Another [https://medium.com/@voshart/photoreal-roman-emperor-project-236be7f06c8f] attempt to create life-like portraits of Roman emperors using machine learning.

Why [https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2020/07/25/worst-tool-for-the-job/]simple, cheap tools are the best place to start.

This is a good two part series on the origins of Indian conglomerate Reliance and its extremely successful telecom division, Jio: Part I [https://hind.substack.com/p/reliance-origins/], Part II [https://hind.substack.com/p/from-oil-to-jio]. I wasn't in India in

Incredible [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEyAs3NWH4A]photos of Mars in 4K from NASA's rovers.

AI Dungeon [https://play.aidungeon.io/] is a text-based adventure powered by GPT-3 (the free version uses GPT-2, a less impressive model). It's great fun for about 15 minutes; the AI can be quite creative at times and make up a story

Duck Hunt game screenshot from Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Duck_hunt_pic.PNG]I've always been curious about this, and now MentalFloss has written an explainer [https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/26875/how-did-duck-hunt-gun-work]on it: > When you point

A collection [https://mobile.twitter.com/xuenay/status/1283312640199196673]of frankly incredible things OpenAI's new model GPT-3 can do. This includes being able to (almost) solve coding problems.

A paper [https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.03394]in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society puts forward a new hypothesis for the Fermi paradox. Their hypothesis in a nutshell: Aliens are asleep, waiting for the universe to cool down  so they can do

Look [https://window-swap.com/]through windows from around the world.

A video [https://twitter.com/mikewarburton/status/1280405483334090752]taken in Halifax, England in 1902, colourised by modern technology. There's a whole series of such colourised videos from various cities in this [https://twitter.com/JoaquimCampa/status/1251243294157348864]Twitter thread.

This [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRt-fquxnij9wDnFJnpPS2Q/videos]amazing channel uses a speech synthesis algorithm to do deep fakes of celebrity voices. Here are a few of the best ones: Jay-Z raps the "To Be, Or Not To Be" soliloquy from Hamlet:

Why [https://graphics.reuters.com/HEALTH-CORONAVIRUS/TIME/gjnvwwjegvw/]time seems to be distorted during the lockdowns. Basically, our perception of the duration of time is based on the number of interesting events that happen. A month with many interesting events seems longer than a

A profile [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/03/07/voltaires-garden]of the French philosopher from The New Yorker, worth reading.: > It would be nice to say that Voltaire was a courageous man whom no amount of comfort could seduce. The truth is

The Pareto principle came from the observation it's common to find distributions where 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes – 80% of land in Italy is owned by 20% of people, 80% of book sales are from 20% of

From [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/12/05/the-fine-art-of-opportunism/]the Ribbonfarm blog, an article on the art of opportunism: > It [opportunism] works because opportunists are humble enough to realize that the random forces of nature are more powerful than themselves. That these random