50 days of Eurovision, Day 8

[eurosong]

Good evening folks! It’s Day 8 on Eurovisionfanblog’s 50 days of Eurovision challenge, and the task today is to share a video of a song you don’t like from this year’s contest, and say something nice about it!  

There are about a dozen songs this year that I could happily see flung into Room 101, but Keep the faith is my current #43. I was amazed that a country as innovative and left-field as Georgia at the ESC sent something so dull and generic.  I struggle to think of anything good about it - except the backing video. No, I don’t like it in itself - its ridiculously overt political nature makes it quite tawdry - but something good came out of it. It must include dozens of pieces of newsreel and stock footage. Her song has put the children of whoever is in charge of multimedia copyright management in Georgia’s TV station through college, and put money in the pockets of the copyright holders too. That’s one definite bright side.

[discworldtour]

“How are we going to get in, sir?” said Carrot.
“How would you go about it, Carrot?”
“Well, I’d start by knocking, sir.”
“Really? Sergeant Detritus, forward please.”
“Sir!”
“Blow the bloody doors off!”

– on getting in | Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant

[bodygemsgoldbodyjewelry]

Meow meow meow meow! #Bodygems #meowring #goldbodyjewelry #daith #daithpiercing #safepiercing #legitbodyjewelry #piercings

[shampooligan]

i was trying to remember the “live long and prosper” motto from star trek and for a solid 10 minutes the only thing i could think of was “live big and die”

[flightyfinch]

(ebay)

Irish Tune names, invented by neural network

[lewisandquark]

So I play traditional Irish music (flute) and one thing about Irish music is that the tunes all have a distinctive kind of name. It’s hard to define what makes a tune name sound Irish, only that “Boil that Cabbage Down” doesn’t sound Irish, whereas “Whip the Mustard” (invented by the neural network as a recipe title) definitely does.

Here are some example Irish tune names, out of a list of 1300 that one of my friends kindly provided:

John Ryan’s
Apples in Winter
Drowsy Maggie’s
Maid Behind the Bar
Kid on the Mountain
Killavel Jig
Sailor’s Hornpipe

I gave the list to a neural network (based on this open-source neural network framework from Andrej Karpathy), and asked it to produce more. It most definitely delivered:

Here’s a sample output (notice how the list is roughly in alphabetical order, since the original list was too):

Ardenn Reel
Anny Compand
An the Bander
Turper’s Daughter
Tum Mountain
Tin the Connand the Wallop
Trap the Barry Durpers
Tarken Hand
Tam Hull Sain
Tom Road to Sligo

These particular ones are hilarious if you happen to know the Irish tune names it alllmost managed to replicate:

Tondertina Reel (Concertina Reel)
Sean Crancy’s (Sean Clancy’s)
Bolly Catey (Bobby Casey’s)
Sloom of Youth (Bloom of Youth)

And it came up with some that aren’t in the original dataset, but are quite plausible and definitely should be tune names:

Old Lady’s Reel
Tripping on the Rock
Rolling Old Man

And these are some of my favorites:

Sailin the Donkey
Lard of the Land
Blangy Maid
Dronk Mary
Seat of Slugs
Lare’s Piles
Dan’s Derpipe
Horn Potty’s Farhain
Trap the Barry Durpers
Thing Mop the Bog

Want more? Bob Sturm has produced not only Irish tune names, but entire Irish tunes using the same char-rnn neural network framework. You can even listen to midi versions!

[zoofitness]

Archer fish in action at the National Aquarium in Baltimore! Such a cool species of fish!

You can probably guess how they got the name archer fish - by spitting water with pinpoint accuracy at bugs on branches and leaves above the water, knocking them in for a meal. So cool!!!

[ghostofthemountain21]

AHHHH! Archer fish are my favorite :D I remember reading about them in a book as a kid and the first time I ever saw them in real life at an aquarium! I freaked! I was so excited :D

[zoofitness]

Right?? They’re the best! It was even more awesome cause I was JUST telling my nephew and my sister about them shooting water at bugs and we got to see it there! Such a cool experience!

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

This is such a cool species to do a demo with! I don’t think I’ve seen any other facilities purposefully use that behavior for education. 

[ihamtmus]

bonus:

[hat source]