Finally made the move.

@the-real-numbers

I just felt like having my math blog be my main blog.

Finally made the move.

@the-real-numbers

I just felt like having my math blog be my main blog.

Finally made the move.

@the-real-numbers

I just felt like having my math blog be my main blog.

A computer tries its best to learn psalms

There’s a type of computer program called a neural network that tries to imitate whatever dataset you give it. The programmer gives it no explicit instructions about what the dataset is like; whether it’s poems or prose or a list of pies. The neural network has to figure all that out for itself, as best it can.

I recently helped with Rose Eveleth’s podcast Flash Forward, which is a science fiction/technology speculation podcast in which she and her guests talk about a new hypothetical future each week. In this recent episode, we imagined what would happen if a scientist one day tried to create a new religion by training a computer on all the existing texts of world religions. I simulated this on a much more modest scale using a neural network on my laptop, just to see what the results would look like. The results were mostly incomprehensible, but there were a few interesting bits:

Here you can hear the entire science fiction story, and some real religious scholars talking about the computer-generated text.

I also trained the neural network on a much smaller dataset, which is much easier for it. This time, I gave it just the set of 150 psalms from the Jewish and Western Christian tradition, verse-form songs of praise, thanksgiving, or lamentation. The neural network would ideally love to memorize these and read them back word-for-word, but because it didn’t have enough brainpower, it had to generalize as best it could. Here’s a typical example of its attempts to recreate a psalm:

If you are a choir, you can sing one of these, thanks to Owain Park, who arranged a neural network psalm as a chant based on the Tetris theme. (I assembled this particular psalm from a bunch of individual lines that the neural network produced).

Feel free to share and/or record (oh please oh please record this).

Want more neural network psalms? Sign up here and I’ll email them to you.

Fulltext of Psalm 10010111:

Keep reading

“And thy testimonies be clothed with frogs.”

I think my favorite part of this is the neural network getting confused and repeating things actually works well with the structure of hebrew poetry

Humor aside, we’re creating new forms of life and teaching them to praise God in their own way.

postdoc 1: my rule is that if you don’t have time to clean up after your experiment you don’t have time to do the experiment

postdoc 2: like the cells you’ve left in the incubator for the last month?

Millennials are using the free market the way it was meant to be used

“Muh industry”, writes entitled 50-something, wishing his entire generation had just beaten respect for inane tradition and ‘The Way Things Are’ into their children, like his parents did.

This morning, local industry puppet Larry Smith lamented a lack of buisness from younger, hipper audiences. “They think it’s too expensive for them, but it isn’t for us sensible baby boomers” he muttered, shaking his head. “They’re also worried about new fads like 'Ethics’. Can you believe this?” he says, almost in shock. “Ethics. As if they alone are going to solve the world’s problems. But they aren’t. They’re making more, actually. In fact, we’re all gonna be out of jobs if this lack of buisness continues. It’s stupid. They’ll never do anything.”

Deciding it was time to take a stand, Larry Smith sat down and wrote an article for a bottom-feeding content aggregate that occasionally tends to go viral. He indignantly titled it: “Millennials are killing this industry and they have to be stopped”. Sandwiched between an article about a celebrity boob-job and copy-pasted answers from a touching askreddit post, Larry’s article garnered a few curious clicks until some “Dumb Neo-marxist on Twitter made fun of it”, said Larry. The article took off, “inexplicably” spreading throughout the millenial twittersphere, being re-tweeted with a few absurd comments about avocado here or there. “I think they’re finally going to see the light” declared Larry, hope in his eyes, wholly unaware they seemed to be mocking it.

“It’s a matter of simple economics, we gotta support the industry. I think it was Keys that said that” offered Larry, totally butchering the economist’s name. “No, I don’t know who Adam Smith is, but he can fuck off with the rest of you” he said to the author’s (millennial) intern after they paused scrolling through absurdist memes to make a nonchalant comment about Mr. Smith’s spotty knowledge of economics.

Larry’s concerns are legitimate. Sales have gone down significantly in the past five years, and the statistics are showing a complete lack of interest in younger audiences, as is the case with many other industries. “It’s been hell” ranted a pot-bellied buisnessman who wished to be identified as 'Shmarles G Shmoch’. “They’re just not buying into it like they used to. What ever happened to my American dream?” asked 'Shmarles’, petting his lapdog and pausing to take a sip from his expensive scotch at 3 in the afternoon. “Hell, I say” he repeats. “Hopefully this madness ends soon.”

Shameless RB for the morning crowd

art cheats

hello i am here today to not lose track of the art cheats i have discovered over the years. what i call art cheat is actually a cool filter/coloring style/way to shade/etc. that singlehandedly makes art like 20 times better

80’s anime style

glitch effect

glow effects

adding colors to grayscale paintings

foreshortening ( coil )

foreshortening ( perspective )

clipping group (lines)

clipping group (colors)

dramatic lighting ( GOOD )

shading metal

lighting faces

that is all for today, do stay tuned as i am always hunting for cool shit like this

guys stop reblogging this these are cheats the CIA will come for you

Never, I’m a rebel.

An d I’m barely able to train my dogs.

Okay yeah everyone always talks about chubby tweek and of course we know this is true but let’s talk abt… chubby craig

do u see his chub

Objection!

If you’ll look closely….

Tweek’s Chub is represented by a convex curve at the bottom of his torso to indicate his adorable tummy going over his pants. With Craig, this is hardly the case. The line we see in the image you’ve provided above is more indicative of a prominent rib cage. Given the fact that Craig was measured to be lighter than Tweek while still being taller than all the others, it seems more likely that Craig is, in fact, alarmingly skinny.

Your honor, I rest my case that this boy is a flimsy string bean!

Objection! 

while your evidence is compelling, take a closer look!

Here is an image of Tweek and Craig, along with a few handy lines for chub measurement, at the widest part of their bodies! 

With Tweek’s line selected you can see it is only 206 pixels in width!

However! with Craig’s, the width is 231 pixels! Thus proving Craig’s superior chub!

I rest my case!

FOOL!

You seem to have forgotten that Tweek vs Craig aired in season 3, while the animation style still had mild inconsistencies! In order for your measurement of chub to be credible, it should refer to a newer episode, as I have done.

We can see here that while Tweek is wearing only a thin button-up shirt, Craig is wearing a jacket! An entire extra level of thick clothing, surely displaying a false image of thickness! Unless their bare torsos are exposed, there is no way to know who is truly thicker.

Furthermore, I would like to call attention to the error in your observation!

This line that supposedly shows Craig’s true width is not aligned correctly with his body! Instead, it shows the width of his sumo pants! This evidence is misleading and false!

It is you who is the fool!

I cannot use a newer episode without the thick layer of Craig’s coat in the way, as you have mentioned! However, I have readjusted my previous image here!

but there is no use in your argument, for Craig is now 227 pixels in width, which still beats tweek’s 206!

Even without the sumo pants included in the measurement, Craig is still chubbier than tweek by 21 pixels!

FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

No matter… It cannot be argued that Craig weighs less than Tweek, proving it impossible for Craig to be the chubbier of the two! In fact, Craig should be wider as he is the taller one! If anything, it proves that Craig has a more proportionate ratio of height to weight, whereas Tweek has an extra amount of chub for his size!

remember how the first time king louis ix went on crusade it ended with him getting dysentery and diarrhea that was so bad he just cut a whole in the back of his pants bc he lost all control over bowel movements and then he went on crusade again and got dysentery again and then died and both times he never got remotely close to jerusalem

I do now.

I basically never check my Twitter’s “Moments” tab, but the one time I decide to I’m greeted with this fucking incredible sight

Me