Author name: hubs

Does A Deep Neural Network Like Your #Selfie?

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Best Selfies
Andrej Karpathy trained a Convolutional Neural Network with a dataset of 2 million photographs to determine what makes the perfect selfie. The image above contains the top 100 best selfies (here are the 1,000 best selfies) Andrej concludes that the best selfies have these qualities:

  1. Be female. Women are consistently ranked higher than men. In particular, notice that there is not a single guy in the top 100.
  2. Face should occupy about 1/3 of the image. Notice that the position and pose of the face is quite consistent among the top images. The face always occupies about 1/3 of the image, is slightly tilted, and is positioned in the center and at the top. Which also brings me to:
  3. Cut off your forehead. What’s up with that? It looks like a popular strategy, at least for women.
  4. Show your long hair. Notice the frequent prominence of long strands of hair running down the shoulders.
  5. Oversaturate the face. Notice the frequent occurrence of over-saturated lighting, which often makes the face look much more uniform and faded out. Related to that,
  6. Put a filter on it. Black and White photos seem to do quite well, and most of the top images seem to contain some kind of a filter that fades out the image and decreases the contrast.
  7. Add a border. You will notice a frequent appearance of horizontal/vertical white borders.

Andrej also created a TwitterBot that will judge your selfie. Simply attach your selfie (or a include a link) to a tweet that mentions @deepselfie anywhere in it. The bot will analyze your selfie and give you its opinion (e.g. score 90% means that the Selfie Bot is 90% sure yours would be in top half of selfies. Selfie Bot was not impressed with my selfie.


More here.

Doo Ba Dih Bee Dwee Doo Daah

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The Lick

Referred to simply as The Lick this melodic element can be found in nearly all genres of music and played by all kinds of instruments. It has somehow managed to seed itself everywhere. It can be found as early as Stravinsky’s “Firebird” (1910). Player’s “Baby Come Back” and Santana’s “Oye Como Va” are based on variations of The Lick. Although the origins of The Lick are unknown, it has propagated throughout the entire musical kingdom as you can see from the two videos below.

I have come down hard on artists who use clichés too much. But I think The Lick proves itself as something greater than a musical cliché, something more like a musical meme. The best art copies, reconstructs, personalizes, mutates and owns up to other great artworks that came before it. Viva La Lick!

This Used To Be My Jam

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This Is My Jam

It happened. This Is My Jam is no longer with us. But it died in the most beautiful way. Although This Is My Jam no longer accepts new submissions the site has been completely archived and remains for your listening pleasure. What a refreshing change from the usual “We’re deleting everything in a week because we got acquired/ran out of money.” thing we’ve heard so much of lately. No Jams were lost.

One really cool feature of the archive (here is my archive page) is the automatic generation of a Spotify playlist from your submitted jams. Though Spotify on had only 25 of my 37 jams you can listen to them all on the archived Wall O’ Jams. I’m sad to see This Is My Jam go but I’m glad they left with such dignity.

Top 10 Most Banned Books: 2014

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For the past many years, during Banned Books Weak, I have put together a list of the top ten most banned books of the previous year. Out of 311 challenges (a slight increase from the 307 challenges reported in 2013) as reported by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, here are the top ten:

2014

  1. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
    Reasons: anti-family, cultural insensitivity, drugs/alcohol/smoking, gambling, offensive language, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group, violence. Additional reasons: “depictions of bullying”
  2. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi
    Reasons: Anti-family, homosexuality, political viewpoint, religious viewpoint, unsuited for age group. Additional reasons: “promotes the homosexual agenda”
  3. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
    Reasons: Nudity, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group
  4. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
    Reasons: Sexually explicit, unsuited for age group. Additional reasons: “contains controversial issues”
  5. It’s Perfectly Normal (The Family Library), by Robie H. Harris
    Reasons: Nudity, sex education, sexually explicit, unsuited to age group. Additional reasons: “alleges it child pornography”
  6. Saga, Vol. 1, by Brian K. Vaughan
    Reasons: Anti-Family, nudity, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group.
  7. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
    Reasons: Offensive language, unsuited to age group, violence
  8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
    Reasons: drugs/alcohol/smoking, homosexuality, offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group. Additional reasons: “date rape and masturbation”
  9. A Stolen Life: A Memoir, by Jaycee Dugard
    Reasons: drugs/alcohol/smoking, offensive language, sexually explicit, and unsuited for age group
  10. Drama, by Raina Telgemeier
    Reasons: sexually explicit

Click these links if you are looking for the top 10 lists for previous years with easy links to Amazon: 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001.

Additionally, in 2010, I put together a list of the 100 Most Banned & Challenged Books Of The Decade by aggregating several lists from the American Library Association.

The Tallest Structure In The United States Is A TV Antenna

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The KVLY Television Tower, located in Blanchard, North Dakota is the tallest structure in the United States. It is also the tallest structure in the Western Hemisphere and the fourth tallest in the World (beaten by the Burj Khalifa, Tokyo Skytree and Shanghai Tower). It tops in at 2,063 feet (628.8 m) tall. Just a few miles away is the fifth tallest structure in the world, the 2,060 ft (628 m) KRDK Television Tower.

If you’re interested in what it might be like to climb to the top of one of these towers, check out this video.

KVLY-TV Mast Tower Wide.jpgImage via Wikimedia

First New Dr. Seuss Book In 25 Years

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What Pet Should I GetImage via Random House

The first new Dr. Seuss book in 25 years, was released yesterday! “What Pet Should I Get?”” was discovered in a pile of papers by Audrey Geisel (Dr. Seuss’s wife) shortly after his death in 1991. It is thought that he wrote and illustrated the book sometime between 1958 and 1962. And there are more unpublished books from that posthumously discovered pile of papers to come!

I have read “Hop on Pop” to my son so many times I have it committed to memory. I sure he’ll like this new one too.

The Silent Sky Project#

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Artist Rob Sweere has been inviting participants to take part in an original, traveling social project titled Silent Sky Project#. Since 2004 Sweere has asked people around the world to take 30 minutes out of their day to lay in silence amongst one another and contemplate the sky in complete silence. Currently there have been 65 Silent Sky occurrences with between 3 and 2000 participants. It all sounds very therapeutic.


All images via Rob Sweere

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