This is a video of James May explaining a critical design flaw with the Tesla Model S. Basically, even though the Tesla has a giant battery in it that runs the entire car, it also has one of those tiny regular 12v car batteries that powers the doors and hood and pretty much anything else that lets you actually access the car. For some reason the 12v battery doesn't get topped off by the bigger giant battery so if it dies you're essentially locked out of the car and the only way to charge it is to disassemble your Tesla because to access the 12v battery you need to pop the hood that's powered by the dead 12v battery. So there ya go. The reason I'll never buy a Tesla Model S. That, and the fact that they cost money and I don't have any of that stuff.
Keep going for the full weirdly mesmerizing video. I could listen to James May talk about anything.
A graphics glitch caused meteorologist Jennifer McDermed to start multiplying on-air during her forecast and she did her best to accept her new reality in a psychedelic dimension. A very different reaction than the time I entered a psychedelic dimension after taking too many mushrooms and ended up just trying to stab everybody in the room. Look, if they didn't want to be stabbed then they shouldn't have morphed into the baby-eating demons.
Researchers have developed a method of making synthetic images more realistic using neural networks and the results when applied to GTA V are pretty damn impressive.
We present an approach to enhancing the realism of synthetic images. The images are enhanced by a convolutional network that leverages intermediate representations produced by conventional rendering pipelines. The network is trained via a novel adversarial objective, which provides strong supervision at multiple perceptual levels. We analyze scene layout distributions in commonly used datasets and find that they differ in important ways. We hypothesize that this is one of the causes of strong artifacts that can be observed in the results of many prior methods. To address this we propose a new strategy for sampling image patches during training. We also introduce multiple architectural improvements in the deep network modules used for photorealism enhancement. We confirm the benefits of our contributions in controlled experiments and report substantial gains in stability and realism in comparison to recent image-to-image translation methods and a variety of other baselines.
Unfortunately, you can't actually play the game in this photorealistic mode since it's only re-rendering the recorded footage. Maybe one day, but until then they need to apply the same methodology to Mortal Kombat because I've always wanted to watch video game footage and then throw up. Although finding the footage to train their model is going to be pretty difficult ever since LiveLeak shut down and took all their snuff films with it.
Keep going for the full demonstration video and check out side by side images on their project site.
Reminding me why I never step foot into the ocean, a deep-sea angler fish washed ashore in Crystal Cove, California last Friday. They usually lives in waters as deep as 3,000 feet and it's super rare for them be found intact, let alone washed up on a shore.
Last Friday morning an incredible deep sea fish washed up on shore in Crystal Cove State Park's Marine Protected Area (MPA). There are more than 200 species of angler fish worldwide and this particular fish is most likely the Pacific Football Fish. Only females possess a long stalk on the head with bioluminescent tips used as a lure to entice prey in the darkness of waters as deep as 3,000 feet! Their teeth, like pointed shards of glass, are transparent and their large mouth is capable of sucking up and swallowing prey the size of their own body. While females can reach lengths of 24 inches males only grow to be about an inch long and their sole purpose is to find a female and help her reproduce. Males latch onto the female with their teeth and become "sexual parasites," eventually coalescing with the female until nothing is left of their form but their testes for reproduction. Wild! To see an actual angler fish intact is very rare and it is unknown how or why the fish ended up on the shore. Seeing this strange and fascinating fish is a testament to the diversity of marine life lurking below the water's surface in California's MPAs and as scientists continue to learn more about these deep sea creatures it's important to reflect on how much is still to be learned from our wonderful ocean 🌊
So you're telling me the ocean is filled with sharks and jellyfish and things that look like this and people still voluntarily go in there? Yeah, no thanks. If you need me, I'll be in my bed where the only spiky-toothed monster is my girlfriend's vagina.
Elon Musk hosted SNL over the weekend and if you managed to miss it, here's his monologue along with a bunch of other sketches. It goes surprisingly well considering he's not an actor, has Asperger's, and is generally just a really, really odd person. He has such a strange communication style and for some reason it lends itself perfectly for comedy. I just wonder if there's a single person who watched who doesn't know who Elon Musk is, because they would've been very confused. "Mom, why is SNL being hosted by an alien pretending to be a human?"
Keep going for Elon's monologue as well as a bunch of other sketches.
On the same day a distracted driving bill was introduced, state Senator Andrew Brenner participated in a government video meeting while driving. While that's ironic enough, the best part was that he used a Zoom background to try and disguise the fact he was driving. Because, ya know, everybody wears a seat belt at home while taking Zoom calls. Sometimes I even put on a bike helmet too just in case.
This Ohio State Senator thought he was slick, using a Zoom background of his home office while driving... debating a bill for harsher penalties for distracted driving https://t.co/XfangsLaHXpic.twitter.com/r55ti7bsma
I've already had this exact conversation more than once and I guarantee by the end of the month I'll have had it again. The only solution is to never actually leave my home even after the pandemic is over which, honestly, is kind of what I was planning anyway. I've grown accustomed to not shaving or cutting anything ever and I'm not sure I can go back to the way things were.
This topless lunatic made a whip out of large chains and it looks like he stepped out of an anime. Also, it looks like he almost exploded his own head with that first whip. I mean, I'm not a whip expert or anything but I'm pretty sure the whip isn't supposed to come flying back and create a huge shockwave inches from your face? But props to him for carrying on and continuing to demonstrate his death machine. If it was me I would've given up after the first near-death attempt and taken up knitting instead.
Keep going for the full video. I dig this guy's energy and hope to see more from him assuming he doesn't accidentally kill himself.
