricula, like i-Ready, got perfect scores in part thanks to their treatment of “conceptual understanding.”

But what is conceptual understanding, and how do you develop it?

According to their documents, EdReports checks to see if texts include “brief conceptual problems with low computational difficulty,” for example:

• 11 + 6 = ___ + 2

• Find a number greater than 3/5 and less than .75.

• A fraction divided by a fraction is always/sometimes/never less than the original fraction

Curricula also need activities that focus on “concrete representations.” For example, the 7th Grade review of i-Ready specifically cites the following question in their glowing evaluation:

Neva plays a video game. On her first turn, she earns 3 points. On her second turn, she loses 3 points. The expression 3 + (-3) represents her score after the two turns. You can use integer chips to find the sum of 3 and -3.

a. The sum of any number and its opposite is 0. Another term for opposites is additive inverses. Since the sum of 1 and -1 is 0, 1 and -1 form a zero pair. Circle the zero pairs in the model.

b. How many points does Neva have after her second turn?

c. What is 3 + (-3)?

The Big Ideas books apparently lack these wordy questions about semi-physical objects. And EdReports complains that in Big Ideas the “conceptual” questions (whatever those are) mainly arrive at the beginning of the lessons, whereas the practice questions are “primarily procedural.”

What does that mean?

EdReports cites all sorts of documents and rubrics. Some of these documents define conceptual understanding, others don’t, and sometimes the definitions clash. This is exactly what researchers Crooks and Alibali found when they reviewed academic papers (about a hundred) for definitions of conceptual knowledge—that “explicit definitions of conceptual knowledge are rare” and “often vague.”

With EdReports we have a relatively clear definition of conceptual understanding but…it’s not great. That video game question isn’t going to help students understand anything. And I have no idea what a “conceptual question” is. Conceptual questions are questions that…develop conceptual understanding? Augh! We’ve gone in a circle.

Fortunately, I think there’s a perfectly sensible definition of conceptual understanding. It’s precise with clear implications for teachers.

It goes like this: conceptual understanding is knowing true and useful generalizations about mathematics. Crooks and Alibali, along with other researchers, sometimes call these principles instead of generalizations, but it’s the same deal—we want students to know facts that apply to a wide variety of cases.1

Take something like 6 x 3, which kids often think of as six 3s. We might teach kids that 6 x 3 is the same as 3 x 6, so three 6s, which can help them complete the multiplication. Terrific! But we should be more ambitious. We should teach a generally true principle—you can always reverse the order when multiplying—so that they can apply that to any problem, even one like 200 x 3.

I find this an extremely useful guiding classroom principle—to always push for generalizations, facts that are always true. To illustrate, here a few ways this has cropped up in my recent teaching.

“Procedural” Practice Can Develop General Principles

The basic idea of combining like terms is fairly simple—we can always add/subtract like terms as we do numbers—but it needs to be applied in a huge variety of cases. The variety is the challenge.

Obviously there is a limit to how much you can gain from repetitive practice of only one case. But if practice carefully escalates while gradually adding new twists, you give students a chance to apply the general principle to disparate cases.

This only works if a clear principle has been articulated before the practice. If you do that, though, this kind of practice gives that generalization a workout.

The Teacher Can Articulate the Principle

There’s a sort of discovery-ish vibe associated with conceptual understanding. But there’s no reason that generally useful principles need to be invented by students.

I shared this pair of graphs (from Math Medic) of a function and its derivative in calculus today. (If you’re rusty on calc: the derivative graphs a function’s slopes.) Can you tell, from looking only at the derivative, where the original function is increasing? My students were all able to answer accurately that it’s the portion of the derivative that’s above 0.

Terrific. But when handed this graph a new derivative they weren’t able to find where the original was increasing.

It was my role to take a step back and articulate the generalization even more clearly. The principle is where the height of the derivative is positive, the function is increasing. “Is the function positive here? How about here?” I pointed at specific points of the derivative. After this students were able to tackle the question. They extended it in the natural way to negative values too. It was good that I said this directly after they got stuck—I wish I’d done it before then.

I sometimes think of this kind of teaching as a generalizing triangle. It’s a pattern that comes up often: teacher talk bumps up the abstraction and students connect it to new particulars.

Correct Explanations are Not Enough

Here is a good question from Transition to Algebra:

When I asked my 7th Graders to answer this, one student pointed out 100% correctly that since it’s four units up from E to D, the diagonal has to be longer than that.

I was about to move on, when I caught myself. I turned back to the kid. “So is the diagonal always going to be more than the vertical distance? Why would that be?”

I’m glad I pushed, because my students responded with two smart generally true answers:

• Yes, the diagonal is always longer than the horizontal or vertical distance, because when going diagonally you’re going in two directions, not just one.

• The Pythagorean Theorem says where the diagonal length is found by adding the squares of the horizontal and vertical distances, and that’s always going to be longer than just the vertical distance squared.

The point of an explanation isn’t just to eliminate doubt—it’s about connecting this particular situation to some generally true fact about the mathematical world.

Visuals are Only Good if They Suggest Principles

I was explaining to a student how to handle the equation 12 + 6x = 7x - 35. We had talked previously about mobiles, so I drew a quick picture:

This is a useful move because it’s easy to use the mobile to come up with a true principle—you can remove equal things from both sides of a balanced equation. Our physical knowledge of balance and symmetry are to thank. But that’s only useful if you then leverage that into a true principle about equations, something abstract we have much less experience with. And you have to get rid of the mobile! It’s job is to suggest a generalization, then leave.

That integer chip thing earlier…what’s the principle? What are they getting at? Why do they get credit just for using a representation? What is the point of checking to see if textbooks do that?

***

And what about how this all feels, for a student?

Possibly my most frustrating school experience was a semester of Ancient Greek I took in college. Tos theos…I was seriously unprepared. Everyone else in the class had taken either Latin or Greek before; my grasp of English grammar is still on the shaky side. There were rules to memorize but it all felt random, isolated, disconnected to anything else I knew.

I was working with a young student recently on subtraction with borrowing. I’d show him how you could cross out the four and turn it into a fourteen by regrouping. The next question he’d cross out an eight and turn that into fourteen also. It was like that for twenty frustrating minutes. I was failing to help him see the general principle. How frustrating for him! Each subtraction was a brand new problem, unrelated to the one before.

But when it finally clicked…

We all want generalization. We want to see how it all fits together. We want to know how a particular idea flows from something bigger. We want to know how to do things—we also want to know things. We want the whole picture. And when we get it—whether we land on it on our own or someone makes us think of it with words or a picture or anything else—the feeling is terrific, like it all finally makes sense.

Open up any video game magazine, and you’ll find pages of high-quality artwork for just about every title that was coming out.

Have you ever wondered where that art came from? And where did it all go? We have the answers.

Years ago, we were donated the internal art archives from GamePro magazine. Whenever the staff at GamePro received artwork or screenshots from a game publisher, they backed it up on a CD and organized it in a set of binders for future reference.

As part of our preservation mission, we’ve been digitizing the GamePro press CDs and adding them to our digital archive. When we launched our library this year, we started with the first 100 GamePro CDs. Today, we’re expanding that to 200! The collection currently runs from 1995–1998. There’s another 500+ CDs to go, but we thought this would be a good opportunity to talk a little more about this project.

Getting these CDs into a usable state for our digital archive hasn’t been an easy or automatic process. In addition to digitizing and scanning the CDs, we also need to convert the files into a modern format you can view in your browser. We always keep the original disc images, but we also want to make their contents convenient to browse. As an example, we convert print-formatted CMYK images to RGB images in bulk using open-source command-line tools. It took a while to iron out that process, but we’re happy with the results so far.

Besides artwork, these CDs could also contain press releases and pre-release screenshots, which help researchers understand how games were made. In some cases, these CDs have screenshots and art for games that never came out! Game researchers rely on magazines to learn about games that were canceled, but we can go a step further and give them access to the raw digital assets that those magazines used!

Our latest batch has high-resolution promotional artwork from classic games including Banjo-Kazooie, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VIII, Parasite Eve, Mega Man Legends, Soulcalibur, EverQuest, and much, much more! Click below for a full list.

To learn more about the production of GamePro, listen to our episode of the Video Game History Hour with former editors Katrin Auch (Miss Spell) and Dan Amrich (Dan Elektro).

The post Library Highlight: The art of GamePro appeared first on Video Game History Foundation.

Security biz Wiz says 65% of top AI businesses leak keys and tokens

Leading AI companies turn out to be no better at keeping secrets than anyone else writing code.…