Via Twitter
25 December 2015
26 November 2015
Tiny Penis Drumsticks
Like so many other crickets, a Roesel’s bush cricket sings to attract his mate. But his courtship doesn’t stop once a female finds him. As they have sex he’ll use a pair of tiny drumsticks on his genitals to show her he’s the rhythm master she wants to father her young. The structures are called titillators; they’re small stiff rods that sit at the base of the penis and are inserted into a female during sex ...
The drumming seems to be an important sexual step for this cricket. Females often tried to stop mating with males whose titillators had been removed–especially in the males who were left with only one drumstick. And even when the females put up with their rhythm-impaired mates, the males were less successful in getting their sperm to stick.Read the rest of the story here.
25 November 2015
30 October 2015
13 October 2015
05 September 2015
From Ms. L-y's Social Media
Via FB | Click image to enlarge
Via FB | Click image to enlarge
Via Twitter | Click image to enlarge
Via Twitter | Click image to enlarge
Via FB | Click image to enlarge
Via Twitter | Click image to enlarge
20 August 2015
07 August 2015
31 July 2015
30 July 2015
Tribute To Hayao Miyazaki
Link via The Nerdist
Made with Blender, Gimp, Octane and Natron. Thanks to Blackschmoll, Boby, Christophe, Clouclou, Cremuss, David, Félicia, Frenchman, Sozap, Stéphane, Virgil. And Thanks to Ton Roosendaal, the Blender community, the developers of Blender, Gimp and Natron.Music by Joe Hisaishi. dono 2015
28 July 2015
21 July 2015
07 July 2015
05 July 2015
Google's DeepDream
From the description on Vimeo:
A visualization of what's happening inside the mind of an artificial neural network.
By recognizing forms in these images, your mind is already reflecting what's going on in the software, projecting its own bias onto what it sees. You think you are seeing things, perhaps puppies, slugs, birds, reptiles etc. If you look carefully, that's not what's in there. But those are the closest things your mind can match to what it's seeing. Your mind is struggling to put together images based on what you know. And that's exactly what's happening in the software. And you've been training your mind for years, probably decades. These neural networks are usually trained for a few hours, days or weeks.
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In non-technical speak:
An artificial neural network can be thought of as analogous to a brain (immensely, immensely, immensely simplified. nothing like a brain really). It consists of layers of neurons and connections between neurons. Information is stored in this network as 'weights' (strengths) of connections between neurons. Low layers (i.e. closer to the input, e.g. 'eyes') store (and recognise) low level abstract features (corners, edges, orientations etc.) and higher layers store (and recognise) higher level features. This is analogous to how information is stored in the mammalian cerebral cortex (e.g. our brain).
Here a neural network has been 'trained' on millions of images - i.e. the images have been fed into the network, and the network has 'learnt' about them (establishes weights / strengths for each neuron). (NB. This is a specific database of images fed into the network known as ImageNet http://image-net.org/explore )
Then when the network is fed a new unknown image (e.g. me), it tries to make sense of (i.e. recognise) this new image in context of what it already knows, i.e. what it's already been trained on.
This can be thought of as asking the network "Based on what you've seen / what you know, what do you think this is?", and is analogous to you recognising objects in clouds or ink / rorschach tests etc.
The effect is further exaggerated by encouraging the algorithm to generate an image of what it 'thinks' it is seeing, and feeding that image back into the input. Then it's asked to reevaluate, creating a positive feedback loop, reinforcing the biased misinterpretation.
This is like asking you to draw what you think you see in the clouds, and then asking you to look at your drawing and draw what you think you are seeing in your drawing etc,
That last sentence was actually not fully accurate. It would be accurate, if instead of asking you to draw what you think you saw in the clouds, we scanned your brain, looked at a particular group of neurons, reconstructed an image based on the firing patterns of those neurons, based on the in-between representational states in your brain, and gave *that* image to you to look at. Then you would try to make sense of (i.e. recognise) *that* image, and the whole process will be repeated.
We aren't actually asking the system what it thinks the image is, we're extracting the image from somewhere inside the network. From any one of the layers. Since different layers store different levels of abstraction and detail, picking different layers to generate the 'internal picture' hi-lights different features.
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All based on the google research by Alexander Mordvintsev, Software Engineer, Christopher Olah, Software Engineering Intern and Mike Tyka, Software Engineer
http://googleresearch.blogspot.ch/2015/06/inceptionism-going-deeper-into-neural.html
https://github.com/google/deepdream
04 July 2015
28 June 2015
"Senator Huckleberry J. Butchmeup": Charles Pierce's Political Nicknames
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| Morning Joe: Squint and the Meat Puppet |
Charles Pierce is a sportswriter, author, blogger, and political observer. The following list of "Pierce-isms" is a work-in-progress compiled by Frank Moraes of Frankly Curious.
Brogressive Man-Crush Senator Aqua Buddha: Rand Paul
C-Plus Augustus’ Excellent Mesopotamian Adventure: (Bush’s) Iraq War
Clinton Guy Shocked By Blowjobs: George Stephanopoulos
The Combover Trump: Rudy Giuliani
Douglas McArthur McCain: John McCain
Fred Hiatt’s Home Depot For Bad Ideas: The Washington Post
FREE MONEY (!): Medicaid Expansion
Fracksylvania: Pennsylvania
Girl With The Faraway Eyes: Michelle Bachmann
Goggle-Eyed Homunculus Hired by Koch Industries to Run Their Midwest Subsidiary Formerly Known as the State of Wisconsin: Scott Walker
Governor Goodhair: Rick Perry
Senator Huckleberry J Butchmeup: Lindsey Graham
Manson Family of American Geopolitics: Cheney family
Mausoleum of Unemployables: Breitbart.com
Mitchell Brothers: Charles and David Koch
Mrs Greenspan: Andrea Mitchell
Nine Wise Souls: Supreme Court
Obvious Anagram: Reince Priebus
Our Lady Of The Magic Dolphins: Peggy Noonan
Padishah Emperor of All Crazy People: Louie Gohmert
Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods: Sarah Palin
Senator McDreamy: Scott Brown
Senator Professor Warren: Elizabeth Warren
Squint and the Meat Puppet: Morning Joe
Tailgunner Ted Cruz: Ted Cruz
Tiger Beat on the Potomac: Politico
13 June 2015
06 June 2015
01 May 2015
30 April 2015
28 April 2015
Baltimore | Tuesday 28 April 2015
Pennsylvania Avenue at North Avenue | Photo by Bishop M. Cromartie
29 March 2015
25 March 2015
Shiny Homage To Firefly
... thanks to Joss Whedon ... we get to hear (Jesse L.) Martin and his Flash costars/Kickstarter partners Rick Cosnett (Eddie Thawne) and Carlos Valdes (Cisquo) sing a gospel version of the Serenity ballad. No, this is not a drill. Martin, Cosnett, and Valdes filmed the video as a thanks to Whedon, who contributed “an outstanding amount” to their Kickstarter for a collaborative musical short film, The Letter Carrier ...Gorram.
05 March 2015
20 February 2015
Cold Enough To Freeze The Balls Off A Brass Monkey
There is no better visual cue that it is cold out than this brass monkey. Once the temperature gets to be frigid, about 23 degrees Fahrenheit, a piece of his anatomy drops off as illustrated in the picture above. This will bring life to the adage “cold enough to freeze the b…s off a brass monkey.” To reset him all you have to do is let him thaw out a bit and reattach his boys. This may be the only time you find emasculation amusing.Nerd Approved via FB
17 February 2015
15 February 2015
Correction | Obama NOT The Antichrist
Correction published in the Lexington Dispatch via R. L. Bynum's Twitter | FB
06 February 2015
05 February 2015
Steven Pinker | Mind Games
From the quiz
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist, and popular science author and is currently the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. The questions in this short quiz are culled from Pinker's course "Psychological Science." From Pinker:
... The questions that psychology tackles are the ones that obsess us in everyday life: family relations, sexuality, kindness and aggression, the reliability of knowledge. Not surprisingly, many concepts in academic psychology have crossed over into popular culture, such as conditioning, Freudian psychoanalysis and cognitive dissonance. Exams that invoke these memes test whether students understand the theories well enough to reason about them when they are presented away from a familiar textbook context and are applied to real life ...Take the quiz here.
NYT
01 February 2015
30 January 2015
28 January 2015
Can't Be Unseen | Domino's Ad
Click image to enlarge
The Fifty Shades effect. New print ad for Domino's Spicy Sriracha puts the "B-D-S-M in P-I-Z-Z-A."
Fusion
25 January 2015
18 January 2015
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