I love what fleas look like from above vs. from the side
I didn’t realize this was surprising to so many people!
This lateral flattening allows the flea to “swim like a fish” through fur, aided by the many backwards-facing barbs and hairs along their sides.
If you’ve ever tried to pick them off a dog or cat you’ve seen this in action, it really is like they’re gliding through a liquid environment and amazingly fast, hardly even using their legs to do it.
This is also why they don’t have wings, which would get in the way of this trick, but they compensated with incredible jumping ability that may as well be flight.
Hundreds of millions of years ago, though, fleas couldn’t jump and they were flattened top-down:
This is because fleas were originally parasites of dinosaurs, and while dinosaurs often had feathers, feathers have a different density and the “fur swimming” wouldn’t have worked yet.
The first fleas similar to today’s fleas probably began evolving towards the end of the dinosaur’s run, adapting to the increasing number of our ancestral mammals. Dinosaurs shrank into modern birds so rapidly, it seems, that their original fleas vanished entirely.
So basically whenever you get bit by a flea, you caught that from a dinosaur.
There was a paper recently where a research team trained a machine learning algorithm (a GAN they called AttnGAN) to generate pictures based on written descriptions. It’s like Visual Chatbot in reverse. When it was just trained to generate pictures of birds, it did pretty well, actually.
(Although the description didn’t specify a beak and so it just… left it out.)
But when they trained the same algorithm on a huge and highly varied dataset, it had a lot more trouble generating a picture to go with that caption. Below, I give the same caption to a version of their algorithm that has been trained to generate everything from sheep to shopping centers. Cris Valenzuela wrapped their trained model in an entertaining demo that attempts to generate a picture for any caption.
This bird is less, um, recognizable. When the GAN has to draw *anything* I ask for, there’s just too much to keep track of – the problem’s too broad, and the algorithm spreads itself too thin. It doesn’t just have trouble with birds. A GAN that’s been trained just on celebrity faces will tend to produce photorealistic portraits. But this one, however…
In fact, it does a horrifying job with humans because it can never quite seem to get the number of orifices correct.
It’s fun to ask it to draw animals though. It knows the texture of giraffes, but not quite exactly their shape. And it knows that boats are on the water, but not necessarily that they are boats.
It also (like many other image recognition algorithms) gets a bit confused about the difference between sheep and the landscapes they’re found on. Other algorithms recognize sheep in pictures of empty green fields. And this one, when asked to draw sheep…
That’s different, though, from asking it to draw *a* sheep. In that case, it knows exactly what to do. It draws the sheep, and then just to be safe it fills the entire planet with wool too.
It really likes drawing stop signs and clocks. Give it the slightest opportunity to draw one, and it will chuck those things all over the place.
Other than its horrifying humans, this algorithm can actually be pretty delightful.
I had way too much fun generating these and ended up with way more than would fit in this one blog post. I’ve compiled a few more of my favorites. Enter your email and I’ll send you them (and if you want, you can get bonus material each time I post).
once you get the hang of it (a good tip is you don’t need to write sentences, you can just list stuff) you can just use it like an instant body horror generator, watch:
whenever a young kid joins our staff at work im just like huh. guess im a father now.
these kids will be like “can you drive me home? i don’t have gas money but-” and im already pullin out my keys and am like. sweetheart, you are a child. i am not charging a child gas money.
i literally almost lunged across the counter to throw hands with some old hag who yelled at and insulted one of our 16 y/o girls but instead i threw her sandwich at her and told her to never fucking come back
old dudes will flirt with our young girls too and i’ll be like ay man this is a truck stop, normal customer service rules dont apply here. i can and will call the cops on you.
im the only manager that actively tells them to steal food because these are teenagers and they are HUNGRY
Losers Didn’t Actually Read Frankenstein, Write an Article About It Anyway, More at 11
This article was written by one of the townspeople
So I often google the articles I see in these ridiculous tweets to see if they are satire. They are getting less likely to be satire.
However, the below article is an important addition to the above tweet. It is a response to the Flakenstein article.
The basis of it can be summed up with this quote from it
“This is not a story about being too thick to understand a 200-year-old
book. No, just as Mary Shelley’s novel was a meditation on humanity
dressed up as a horror story, this Sun piece is purely an ideological
prejudice dressed up as a cultural phenomenon. It’s about poking fun at
millennials, at the brittle snowflake generation who are the beloved
target of the balls-out, men’s men of the right. Ha ha, it’s saying. Look at the simpering liberal softies! They feel sorry for the big, bad murderous monster.“
So while the subeditor who wrote the headline could maybe have tried a little harder, the story itself is vintage Sun, akin to their discredited claim in 2003 that asylum seekers were catching swans from London’s parks and eating them. Don’t pity the asylum seekers who might be starving, have a go at them for eating our swans. They belong to the Queen, you know!
Because emphathy has no place in today’s world and as long as complete misinformation sells …
if you want to ask a bisexual or asexual person about their sexual history to verify that they’re queer, but you don’t want them to take it the wrong way, try this useful communication technique:
give them twenty dollars and go away.
As a bi person, I can attest to the beneficiality of this method.
As an ace i second that^
if twenty dollars doesn’t work for you then forty dollars is also fine
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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