ladyyatexel
A man with the last name Bopp sends emails to the whole state on the regular.
Every email results in someone humming a Hanson song.
impendingfascination
In Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, Calypso was a nymph who imprisoned Odysseus and ultimately only releases him once he realizes he misses his wife back home. Michael Chabon’s retelling of this tale for ‘Star Trek: Short Treks’ doesn’t really even add a lot of ‘Star Trek’ flair to the story, but what we are left with is a strong story that leaves us wanting more and ok if we never get it.
The story focuses on Craft (Aldis Hodge) and Zora (Anabelle Wallis). Craft is a soldier adrift in a life pod and near death. Zora is an AI intelligence left in charge of the Discovery for over 1000 years waiting for the crew to return. Zora rescues Craft, and while the two are initially reluctant to share any information about the other they slowly begin to share more and more.
Through Chabon’s deft handling of the material and Hodge and Wallis’ performances, you are left wanting a relationship that can’t work out to do just that. Chabon is able to highlight the loneliness that both characters feel in a way that, once they begin to come together you can’t help but want that to continue. One also hopes this isn’t the last we see of either character, though it could well be. CBS has expressed an interest in more ‘Star Trek’ series, however, so anything is possible.
One thing comes out of this. Chabon was recently announced as a member of the writers’ room for the new Picard based ‘Star Trek’ series. After watching ‘Calypso’, that new series can’t come fast enough. If we are able to get even close to the level of this material, ‘Star Trek’ may be about to experience a dazzling renaissance.
captainsblogsupplemental
I cannot tell you how disappointed I was to learn that captains don’t just automatically get granted the right to marry people at will
ecologybiology
sdzoo
File this under “things nightmares are made of” and be sure to zoom in on the pup for a secret sinister smirk
#parkourpotato #uptonogood #dontmesswithmymom
📷Liz Sauer
aiweirdness
The world is a chaotic and confusing place. Could advanced artificial intelligence help us make sense of it? Well, possibly, except that today’s “artificial intelligences” are not exactly what you’d call sophisticated. With a couple of hundred virtual neurons (as opposed to 16 billion neurons in the human brain), the neural networks I work with can only do limited, narrow tasks. Can they digest a list of CNN headlines and predict plausible new headlines based on what they’ve seen? No, but it’s fun to watch them try.
Thanks to Rachel Metz and Heather Kelly of CNN Business, I had a list of 8,438 headlines that have appeared on CNN Business over the past year. And thanks to Max Woolf’s textgenrnn, I had an algorithm that could learn to imitate them. In most of my previous experiments I’ve let neural networks try to build words and phrases letter by letter, because I like the strange made-up words like “indescribbening” and “Anthlographychology”. But to give the neural net a better chance of making the headlines grammatical, I decided to have it use words as building blocks. It could skip learning to spell “panther” and “cryptocurrency” and focus on structure. It helped. Sort of.
Early on in the training, it kept generating headlines that were completely blank. This was either a very nihilistic view of world affairs, or its calculation that a space was the most likely (occasionally a headline would just be: “The”). If I told it to be very very daring, then it would finally use words other than “The” in the headlines, generating things like:
Instagram of Suddenly
Its iPhone Look it
Facebook Wind
11 Fake Tesla My People
Million do Regret
Supermarket Disney New Label Signature Company: Why
Cordray to the SpaceX Coal Administration Africa Jared Internet Big the Talks
to Pizza Videos
(I added the capitalization). After much more training (about 30 min total on a fast GPU), it grew confident enough to use actual words more often. It had learned something about business as well.
Why the Stock Market is Trying to Get a Lot of Money
The US China Trade War is so Middle Class
Bank of the Stock Market is Now Now the Biggest Ever
The Best Way to Avoid Your Money
How Much You Need to Know About the New York City
How to Make a New Tax Law for Your Boss
The Stock Market Market is the Most Powerful Money
Goldman Sachs is a New Super Bowl
Facebook is Buying a Big Big Deal
Why Apps in the Country
5 Ways to Trump on Chipotle Industry is the Random Wedding
Premarket Stocks Surge on Report of Philadelphia Starbucks Starbucks Starbucks
One curious pattern that emerged: companies behaving badly.
Walmart Grilled With a New Leader in Murder Tech
Coca-Cola is Scanning Your Messages for Big Chinese Tech
Amazon Wants to Make Money Broadcasting from Your Phone
Should I Pay My Workers
Amazon is Recalling 1 Trillion Jobs
My favorite headlines, though, were the most surreal.
Star Wars Episode IX Has New Lime Blazer
Mister Rogers in Washington
Black Panther Crushes the iPhone XS and XS Max Max
How to Build a Flying Car Car
You Make Doom Stocks
The Fly Species Came Back to Life
India Gets a Bad Mocktail Non Alcoholic Spirit
How to Buy a Nightmare
I talk a bit more about AI and creativity in this CNN article.
Support AI Weirdness and get bonus content: two fine* recipes generated by a neural net trained solely on cake recipes: “Cargot Puddeki Wause Pound’s Favorite Ice Cream: Plant Tocha” and “Three Magee Coffee Cake”.
gordzillapierce
First one of the show. @ottawagatineautattooexpo #appmember #safepiercing #goldenhorseshoetattoo #stcatharines #niagara #nostrilpiercing #nostril (at Casino Lac-Leamy)
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp-VzR1lv15/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=19gg84i911qpc
petermorwood
aislinnsiofra
I’ll just leave this right here 😚
Maybe it’s some sort of musical instrument, like a sistrum.
Some swords, or at least the claims made for them, can be dismissed as a load of balls, but there were others where the balls were quite real.
“Tears of the Afflicted / Wounded” aka “Rolling Pearls”, were an actual feature found in some Indian and Chinese swords. It was the fancy name for steel balls sliding in a groove which supposedly increased the force of a cut.
However they went up and down the length of the blade, while the OP
blade’s beads go from side to side across its width and not even half
way, at that.
Oops.
The historical Alasdair Mac Colla (aka Alexander MacDonald), a soldier during the English Civil Wars of about 1640-50 - so not a blue-faced kilt-wearer - was supposed to have carried a sword with a rod along the back fitted with a 10lb weight “which slid from hilt to point to give extra force to its stroke.” Such a heavy weight is obvious nonsense, but he was supposedly a very big man and certainly had a big reputation. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, once the stories get going, men like that who appear in them can’t carry just “ordinary” weapons.
And then of course there’s the “blade with a channel full of mercury”. AFAIK there’s no real example, and its fame derives from “Terminus Est” in “The Book of the New Sun” by Gene Wolfe. However, T.E. isn’t a weapon but an execution tool so, even though it’s used in fights, describing the mercury as being for “enhanced combat effectiveness” is completely wrong.
I’ve handled two Richtschwerter (German execution swords) - one was for sale in an antique shop in Bamberg, but @dduane said “you’re NOT bringing that into the house” - and their broad, flat, straight-edged blades were already balanced for function in a way that made mercury or sliding weights unnecessary.
That same balance meant they were far too top-heavy for use in combat; these things were for lopping off immobile heads, nothing more. Diane’s right; I wouldn’t have one in the house.
The mercury filling was also claimed for Indian swords as a way to explain their sharpness, but those claims were made by 18th-19th century British Army soldiers whose swords were much blunter. Their scabbards were metal, and the swords were constantly drawn and resheathed during parades, drill etc. Indian scabbards were wooden, and the swords were drawn only for practice or use. Starting with two equally-sharp swords, it’s obvious which will get blunt faster.
These two - a shamshir and a tulwar -
are sharp, well-balanced fighting swords. Both
have “Tears of the Afflicted” in their blades, but IMO it’s obvious from the other details on blade and hilt that the “Tears” are less a gadget to improve efficiency, and more a fancy enhancement on already fancy blades.
The hilt on the shamshir is beautiful koftgari work, but the tiger-striped blade of the tulwar is just amazing.
Diane suggested they might be the period equivalent of a fidget spinner, a desk toy or worry beads. If she’s right, that probably meant having the sword drawn so it could be turned up…then down…then up…then down.
sssclick…sssclick…sssclick…sssclick…
Bearing in mind the life-and-death power of an independent Maharajah, he might be playing with the beads, but everyone else at court got to do the worrying…
And as for the beads on the OP sword - I have no idea what they’re for.
discovernow
lissy-strata
relatablepicturesofgarak
t00thpasteface
