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Week #29

Tell me you've been to Italy without telling me you've been to Italy.

I couldn't put a finger on how I felt looking at these street food menus in Milan's Chinatown (this explains it better). 

Arriving in Italy during the semi & final of the Eurocup was as puzzling as looking at those translated dishes. Both evenings that the Italy team played felt like a breach in the current timeline of events. I had my temperature (!) checked throughout the day with Thermo-guns, but everything was forgotten after 8p. After countless aperitiv during this week, I'm back with my normal schedule. This week we have a lot of A.I. posts.

Aftermath of Italy's classification for the Finals.

1

Perceptions of Probability: What people mean when they use everyday terms describing probabilities. I wonder what would be the Portuguese & German equivalent.

Sherman Kent, the first director of CIA's Office of National Estimates, was one of the first to recognize problems of communication caused by imprecise statements of uncertainty

2

GAN Theft Auto is a Generative Adversarial Network that recreates the Grand Theft Auto 5 environment. In other words, the video below shows the result of training a neural network with an enormous amount of data from the GTA 5 game. With this model, they were able to recreate (parts) of the game without writing a single physics line of code or creating any 3d models. Quite impressive and good example of how you can use synthetic data to train models.

3

I remember reading a couple of articles years ago stating that "no interface was the best interface", making some connection to the advantages of voice assistants (imho, meh). A year after OpenAI has opened the API of its powerful GPT-3 AI model, we will soon be seeing more frequent implementations, Fridayy.me is a good example of such practical cases. You can see a video of it in action here.

4

That is a hippopotamus

One fascinating science theory that I've been bumping into every now and then is that the way we depicture dinosaurs is completely inaccurate. Here are several links with different takes on this topic [1] [2] [3]. I don't think we will ever get to the truth in that topic, but I found this article depicting current animals in the same way we depict dinosaurs.

Sketches reveal what animals would look like if drawn like dinosaurs
Palaeoartist C. M. Kosemen believes there was more to the shapely dinosaurs, including larger layers of fat and areas of soft tissue. He blames Hollywood for dinosaurs’ ‘monster’ image.

5

A Physalis painted with Quinacridone Gold PO49

We ran out of Quinacridone Gold and I loved reading about it. Apparently the manufacturer of the goldest of golden pigments ceased its production decades ago, and sold all of its leftover stock to another ink manufacturer, Daniel Smith. We won't have any other paintings in our lifetime with this hue of gold.

The way I learned about this was by casually browsing this eshop. It explicitly disclaims on the page:

GOLD is now available to EVERYONE* (except Daniel Smith who have bought up all available Quinacridone Gold pigment and made it extinct so no other paint makers or artists can use it ever again!)
IMPORTANT -  By adding Gold to your cart you confirm that you are not Daniel Smith, you are in no way affiliated to Daniel Smith, you are not purchasing this item on behalf of Daniel Smith or an associate of Daniel Smith. To the best of your knowledge, information and belief this material will not make it's way into the hands of Daniel Smith.

6

Carlos Cipa - Retronyms (2019)

Carlos Cipa's was the first concert I've attended since March 2020. A beautiful landscape by this Munich-based composer. His piano performance at Silent Green was delightful. You can find it here.

Beijos.

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