Odd Stuff (Part 2)

general topics
2433

Trash pandas with wings.

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2434
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2435

It is indeed dismaying to watch vehicles go by on US roads now. Everywhere I go, behemoths outnumber regular cars (which I guess may no longer be “regular”).

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2436

It’s like people have completely forgotten about $4+/gallon for regular. What sucks is that small, reasonable cars are getting harder and harder to come by. Honda is no longer bringing the Fit here, with the HR-V (basically an overgrown Fit) taking its place. Watch the car companies get caught flat-footed yet again as gas prices creep up and people suddenly realize they’re lucky if they get 25 mpg with that gigantic SUV.

Small and nimble has saved my bacon more than once. I don’t need a lumbering behemoth to get me around.

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2437

51 posts were split to a new topic: What’s your Pulp novel cover?

2438

One of the strong memories I have is after I spent a year in the UK (my Dad had a sabbatical) coming back to the US in around 86-87 was…"look at the size of those cars. They weren’t high SUV style, but plenty of landboats and huge hunks of steel compared to the UK.

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2451

We have seen that “owning the libs” is a more powerful motivator than money or even life itself.

Higher gas prices won’t be enough to change those minds.

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2475

I got a 50.2 percentile. Average creativity doesn’t seem very creative to me.

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2477

You need to think more creatively about that!

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2487

An Australian Court has decided that an artificial intelligence can be recognised as an inventor in a patent submission.

In a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who has filed and lost similar cases in other jurisdictions, Australia’s Federal Court last month heard and decided that the nation’s Commissioner of Patents erred when deciding that an AI can’t be considered an inventor.

Justice Beach reached that conclusion because nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human.

[…]

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2488

I found this nifty little tool:

It looks like deep dream with a little more control around the neural network, and fewer psychedelic dogs.

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2492

Was 50.2 your score or was there a separate percentile somewhere? Because if it was the score I have bad news for you - 78 is the average score (I got 77.31).

I would still not feel too bad though because they are only claiming to look at verbal creativity, which let’s face it is one narrow facet of creativity.

I am also not sure that I agree with their methodology, since I think it is more creative to be able to come up with subtle and unexpected connections between words and concepts then it is to come up with a list of things that are as unrelated as possible, which seems like a more mechanical task.

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2496

Yeah, that was the percentile. I scored just over 78. I agree that it isn’t exactly creativity that they are testing.

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2497

More creative than me then! :wink:

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2499

Well I scored something like 98 and some change because I thought I had better pick a couple more basic words since I wasn’t sure what counted as “different” to the program so on the off chance it was considering word length or sylable count I went with something simple like “porridge” or “wax.” From a glance at the results I see that “different” is not being measured that way.

Neat test but it’s kind of conflating creativity with vocabulary which… Not sure that’s great.

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2500
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2501

Thanks cicadas!

ETA more odd cicada news…

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2502

Mrs FSogol is suffering from these bites. Luckily they don’t have a taste for me.

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