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Does A Deep Neural Network Like Your #Selfie?

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Best Selfies
Andrej Karpathy trained a Convolutional Neural Network with a dataset of 2 million photographs to determine what makes the perfect selfie. The image above contains the top 100 best selfies (here are the 1,000 best selfies) Andrej concludes that the best selfies have these qualities:

  1. Be female. Women are consistently ranked higher than men. In particular, notice that there is not a single guy in the top 100.
  2. Face should occupy about 1/3 of the image. Notice that the position and pose of the face is quite consistent among the top images. The face always occupies about 1/3 of the image, is slightly tilted, and is positioned in the center and at the top. Which also brings me to:
  3. Cut off your forehead. What’s up with that? It looks like a popular strategy, at least for women.
  4. Show your long hair. Notice the frequent prominence of long strands of hair running down the shoulders.
  5. Oversaturate the face. Notice the frequent occurrence of over-saturated lighting, which often makes the face look much more uniform and faded out. Related to that,
  6. Put a filter on it. Black and White photos seem to do quite well, and most of the top images seem to contain some kind of a filter that fades out the image and decreases the contrast.
  7. Add a border. You will notice a frequent appearance of horizontal/vertical white borders.

Andrej also created a TwitterBot that will judge your selfie. Simply attach your selfie (or a include a link) to a tweet that mentions @deepselfie anywhere in it. The bot will analyze your selfie and give you its opinion (e.g. score 90% means that the Selfie Bot is 90% sure yours would be in top half of selfies. Selfie Bot was not impressed with my selfie.

More here.

This Used To Be My Jam

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This Is My Jam

It happened. This Is My Jam is no longer with us. But it died in the most beautiful way. Although This Is My Jam no longer accepts new submissions the site has been completely archived and remains for your listening pleasure. What a refreshing change from the usual “We’re deleting everything in a week because we got acquired/ran out of money.” thing we’ve heard so much of lately. No Jams were lost.

One really cool feature of the archive (here is my archive page) is the automatic generation of a Spotify playlist from your submitted jams. Though Spotify on had only 25 of my 37 jams you can listen to them all on the archived Wall O’ Jams. I’m sad to see This Is My Jam go but I’m glad they left with such dignity.

Definitive List Of Things You Should Have Already Experienced On The Internet Part 2014

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Greg Rutter has once again created a definitive list of the 99 things you should have already experienced on the internet unless you’re a loser or old or something. Once again, it is a little YouTube heavy, me thinks. But it still a great way to burn an evening. There are a bunch on this years list that I haven’t seen yet. Maybe I really am getting old or something.

01) First Kiss
02) Apparently Kid
03) Hater Blockers
04) The Ice Bucket Challenge
05) In My Mum’s Car
06) Swedish Soldier’s “Greased Lightning”
07) Skateboarding Cat
08) Mr. Pimp Goodgame
09) Kayden and Rain
10) Runner Falls In The Snow After Interview
11) Shia LaBeouf – Live
12) Climbing The World’s Second Highest Tower
13) Snowboarding NYC
14) Brian Williams Sings “Rapper’s Delight”
15) Twitch Plays Pokemon
16) 10 Hours Of Walking In New York As A Woman
17) Cleaning Dancing Roommate
18) Seth Rogen’s Alzheimer’s Senate Testimony
19) Fake Chef Pranks Morning TV Shows
20) Glow Stick Blows Up In Kid’s Face
22) Two Women Caught Stealing Canopy On Beach
22) The Camera In The Mirror
23) Barack Obama’s Between Two Ferns
24) The Ice Cream Van
25) Demon Baby Attack
26) Good Looking Parents Sing “Love Is an Open Door”
27) Superman With A GoPro
28) Andrei Linde Celebrates Physics Breakthrough
29) KTLA Anchors React To Earthquake
30) Louis C.K. and Bradley Cooper
31) Grandmas Smoking Weed For The First Time
32) I Might Boycott Bath And Body Works Rant
33) BASE Jump From The Freedom Tower
34) Instant Karma
35) Action Movie Kid
36) Slow Life
37) Coke + Nutella + Mentos + Durex ITALIA world record
38) Circle Of Life On Flight Home
39) When Mom Isn’t Home
40) Classroom Phone Call April Fools Prank
41) Kids React To The Walkman
42) The Futility Of Existence
43) Kicked In The Head By A Train
44) Baby Conducts Choir
45) Dog Carjacking
46) Reveal To Grandpa
47) Tiny Hamsters Eating Tiny Burritos
48) 100 Days Of Dance
49) Tempura Shrimp Canon
50) Shovel Fight
51) Ellen’s Oscar Selfie
52) Three Year Epic Selfie
53) My Cat Saved My Son
54) Bunny Eating Rasperberries
55) 300 Sandwiches
56) Amazing Jam Session
57) 26 Country Proposal
58) Aug(de)mented Reality
59) Basejumping Dog
60) Luigi Death Stare
61) Full Cycle Inside A Dishwasher
62) Blatant Racism In Cheektowaga, NY
63) Sir Mix-A-Lot With The Seattle Symphony
64) All By Myself
65) Musicless Music Video: Dancing In The Streets
66) Fireworks Filmed With A Drone
67) F*ck Her Right In The P*ssy
68) I Dare You To Watch This Entire Video
69) Pallate Surfing
70) An Oscar-Worthy Toddler Tantrum
71) Zach King’s Magic Vines
72) Sadie Doesn’t Want Her Brother To Grow Up
73) British NFL Commentary
74) Things You Can’t Do When You’re Not A Toddler
75) Seal Wants To Surf
76) Been Walking Up Late For Some Reason
77) Between Two Ferns: Brad Pitt
78) People Power Frees Man Trapped By Train
79) The Gap by Ira Glass
80) East Hills Mall Back To School Commercial
81) Wisdom Teeth Ice Bucket Challenge
82) That J Crew Gingham Shirt
83) Run, Walter, Run!
84) Mascot Traffic Accident
85) Grandpa and Grandmaster Flash
86) Mutant Giant Spider Dog
87) Jam Session Bat Attack
88) First iPhone 6 Gets Dropped
89) You Poked My Heart
90) Dog Thinks Terrace Door Is Closed
91) I Smell Like Beef
92) Kid Goes Diva
93) Auto-complete Song
94) Love At First Touch
95) Dallas Airport Homophobe
96) Walking On Clean Ice In Slovakia
97) Coyote & Crow Dance
98) Crash And Burn Weezer Cover
99) iPhone 6 Plus Bend Test

I always try to add a few that I think Greg Missed, so here you go:
100) Deez Nuts

Flooded Google Street View

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Flooded street

This is what my street could look like according World Under Water. It is a Google Maps powered website (Chrome only) that it lets you pick any Street View location and see what it will look like after sea levels have risen. The site was created to bring awareness to World Environment Day on June 5. Unfortunately it uses the same effect for every location and the sea level doesn’t change depending on your geography. Regardless, it’s an admirable idea and the illusion is fairly believable.

Some Say The World Will End In Fire, Some Say In Ice

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This comic by Stuart McMillen is an adaptation from Neil Postman’s book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. It compares Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” with George Orwell’s “1984”. With the recent revelations of NSA surveillance, I think the jury is still out on which vision is more correct. I think both Huxley and Orwell were right – the iron fist of government and the attention-sapping distractions of technology are dangers to modern society. The whole thing resonates quite loudly in today’s internet landscape.

Amusing Ourselves To Death

Denver Public Library Lookup Extension

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My family is full of voracious readers. We all spend a pretty penny at Amazon.com and related sites buying books we are interested in while our Denver Public Library cards sit dormant in the junk drawer. I wanted a way to save some money and support our local library. So I created a Chrome Extension to do just that. Now when we are about to buy the next book for our book club from our favorite online retailer we can, with one click, check to see if the Denver Public Library branch has it available first.

Use the Denver Public Library Lookup Extension for Chrome to instantly search the Denver Public Library at the same time you’re viewing pages at online bookstores. Get the extension by clicking the button below or by visiting the Chrome Web Store.

Right now this extension is for Google’s Chrome web browser only. If you are using Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, drag the button below up to your to your bookmarks bar.

More detail instructions and some caveats below.
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Denver Public Library Lookup ExtensionRead More »

How To Easily Turn Your Twitter Stream Into A Linkblog Of Your Friends

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Since Twitter allows you to search the tweets of just the people you follow (in addition to “all” and “top” tweets), it is easy to create a Linkblog of all your friends. Simply enter “filter:links http” into your search bar. Easy and productive. This is great little trick if you are the type of user that gets on twitter to find cool links to read, watch, or listen to.

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