Piss and Vinegar

So the folks on Ravelry’s LSG forum are quickly becoming some of my favorite people on the Internet. They enabled the fiber-wrangling wonder that is SkyKnit, feeding it a dataset of knitting patterns to learn from and then turning its mistake-prone patterns into hilarious reality. They’re hard at work collecting a dataset of crochet hats for SkyKnit’s sibling, HAT3000. And it turns out there’s an (also 18+) sister group of LSG folks who are also nail polish fanciers, and who have amassed large personal lists of nail polish colors. Why? I don’t know, but it’s a machine learning algorithm’s dream.

The nail polish fanciers (the group is called “There’s Fiber in My Polish”) graciously contributed their name collections to the cause, filling a spreadsheet with several thousand entries in just a few hours. I already knew that neural networks can generate paint colors, but this is the first time I’d tried to get colors out of a neural network that was previously trained on metal bands.

Thanks to its head start on the rules of spelling English words, this algorithm didn’t go through the usual alphabet soup phase of learning about vowels and spaces. It did, however, go through an initial phase where it produced nail polish colors like this:

Murder Earth Blue Slaughter All Death    Bear Hollow Orange Flay Pink Silence I Dared Sacred Rose Mange Opal You Death  Pink The Foull Sea of Leather Stray Color Eye Claw Green Chambers of Flame Shades of Flesh Brutally Bright Mind Machine Blue Dirty Flesh Night Burphouse of Poppy Transis

As it learned more about nail polish names, though, it gradually forgot about its dark past - this phenomenon is called “catastrophic forgetting” and is part of the reason that machine learning algorithms have to specialize at one task at a time.

It started creating polish names that were actually pretty believable:

Purple Skystone Shimmerelle Sweet Eclipse Neon Sunshine Fire In the Starry Fell Moonland Purple That Orange Spice OMG Power Indigo Dragon Flame Dust Plummerine Teal Moon Sunblaster Neon Pow

Several would also make good names for punk bands:

Ink Flame Electric Frost Blue Wine Fire Splat Batberry Lime Force Bike String Neon Mint Alice Twilight Mashery Charming Machine Butter Street Mind Sparkle Shattered Girls Lead Not the Poppy

Nail polish names can be very strange (“I’d never eat your brains,” “Hands Off My Kielbasa!”  “My Gecko Does Tricks,” “Fishwife”), but these would give even the strangest a run for their money:

Bloshing Glip Pants of Sun Bat in Love Grinch Pink Clearly Stare’s Hoot Mews, New Universe Science Stars Pickwool Mint Space Holly Gold Be Tangeling The Green is In the Be Glitter Metallic With All of the Alive Pant Summer Up of the mangle Don’t Man Splat Grape Have Dorkanna Angel Wants Magic Sharker I’m the Sunshiple Little Dangest Street Dance Pants Pickles Green Candy in Santa Girls Burblipp Collide Loopstorm Ink-Orange Me, Orange Chunky The Midnight Doodle What Hello Glake Decisonator

And of course there was an entire category of names that will probably not catch on.

Love Rot Fail Pink Wart Boy Blood 204 Dead Pearl Social Mace Mooned Black Old With Anger Suffering Lights Acid Touch Green Evil Gold Charming Tick Diamond Flesh Song of the Booty Sorry Green Fail The Baby Sore Love Diamond Pink Ashes in the Green Creamscrap Golden Bop Dragon

Were there names that were even worse? Heck yeah. You can read them, plus a few other bonus names, at the “There’s Fiber in My Polish” group, or you can enter your email here and I’ll send them to you.

just look at these!!

if you can afford to, give her some business! businesses like her are much better to support then people like jeffree starr who is a notoriously racist devil.

her makeup is also just generally 100% better and also better for you, as big makeup companies tend to put icky shit in makeup.

peter parker: well, thank ya for askin’. i used the bittenbinder method. when i saw the titan approachin’, i chewed up a tab of alka-seltzer i carry with me at all times. this created a foaming-at-the-mouth appearance that made it look like i had rabies. now i’ve thrown him off his rhythm. then i reach into his jacket pocket where i had planted an infinity stone and i went, ‘whoa! what the fuck is this?’ and he goes, ‘that’s not mine. i never seen that before.’ i go, ‘boo-hoo, it’s in your jacket. you’re doing two to ten and your kids are going into social services.’ now he’s cryin’! then i grab an arc reactor and i beat him on the torso with it. ‘cause as any avenger will tell ya, an arc reactor doesn’t leave bruises.

make me choose: 

↳ [anonymous asked]  → Tom Hiddleston or Tom Holland

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

—

Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’ “

(via gothhabiba )

Yes.

(via geardrops)