category: athletes with maps

The intrepid team at Lewis & Quark have run some notable experiments with neural networks in the past year (previously here, here, and here) and begins 2018 with an equally insightful drill that invited their AI familiar to come up with plausible Wikipedia articles—based of course on the contributions of human encyclopaedists, and the results were predictably weird though revealing about our own editorial conventions.
Parallel to the headings that the machine will generate, we learn that Wikipedia has curated a collection of submitted articles that humorously failed to adhere to the site’s standards and were consequently never published, which could have been the product of the machine itself but Wikipedia’s rejects could not hold a candle (we think) to some of the ones in the computer-generated sandbox: Monster Diseases, Tire bear (country), Near Dogs and Tree Wars. Be sure and visit Lewis & Quark on Tumblr at the link above for more of computers trying and subscribe so you’ll never miss a post.

duckies

Here is a sample of the kinetic, magical artwork of Seattle-based illustrator Jonathan Stroh. One should browse his entire, extensive portfolio here for more exotic destinations and more multifaceted animations. There are ducks, I believe, somewhere in every composition.

lordy, i hope there are tapes!

kuh und überkuh

Not content to limit their party’s ideology regarding eugenics to human beings, Reichsminister Hermann Göring (bedauerlicherweise, nür auf Deutsch) wanted to create a quarry worthy of the Nazis to hunt.
Inspired by historical accounts of the fearsome but unfortunately extinct aurochs—including encounters by a conquering General Julius Caesar—Göring worked with the husbandry experts, the Brothers Heck, who tried, through careful breeding, convinced that no animal’s bloodline truly disappears from the face of the Earth, scoured different types of wild and domesticated cows from all over the globe and selected for traits that they believed would reproduce the monstrous and formidable beast. The offspring of this experiment, the Heck cattle—sort of like The Boys from Brazil—were not the genetic heirs of the giant aurochs hunted to extinction in the seventeenth century but were perhaps close enough. The defeat of Germany prevented the project from coming to fruition but Göring planned to allow his Überkühe to roam in a wildlife reserve in an primordial forest in Poland—a Nazi Jurassic Park.