Author name: hubs

Every Episode Of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

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It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Twitch is running a Mister Roger’s Neighborhood marathon that will be showing all 886 episodes of the exceptional children’s program. The marathon is a fundraising effort to celebrate the positive influences of PBS. Feel free to use the donation panel on the linked page to donate to your local PBS station.

The Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Marathon features the most comprehensive collection of episodes available, including many that only aired once and are unavailable elsewhere online. We will be playing the episodes back to back starting at 12PM Pacific on May 15th.

The marathon is expected to take about 17 days to run all the way through. PBS has more information on the Twitch-PBS partnership here.

Inside The Stearn Pinball Factory

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Manufacturing as a whole in America has been suffering. Add to that the fact that video game consoles have entered millions of homes since the early 90s and you have a perfect storm that has resulted in the shuttered and faltering sales of major pinball manufacturers for decades. A great pinball machine requires a vast amount of craftsmanship, and one of largest producing places you’ll find that kind of work happening today is at Stern Pinball. Last month Popular Mechanics went inside of Stearn Pinball manufacturing facility to see how a 21st-century pinball machine comes together. It examines the process by dividing it into four main sections:

  • Finding a license
  • Designing the game
  • Sub-Assembly
  • Assembly and testing

    • While there won’t be anything new in the article for enthusiasts, it is an excellent primer on pinball manufacturing in America. What pinball machines and manufacturers has sold the most over the years? The table below could give some insight.

    [table id=4 responsive=collapse /]

    Hot Pants?

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    Plastic Pants

    Retailer TopShop is selling clear, plastic, jeans for a meager $100. I would argue that they are really selling clear, plastic, capri pants but whatever. TopShop says,

    Think outside the box with these out-of-the-ordinary clear plastic jeans – guaranteed to get people talking. In a straight leg cut, they feature classic pockets detailing and are cropped at the ankle bone. Ideal as a statement piece for a festival or costume party, take the look to the extreme with a bikini and sequin jacket or dress down, layered under an oversized jumper or asymmetric hem dress.

    If these are your style have a look at TopShop’s pink, vinyl, jamie jeans.

    via Boing Boing

    Vocal Mimicry Using Lyrebird Technology

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    Lyrebird has created a voice imitation technology that uses deep learning and artificial neural networks to create fascinating and somewhat scary results. It relies on deep learning models developed at the MILA lab of the University of Montréal.

    Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice. The API will be robust enough to learn from noisy recordings. Lyrebird will offer a large catalog of different voices and let the user design their own unique voices tailored for their needs.

    Users will be able to create entire dialogs with the new or mimicked voice. Inflection, emotion, and content can all be tailored as necessary through a developer API. The demos are fairly impressive but still distinctly robotic. Check out some Trump/Obama examples below.

    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/318022504″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=true&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”300″ iframe=”true” /]

    I’m interested to find out how accurate this will be for non-english and non-human verbal communication.

    Sheboygan Scanner

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    Sheboygan is a small city of approximately 50,000 residents – a population that seems to provide an endless stream of dumb criminals and weird, small-town crime. Maintained by an anonymous user since February of 2009, the @sheboyganscan twitter account has tirelessly transcribed entertaining communications that come through the Sheboygan, Wisconsin police scanner. Here are a few gems I’ve cherry picked for you:

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    Sheboygan ScannerRead More »

    Aliens of the Lembeh Strait

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    It was just last week that I posted a video about the Lembeh Strait and already I have found another beautiful video highlighting the wildlife found in the area. This one is a cephalopod lovers dream. The film, entitled “Aliens of the Lembeh Strait”, by Sascha Janson, won Gold in the 2017 Our World Underwater International Imaging Competition.


    Nearly 200 more incredible videos of the bizarre and wiggly marine life in the Lembeh Straight can be found on the Critters@Lembeh Resort’s Vimeo page where Sascha Janson is the photo pro.

    History Of Spiritual Jazz: 1955-2012

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    In the final hours of Black History Month, I urge you to explore this marathon 12-hour Spiritual Jazz mix compiled by Black Classical. It’s a historical journey of Spiritual Jazz stretching from 1955-2012. This mix originally appeared on NTS Live, an online radio station based in London with studios in Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Manchester.

    The catalog features recognized pioneers Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron, Herbie Hancock, and Pharoah Sanders in addition to South African songstress Letta Mbulu and Brazilian percussion genius Airto. The cuts are deep and the mix is a crate diggers paradise.

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    History Of Spiritual Jazz: 1955-2012Read More »

    Seven Earth-like Planets Found Orbiting Nearby Star

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    TRAPPIST1 Size Comparison ChartImage via Space.com

    This morning NASA announced the discovery of seven Earth-like planets “that could harbor life” orbiting an ultra cool red dwarf star. Three of these seven newly discovered planets are in the Habitable Zone. The exoplanets circle the star TRAPPIST-1, which lies just 39 light-years (235 trillion miles) away — a mere stone’s throw in the cosmic scheme of things.

    From Washington Post:

    The discovery, reported Wednesday in the journal Nature, represents the first time astronomers have ever detected so many terrestrial planets orbiting a single star. Researchers say the system is an ideal laboratory for studying alien worlds and could be the best place in the galaxy to search for life beyond Earth.

    “Before this, if you wanted to study terrestrial planets, we had only four of them and they were all in our solar system,” said lead author Michaël Gillon, an exoplanet researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium. “Now we have seven Earth-sized planets to expand our understanding. Yes, we have the possibility to find water and life. But even if we don’t, whatever we find will be super interesting.”

    Here’s the paper in Nature: Seven temperate terrestrial planets around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1.

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