octopus’s garden

When I first saw this feature as the frontispiece of a rather venerable and unfailing website, I had a moment of misgivings—wondering if they had surrendered to those catch-penny walls of copy-pasta when one strays too near the lower bounds of a webpage.

You’ve seen, no doubt, those unpalatable grasping advertisement, covert, as 11 Things You Didn’t Know about the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV or Neglecting these 24 Things will definitely result in a Ghost Dog Peeing on Your Bed, but those fears were unfounded as this gallery of unearthly plants with a message to help keep such gardens growing was certainly up to snuff and worth a look. Sorry for the unwarranted criticism.  Catchpenny is such a better term than clickbait but I don’t know if there’s a better expression for copy-pasta, which for me connotes the writhing feelers of the cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster—a fabulous argument to invoke—because...FSM—that I think can be wholly attributed to this same exceptional site.

positronic-reinforcement

The New Yorker has a nice, succinct piece on the recent demonstration of the artificial intelligence DeepMind, whose talents draw from two sources, a deductive network of filters and positive-reinforcement.
The program—instructed with only the protocol that winning was good and losing bad—dazzled the human audience with a stellar progression on a platform of classic arcade games with some very masterful and unexpected strokes. It is not that DeepMind is inside the game, like when one challenges the game, but separated like a human player, and quickly devised a sure strategy. The program, however, did not perform quite so well with certain games—like Ms. Pac-Man, and the handlers weren’t quite sure why. Some disparaging voices checked their enthusiasm, as milestones like Deep Blue beating a chess grand-master or Watson winning against Jeopardy! quiz-masters. These achievements, though not coddled and not insignificant, came about, however, through extensive coaching, whereas DeepMind is learning on its own. What do you think? Is growth going to be exponential and get very quickly out of human hands?

five-by-five

neat, petite: Agent Scully posing as Morticia Addams

dog and butterfly: some beautiful photography of an unlikely pairing

geisterstadt: there is a growing website of abandoned places and ghosts towns all over the world

de stiji: a print or tee-shirt of the TARDIS in the style of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian

a great rodd of birch: a character called Whipping Tom (with several copy-cats) terrorised Londoners in the 1600s, beating their hinders and shouting, “Spanko!”

howling fantods

The inexhaustibly fascinating Dangerous Minds features a look at the major arcana of a suite of tarot cards conceived by the brilliant artist Edward Gorey, who gave us the lovable in the macabre.
The cards are not properly prognosticating ones, however, as they all represent different aspects of our internal fantods, a word more than for the nonce, that describes our worries and anxieties and irritations and bode no hope for a bright and uplifting fortune. For instance, drawing the Feather can be interpreted to forecast obstacles of a most pernicious nature—including, rather specifically, blackmail, a forged passport, intestinal discomfort, and loss of eyelashes (which is called madarosis). The horror. Be sure to check out the link for more backstory and augury, and Dangerous Minds in general for some veteran discoveries.