TwoWordReview's votes
Displaying vote 1 to 20 of 94

Hey, There's Science In This
I wrote a book! "Hey, There's Science In This" is a short collection of essays about unexpected science links to everyday topics. Rubber ducks at sea, a Japanese TV show, food-based paint techniques, hiking trails and much more all reveal their hidden science. The book started out as blog posts written between about 2007 and 2023, but they've been updated and rewritten for this collection.
posted by easternblot at 5:18 AM on March 5, 2024


Clone-a Lisa
Can you paint a copy of the Mona Lisa in 60 seconds? Anything over 80% is good, 85%+ very good, and 90% may be possible if you're extremely fast and accurate. While making it I posted updates to Twitter and Mastodon (click a later post to load more of thread).
posted by malevolent at 2:37 AM on August 21, 2023 - 1 comment


The Gender Bias Inside GPT-3
In honor of International Women's Day, I decided to do an experiment to see what GPT-3 might reveal about human gender bias. And boy did it reveal a lot!
posted by missjenny at 1:49 PM on March 8, 2022 - 2 comments


Guess the AI Jukebox artist
AI Jukebox is a fascinating project from OpenAI that uses cutting-edge neural neworks to perform all sorts of musical magic -- it can take a clip of a song and continue it in a new way, sing text lyrics in any artist's voice, make a song sound like it's being sung by someone else. My favorite? Tell it to generate music by an artist without any other info, and it will produce a gibberish song with nonsense lyrics... that still sounds 100% real and just like the actual singer or band with their unique style. You can hear instruments, melodies, sometimes an audience, the breathing of the lead singer -- but the whole thing is generated completely from scratch by the AI, not with samples or digital sounds. It's not flawless -- some of the songs ramble, with glitchy effects or a mutating voice. But these just add to the vibe, like it's from a dream or a parallel universe. I went through their database to find the best examples of these tracks from the most famous artists, then turned them into an audio quiz on Sporcle -- complete with AI-generated art of the artists I made to serve as hints in the second round. How many of the artists can you name?
posted by Rhaomi at 10:30 AM on March 7, 2022 - 2 comments


Birdsong Audio Separation
We made some cool new machine learning models for separating birdsong in soundscape recordings, and demonstrated how to use the separated audio to improve downstream classification. The separation model is available on github, where we've also got lots more examples. There's also a paper.
posted by kaibutsu at 12:27 PM on January 24, 2022 - 4 comments


The Kilobyte’s Gambit 1k chess game
I adapted an impressive 1.25KB chess engine to remove display code and get it down to 1024 bytes, then created a separate interface using pixel art of The Queen’s Gambit. It won’t win any tournaments, but if you’re a chess novice brace yourself for a challenge.
posted by malevolent at 7:57 AM on March 4, 2021 - 3 comments


How To Remember Everything: Tips And Tricks To Become A Memory Master
As a kid, I struggled with any subject that required memorization. As an adult, I found out that there are specific techniques to make memorizing things much easier. I was glad to master a new skill. BUT WHY DID NOBODY TEACH ME THIS STUFF SOONER? It would have made school so much easier! I’m a former contributor to The Onion, and I’ve written for The New Yorker, the BBC, and HBO, and I’m a big believer in Beverly Cleary’s advice: “If you don’t see the book you want on the shelves, write it.” So, I wrote the book I wish I could have read at age 12. It’s a funny, kid-friendly guide to remembering… well, everything.
posted by yankeefog at 9:02 AM on October 16, 2020 - 3 comments


New cookbook: "How to Instant Pot"
Fan of the Instant Pot? Puzzled by it? Intrigued? My latest cookbook, How to Instant Pot, will help you get the most from the Instant Pot, whether you're a beginner or an expert.
posted by veggieboy at 6:58 AM on October 2, 2017 - 9 comments


Three unofficial Metafilter web-extensions
Rewrites of three existing Metafilter Greasemonkey scripts in web extension format.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 7:06 AM on September 25, 2017 - 5 comments


Call Ahead
I hate making phone calls, so I made a service to do it for me. Is a restaurant open? Does a store carry something in stock? Just text us, and one of our VAs will call for you.
posted by philosophistry at 7:43 AM on September 28, 2017 - 4 comments


Peer inside container ships using a radio
This software library helps you capture AIS messages broadcast by passing ships and then to join them with public data sets that reveal what the ships are carrying.
posted by refractal at 10:28 AM on September 26, 2017


I trained an A.I. to Ask Metafilter...
Last time, I trained an LSTM neural network to generate British placenames. This time, I trained one on Ask Metafilter questions to see if the questions it generated might tell us anything about humanity. (Spoilers: yes, of course it did).
posted by danhon at 5:00 PM on August 3, 2017 - 12 comments


Twack: Slack Interface for Twitter
If Twitter were built today, it would be designed from the beginning with chat in mind. Screenshot
posted by philosophistry at 7:47 AM on July 26, 2017 - 5 comments


Tameline — Your Twitter, Organized
Tameline organizes your Twitter feed by giving everybody only one row. Loud users no longer crowd out quiet users. Here's an example.
posted by philosophistry at 7:35 AM on April 13, 2016 - 6 comments


More cowbell
Yet another 0.999/1.000/1.001 phase music thingumy. For reasons unknown this comment popped into my mind today, and having some spare time, I did the next best thing.
posted by farlukar at 9:34 AM on July 1, 2017 - 3 comments


Art by Josh Millard
I've been painting a lot lately, exploring in particular mathematical themes and especially variations on the Menger sponge. I'm proud of the progress I've made, and have built a simple site to show off my finished work: Art by Josh Millard.

I've also been writing about art process stuff on my blog, e.g. a step-by-step document of the execution of yesterday's new painting, Five Concentric Wireframe Cubes.
posted by cortex at 11:14 AM on June 7, 2017 - 10 comments



Falsehoods-to-Bullshit
I mentioned this idea in a politics thread and decided to throw it together. This replaces "falsehood(s)" with "bullshit" on any web page. As a bonus, it replaces "false" with "full-of-shit." It makes the news a bit more readable. Screenshot
posted by rouftop at 10:38 AM on March 26, 2017 - 1 comment


Is the Future Already Set?
We think the past is immutable and the future is yet to be written. But is that an illusion? Einstein's special relativity suggests that it is, as I explain in this short animated video produced in collaboration with BBC Earth.
Also featuring: space invaders! 🚀🚀🚀
First in a new series.
posted by freelanceastro at 1:07 PM on February 6, 2017


Wikinaut
Wikinaut is a compendium of intriguing, unusual and extraordinary Wikipedia excerpts.
posted by Operation Afterglow at 12:52 PM on January 10, 2017 - 3 comments


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