Filtered for what celebrities and dinosaurs look like

09.58, Wednesday 1 Nov 2017

1.

Neural network image synthesis: artificial intelligence systems are really good at generating super-realistic, fake images. Like the faces of celebrities.

Given the synthesised images can be made to be very similar to one-another, it’s possible to make a long chain of synthesised images - all faces, all similar to the one previous - and turn that into an animation.

Resulting in this video: One hour of imaginary celebrities.

It’s like David Lynch took over the Daily Mail showbiz section.

2.

Mapping startup Mapzen put together some slides of gorgeous forms and lines, abstracted from maps.

Explore the world of form. Scroll through the whole thing.

See also: photos of highway interchanges by Peter Andrew.

3.

Generated animation of driving a car at night. Tail lights, rain on the window.

(You’ll probably need to run this on a desktop, but click fullscreen.)

Also, this video clip from a game about looking out of a train window. Full game here: To West.

4.

Dinosaurs aren’t drawn right.

dinosaur illustrations should take more cues from animals living today. Our world is full of unique animals that have squat fatty bodies, with all kinds of soft tissue features that are unlikely to have survived in fossils, such as pouches, wattles, or skin flaps.

Here’s what present day animals would look like, if we drew them as badly as we draw dinosaurs.

The illustration Swans imagined as though they were featherless dinosaurs is particularly terrifying.

Of course we’re not talking about about dinosaurs now because they are indeed now particularly skinny, being skeletons.

This is in relation to millions of years ago, before the dinosaurs got raptured, before we used their fermented meat to drive our cars.

See also: Egyptian mummies were dug up and burnt to power steam trains. (Or rather, they weren’t. It turns out this was made up by Mark Twain.)

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