Curly Comrade

Love it.

Oh my god

Cookie Monster is all wound up. The Count has him hold up his furry blue fingers, count them (of course), and blow on each one in turn as if he were blowing out a birthday candle. Afterward, Cookie declares, in his familiar growly voice, that he feels much better.

“Hey! Me feel terrific! Me calm. Me relaxed.”

You won’t be catching this scene on HBO or PBS. It’s part of a special initiative called Sesame Street in Communities. Free materials, including videos, books and games, will be released today to help parents and caregivers, in turn, help young children cope with traumatic experiences.

For Traumatized Children, An Offer Of Help From The Muppets

- remember that game where someone yells “SHATNER” and you have to overact? same thing except it’s “TRELAWNEY” and you have to use whatever you’re holding to make a ludicrous prediction

- a more popular variation is “LOCKHART” to make up a pompous story about using whatever you’re holding to drive the [monster] out of [town]

- calling hippogriffs “leggy birbs”

- “Our beloved headmaster Albert Dumpsterfire/Aqueous Disillusionment/Aberdeen Decapitation…”

So if you’ve ever picked out paint, you know that every infinitesimally different shade of blue, beige, and gray has its own descriptive, attractive name. Tuscan sunrise, blushing pear, Tradewind, etc… There are in fact people who invent these names for a living. But given that the human eye can see millions of distinct colors, sooner or later we’re going to run out of good names. Can AI help?

For this experiment, I gave the neural network a list of about 7,700 Sherwin-Williams paint colors along with their RGB values. (RGB = red, green, and blue color values) Could the neural network learn to invent new paint colors and give them attractive names?

One way I have of checking on the neural network’s progress during training is to ask it to produce some output using the lowest-creativity setting. Then the neural network plays it safe, and we can get an idea of what it has learned for sure.

By the first checkpoint, the neural network has learned to produce valid RGB values - these are colors, all right, and you could technically paint your walls with them. It’s a little farther behind the curve on the names, although it does seem to be attempting a combination of the colors brown, blue, and gray.

By the second checkpoint, the neural network can properly spell green and gray. It doesn’t seem to actually know what color they are, however.

Let’s check in with what the more-creative setting is producing.

…oh, okay.

Later in the training process, the neural network is about as well-trained as it’s going to be (perhaps with different parameters, it could have done a bit better - a lot of neural network training involves choosing the right training parameters). By this point, it’s able to figure out some of the basic colors, like white, red, and grey:

Although not reliably.

In fact, looking at the neural network’s output as a whole, it is evident that:

The neural network really likes brown, beige, and grey.

The neural network has really really bad ideas for paint names.

To Whom It May Concern:

A lot of people have expressed a desire for an update on President Donald J. Trump’s health since his inauguration. I have been the personal physician of President Donald J. Trump since 1980 and I am here to say that Mr. Trump’s health is absolutely better than ever.

Since being sworn in, Donald Trump has lost 50 pounds and gained 17 inches of height. He’s the longest president who has ever lived. His livers are both functioning flawlessly. His blood sets an all-time record for the state of New York for “most” and his blood pressure was rated “excellent” by seven different Fox News Twitter polls. He doesn’t even have one cholesterol.

I can say this unequivocally: Donald Trump has the most bones. Scientists estimate that he now has around 900 bones in his body and more are being discovered every day. Some of those bones have never been seen before. They allow him to be really good at presidential things like signing executive orders and making love nightly to his wife who wants him to.

Mr. Trump’s test results have been astonishingly excellent. He actually has a blood type we’ve never seen before: “All.” It’s both the universal donor and universal recipient, and sprinkling it on your penis makes your penis bigger. Mr. Trump’s blood is gorgeous. It has a rich color that’s hard to describe, but if I had to put it into words, I might call it “red.”

President Donald Trump has no family history of cancer, diabetes, or death. The president’s family members are immortal beings that walk the earth without end, craving the sweet release of death that will never come unless they make a deal with a cool witch. Donald Trump will never die, he will just keep growing vertically forever until he lives in space. It’s really astonishing.

His physical strength is extraordinary. He can lift as much as a mother whose child is trapped under a car, but he’s more attractive than that mother and he hasn’t let himself go like she has. Have you seen the way she dresses lately? The hypothetical mother in this simile is a total chunk. 4 at best. As the famous doctor Hippocrates once said, “Would not hit.”

Since the Inauguration, Mr. Trump has kept an extremely active lifestyle. He starts every morning by walking straight up into the sky and then walking down again. He also visits me regularly for checkups. Mr. Trump doesn’t let me touch him because of gay, so I just eyeball it and give him a once over. I can usually tell just by looking how much blood is in him that day or which liver has taken the lead, so it’s not a super intensive process.

Mr. Trump is not only the healthiest president that has ever served, but also the most handsome. I usually want to kiss President Trump when I see him, but I would never break the doctor-patient trust, so instead I kiss the portrait of him I drew on my little note pad. There have been no presidents that even come close to President Trump in terms of overall health and hotness. Franklin Pierce was pretty hot, but his body wasn’t great. James Garfield was more cute than hot. President Trump is the total package. I know this because of my stethoscope.

Just to give a little more background on me, I’ve been a doctor for years. I got into medicine the same way a lot of doctors do: I once took an unmarked pill that I found under a toilet in a public restroom, and the next thing I knew, I was blacked out doing surgery on a man on a Benihana table with the big knives they got over there. I flipped this guy’s appendix right into my hat. And that’s when I caught the bug, for surgery and for tetanus!

Now, I want to address some of the slanderous things that have been said about me. It’s just like these coastal elites to say I’m not qualified as a physician. They think you need fancy things, like a diploma from Harvard Med School or a diploma from a med school or a GED or a car or medicine or clean hands. You don’t need those to be a doctor! All you need is the right attitude and a good sense of humor and to be Jewish and a blank death certificate just in case!

This is America. We’re not “fancy” here. You’re supposed to be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and put a bunch of clamps in a guy and see what tubes you can clamp up without making him sleep forever. My grandfather was a blue-collar worker, and so was my father. I am a red-collar worker because my collar is always covered in spurting blood. I may not know art or science or what a “lung” is, but I do know that I love America and am a lung-doctor!

Because of my love of America and Donald Trump, it is an honor to be his physician. Donald Trump could teach us all a thing or two about health. Not only is he the healthiest human ever, but also the healthiest dog, house and Faberge Egg. I wish him luck as he continues on his endless journey.

Love,

don’t yell at me

don’t yell at me

don’t yell at me

don’t yell at me

don’t

yell

at

me

What a cutea!

By which I mean: if you’ve just called your best mate an absolute dickhead, you can’t then call a hated politician something that’s (technically) worse, like a total fuckwit, because that would imply either that you were really insulting your mate or that you like the politician. Instead, you have to use a milder epithet, like bastard, to convey your seething hatred for the second person. But if your opening conversational gambit is slagging someone off, then it’s acceptable to go big (”The PM’s a total cockstain!”) at the outset.