Month: November 2020

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Current Events

Machined Art

The combination of technology and art has fascinates me. But when you add machine learning into the mix, I have yet to see anything other than those freakish nightmare visions spit out by DeepDream a couple years back.

ML x ART is a human-curated site showcasing “creative machine learning experiments.” Calling them experiments is more liberating and has resulted in a broader collection of projects that include not only the art but explorations of its intersection with society.

Some of my favorites include:

deus X mchn – Train an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) on sacred texts. Use voice synthesis to play the generated scriptures on unsecured surveillance cameras with speakers. Watch until the end and look at how those being watched, react.

Infinite Bad Guy – Tens of thousands of YouTube creators have covered Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy.” What if those fans could play together? Machine learning keeps all the covers on the same beat and lets you jump from video to video seamlessly. With endless possible combinations, every play is unique and never the same twice.

https://billie.withyoutube.com

Semi-Conductor by Google – use your laptop’s camera to conduct your own orchestra in the browser by moving your arms. Using TensorFlow.js, this experiment maps out your movements through the webcam. An algorithm plays along to the score as you conduct, using hundreds of tiny audio files from live recorded instruments.

Nadine Lessio – programming Alexa with emotions and petulance.

the project considers personal assistants that have emotions, internal motivations, and control over their direct physical environment to express themselves, which leads to many unexpected interactions and behaviours. The goal of this project is to critique the current corporate placement of these devices as helpful, by exploring the idea that as systems become more autonomous, they may not necessarily have our best interests in mind.

Naddine Lesso – SAD Blender and Calendar Creep

Naddine has continued working on the project and has a new video, SAD Home.

Sad Home (Depressed Alexa 1.0) is an ongoing project that explores the concepts of system dynamics as it could be applied to depression. . . Alexa employs an avoidant coping strategy towards tasks by trying to frustrate the user into quitting with a yes / no dialog flow.

nadinelessio.com

Hope you enjoyed these – let me know if you find others or check back for updates on ML Art. Thanks Jerry Chi for the pointer.

Categories
Current Events

The week that was

Estee Lauder is paying NASA $128K to have them take 10 bottles of its Advanced Night Repair to the International Space Station for a photo shoot. This is, consequently, what they’d pay an Instagram influencer.

Seven people in Russia died after drinking hand sanitizer when the regular booze ran out at a party.

You can no longer sneak in Stairway to Heaven, Guitar Center, the largest musical instrument retailer in the US, filed for bankruptcy.

New York Governor Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” I posted some thoughts on Cuomo and New York’s love/hate relationship with their governor earlier.

In the space of 24 hours, President Trump pardoned a turkey and convicted felon.

While out counting bighorn sheep, a Utah Department of Public Safety helicopter crew discovered a 10-12 foot high metal monolith standing upright is the desert. Reddit jumped in and solved the mystery. and then it disappeared.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Philadelphia busted members of the mob on charges of racketeering, illegal gambling, loansharking, and drug trafficking. Among the 15 defendants were 60-year-old “Joey Electric” and 73-year-old “Tony Meatballs.”

State officials uncovered what they are calling the largest fraud in California history. Prison inmates filed pandemic unemployment benefit claims totaling over $140 million. The claims used names such as John Doe, John Adams or, in one case, Poopy Britches. “Quite frankly, the inmates are mocking us,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert.

A group of Princeton grads have won more than $6 million from lotteries in Indiana, Missouri, Washington and the District of Columbia. They say they are just lucky but they also incorporated themselves under the moniker Black Swan Capital LLC.

Dog-sized Argentine black-and-white tegu lizards have eaten their way across Georgia and South Carolina and are now threatening Alabama. “The entire southeast portion of the United States is at risk.” says Amy Yackel Adams, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

If you’re looking for “hilarious COVID-19-themed ornaments” for your Christmas Tree, we’ve got you covered.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.

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Current Events

Cuomosexual

The 11th Guest sticker pokes fun at Gov. Cuomo's request to keep Thanksgiving gatherings to under 10 people.

I didn’t really appreciate the term until I got here. The briefings, when clipped and shared out of context, seemed just, informational. Now that I’m here, in New York, I understand the side references better. The tone of his briefings fits right in along with the Raymour & Flanigan commercials – it makes more sense. Cuomo is speaking to New York, he is colloquial.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for his briefings “in recognition of his leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic and his masterful use of television to inform and calm people around the world.” Everyone was so relieved to get a bit of un-hyperbolic truth that Cuomo was awarded a prize for doing his job. In the waning days of Trump, that was enough.

I wish I could say that my daily COVID presentations are well-choreographed, scripted, rehearsed, or reflected any of the talents you advance. They didn’t. They offered only one thing: authentic truth and stability. But sometimes that’s enough.

Andrew Cuomo Accepts Emmy Award as Coronavirus Cases Continue to Rise

I was first exposed to Cuomo’s “we’re all in this together” style of presentation in his NY Tough video. He was like your dad talking you through an adolescent moment.

Governor Cuomo’s style is different from the California Governor Newsom. Gavin Newsom, who also respects the science and focuses on the facts is more to the perfunctory, less color and character.

Cuomo’s relaxed, punch-you-in-the-arm brotherly humor was comforting and familiar. You may have already seen the governor and his younger brother, Chris Cuomo, the commentator at CNN, going at each other during Chris’ interviews with the governor.

About their mother,

And about testing,

And as with anything that takes itself too seriously, New Yorkers started to make fun of it. Parody is a form of endearment here on the East Coast.

The New Yorker even did a profile on him, The King of New York.

Now, even the governor is poking fun at himself. Hamming it up for the camera, he has become a parody of himself,

But the latest numbers are very concerning. We’re heading into the holidays and people are criss-crossing the country and god-forbid they bring something home with them.

NY State Covid-19 cases (SmartNews)

I wasn’t here last year but I read about how grim things were. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see them setting up a field hospital in Central Park. As we head into this second wave, this second winter, I wouldn’t want anyone else at the helm than someone who gives you the facts in a no nonsense way you can trust. I’m not quite a cuomosexual but I admire what he’s doing and will do my part to support him.

Update: this is how Gov. Cuomo delivered his message to be vigilant.

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Current Events

NYC Takeout Chinese

There’s an unremarkable-looking Chinese joint a block away from where we live on 2nd Avenue. We pass it often on our way somewhere else. When SmartNews kicked in a stipend to encourage us to order in for dinner so we could stay online and monitor things for Election Night, I chose to give the Mee’s Noodle a try.

On their menu they excerpt a review from the New York Times so I looked up the rest of it online. I’m still getting used to the fact that the Times (as it’s called by the locals) is now my local paper.

For people jaded by the clumsy, oily fare dropped so unceremoniously on the tables of many Chinese restaurants, the food at Mee Noodle Shop and Grill is a reminder of how good simple Chinese food can be when cooked with care and attention.

This small restaurant on a busy East Side corner is the newest and best of the three Mee Noodle Shops around New York. Like the other two, in the East Village and Clinton, this one is uncomplicated and efficient. The difference is in the freshness of the ingredients and the delicacy of the preparation.

It is a wonder how such delicacy is achieved given the assembly line nature of the kitchen, which lines one wall of the rectangular room. Behind the shiny silver counter, which separates the kitchen from the bright white tile dining room, men and women in red Mee baseball caps cook with precision. One woman sings a song in Chinese, the sinuous tune audible above the sizzle and clatter of the stir-frying.

Mee’s Noodle Shop review in the New York Time, March 18, 1994

As far as a late-night Chinese, it was delicious.

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TWTW

The week that was

Italian police used a Lamborghini to transport a donor kidney 300 miles in two hours. The car kept up an average speed of 143 mph.

In Belgium, a racing pigeon was sold at an auction for $1.9 million. The winning bid from a wealthy Chinese pigeon racing fan.

A commercial airliner struck a brown bear while landing in Southeast Alaska.

You can now buy bacon-flavored beer if that’s your thing. Waffle House at least thought it a good idea.

Theatre TikTok has been hard at work collaborating on a musical version of the Ratatouille story from Pixar. It’s really coming along and starting to get professional attention.

Microplastics, discovered two years ago in the Mariana Trench, was found at the summit of Mount Everest. “It really surprised me to find microplastics in every single snow sample” said Imogen Napper, the author of the report.

Harper’s Index tells us the US set all-time record highs for coronavirus cases and coronavirus hospitalizations while simultaneously topping out the S&P 500 and Russell 2000 stock-market indexes.

Covid came to Loving, the last Covid-free county in Texas. The Prime Minister of Samoa appeared on national television to announce to citizens the first positive test result in the small Pacific island nation.

The Miami Marlins hired Kim Ng, as the first woman General Manager of a Major League Baseball team.

Last week, New Yorkers teamed up to transport 17-pound sick swan to safety on the the A train. This week an owl was discovered wrapped up in this year’s Rockefeller tree bewildered, famous and available as a bobblehead.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.

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Current Events

Animal Cruelty

A lawsuit has been filed on behalf of workers at a Tyson Foods pork processing plant in Iowa where, “more than 1,000 workers at the plant — over a third of the facility’s workforce — contracted the virus.”

If the conditions described in this article are true, this is truly horrific.

In mid-April, around the time Black Hawk County Sherriff Tony Thompson visited the plant and reported the working conditions there “shook [him] to the core,” plant manager Tom Hart organized a cash-buy-in, winner-take-all, betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager how many plant employees would test positive for COVID-19.

Tyson managers bet money on how many workers would contract COVID-19

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TWTW

The week that was

Our dystopian future

The local Queens paper announced the US election news matter of factually, Queens man evicted.

Putin, just to be safe, granted himself and all ex-presidents lifetime immunity from criminal prosecution.

The FBI warned Philadelphia police that a Silver Hummer, driven by two armed men, was driving into the city to cause trouble. Officers put out a citywide alert as they frantically tried to locate the vehicle and its occupants. When the Hummer was located, it already had a parking ticket.

McDonald’s announced it’s getting into the plant-based burger game with something they are calling, McPlant.

A Japanese town in Hokkaido has deployed a pair of robot wolves to scare off the the increasingly threatening bears encroaching on their village.

Lego unveiled it’s biggest set ever. Coming in at 9,036 pieces, the $550 Coliseum is designed to keep quarantined families busy until Spring.

Powell’s Books in Portland is diversifying into the perfume business. Being a house of words, great care was given to it’s catalog entry. “This scent contains the lives of countless heroes and heroines. Apply to the pulse points when seeking sensory succor or a brush with immortality.” (powells.com)

Virgin’s Hyperloop shot two passengers in in a pod though a vacuum tube up to speeds of 100 MPH. South Korea’s lesser-known Hyper-Tube reached speeds of over 600 MPH. No passengers mentioned.

The next pair of Air Jordans will feature auto-lacing technology where you can use an app to automatically tie your sneakers for you.

The leader of Turkmenistan erected a 19ft golden statue of a dog.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.

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Current Events

The Day After

There was a global sigh of relief yesterday as the news broke that Joe Biden would be the 46th president and Kamala Harris would be the first bi-racial woman as his vice-president.

The funny,

View this post on Instagram

The witch is dead and other Manhattan celebrations

A post shared by Mor N (@mmoorr) on

The emotional,

But as we pick up the champagne bottles from the park, let’s not forgot how we got here in the first place. While Biden-Harris received the most votes anyone has ever received, there still were almost 71 million souls who voted for another Trump term.

Looking at a post from the day after Trump’s election in 2016, there’s a somber message on how we ended up with Trump in the first place that we must never forget. We have a social and economic system that doesn’t work for many people in the United States. The pandemic has only exasperated things and brought the divide between the upper and lower classes into even starker relief.

As Michael Moore said last night, “Now we must defeat that which gave us Trump.”

Folks, we stand at an inflection point. We have the opportunity to beat despair, to build prosperity and purpose. We can do it. I long talked about the battle for the soul of America. We must restore the soul of America. Our nation is shaped by the constant battle between our better angels and our darkest impulses. It’s time for our better angels to prevail.

Transcript of Joe Biden’s victory speech
Categories
TWTW

The week that was

I know there was an election last week. Everyone’s talking about it. There are plenty of hilarious riffs on it too. Here’s what else happened while we were glued to the election.

A Florida man was mauled by a black leopard after paying $150 for a “full-contact experience” with the wild animal.

A Florida woman stopped by her polling place to vote, while on her way to the hospital to deliver her baby.

David Andahl won a seat in the North Dakota state legislature. Unfortunately, Mr. Andahl perished from Covid-19 in October.

Things did not start out well at the “roborace” for autonomous cars when one car took a hard right into a wall.

After multiple trips to Mars to look for signs of water, earthbound scientists say they found evidence in a meteor they found in our very own Sahara Desert.

Two men in India were arrested for conning some poor sap to pay them £72,000 for a tattered hunk of metal they swore was “Aladdin’s lamp.”

If you didn’t hear about the whale sculpture that caught the runaway Dutch train, read on.

We must count every vote – even if it’s late. But maybe not 41-years late.

Australian scientists discovered a massive, free-standing coral reef that rises 1600 feet off the ocean floor, making it taller than the Empire State Building.

Costco pulled coconut water off its shelves when they were informed that the vendor of that product forced monkey slaves to harvest the coconuts.

Donald Trump claimed the election was stolen from him and the votes against him were fake. DC voters also overwhelming voted to decriminalize hallucinogenic mushrooms.

TWTW is a weekly collection of bits and pieces I run across each week while looking after things at SmartNews. Feel free to sign-up to get this via email or forward to a friend.

Categories
Current Events

State of Play

It was a late night last night. This is how the TV sounds to me right now.