Kids, grafitti is wrong and you should never do it. But if you happen to have a Sharpie in your pocket when walking past an unadorned stop sign, it’s a truism of life that the obvious jokes can also be the funniest. 😉
This was accomplished by the researchers watching a bunch of YouTube videos and creating a database of which parts of their brain “lit up” while watching different images then having a computer match it against another library of video clips.
(It’s fitting they use Google’s YouTube service because, in many ways, their technique sounds not dissimilar to the process Google uses to match your search query against its massive-database of potential web sites you might be looking for.)
Here’s how it works directly from the linked article:
Three volunteers, all neuroscientists on the project, watched hours of video clips while inside an fMRI machine. Outside volunteers weren’t used because of the amount of time and effort involved, and because the neuroscientists were highly motivated to focus on the videos, ensuring better brain images.
Using the brain-imaging data, Gallant and his colleagues built a “dictionary” that linked brain activity patterns to individual video clips — much like their 2008 study did with pictures. This brain-movie translator was able to identify the movie that produced a given brain signal 95 percent of the time, plus or minus one second in the clip, when given 400 seconds of clips to choose from. Even when the computer model was given 1 million seconds of clips, it picked the right second more than 75 percent of the time.
With this accurate brain-to-movie-clip dictionary in hand, the researchers then introduced a new level of challenge. They gave the computer model 18 million seconds of new clips, all randomly downloaded from YouTube videos. None of the experiment participants had ever seen these clips.
The researchers then ran the participants’ brain activity through the model, commanding it to pick the clips most likely to trigger each second of activity. The result was a from-scratch reconstruction of the person’s visual experience of the movie. In other words, if the participants had seen a clip that showed Steve Martin sitting on the right side of the screen, the program could look at their brain activity and pick the YouTube clip that looked most like Martin sitting on the right side of the screen.
Here’s a video of what the translated video looks like:
Sometimes I think about the difference between my life and that of my grandparents and great-grandparents – the Internet, man on the moon, heart transplants, etc. Then I try to guess what life might be like for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And stuff like this starts to come *really* close!
R.E.M., an alternative favourite of the 1980’s who parlayed that early attention into being one of the most successful bands of the 1990’s (and then one of the most uneven bands of the 2000’s) announced their break-up today (given their politics – and the amicable nature of the break – perhaps fittingly on World Peace Day?)
R.E.M. is one of my favourite bands of all-time and when pressed, I’ll usually cite “Find the River” as my favourite song of all-time.
I’ll have more to say about R.E.M. in the list below but first, a warning. If you’re a hipster, you’ll probably want to stop reading right now as this list is not very original at all and my uncool is about to show.
1. The Beatles
We start off the unoriginality with the band widely considered the most popular, most influential, most covered, highest selling of all-time. But the trick is that it wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid, one of my best friends was a huge Beatles fan (mostly because his dad was.) I was a huge Elvis fan (mostly because my dad was.) And ironically, our dads had been best friends when they were younger too – still not sure how my dad went for Elvis and his dad went for the Beatles but there you go.
Anyhow, one day I woke up in dorms deadly sick (for real, not alcohol-induced.) I decided to skip classes but had enough energy to get on a local BBS (a pre-cursor of the web for you kids out there!) and I saw a post by someone who was wanting to sell their entire collection of Beatles CD’s (possibly to raise funds for their own alcohol-induced illness?) In a slightly fevered state, I sent a message saying I wanted the discs and the person even offered to deliver them. Later that day, a knock on the door, an exchange of money I couldn’t really afford (I still remember the total was $60. In the days when used CD’s went for $10 each, this was a steal for maybe 10-12 CD’s!) I popped in one of the discs and with the fever creating a “1960’s” state of mind, I finally *got* the Beatles. Wow. I lay in bed all day listening to one album after another through my hazy head and have been a huge fan ever since – not only reading but collecting books about them, watching movies & videos, reading interviews and so on.
2. The Tragically Hip
Although I’m not as big of a fan as I once was, there was a time in my life when The Hip pretty much defined my life. I was the guy who went to record stores at midnight on the day their new album was released, followed them around to nearby cities to catch various shows on their tours and was part of the tape trading community that sprung up around the band. There was and is so much I loved about the Hip – the poetic, obtuse lyrics, the riffs, the Canadiana, Gord Downie’s stage presence, the jam-band improvisions in music and lyrics, the shows that were never the same twice.
3. R.E.M.
I might have heard one of their earlier songs on MuchMusic but one of my first R.E.M. memories is being at Provincial Drama Finals and there was a dance for all the participating schools. I still remember that the song “Stand” came on and one school’s kids all got up and did the dance moves from the song together while I sat with my friends on the edge of the dance floor thinking “Wow, that *never* happens at our school!” “Out of Time” was released and was huge of course. It played a pretty major role in my life and skirting along the edge of “too much information” territory, I can state that, although it wasn’t the album playing when I lost my virginity, it played a big part of events earlier in the evening! (What’s the emoticon for the embarrassed face?) Not just for that reason, I became a big fan of the band and their music. But if “Out of Time” was their biggest album, “Automatic for the People” was their masterwork – an entire album about death, dying, mortality, love and loss which is still ultimately uplifting. So good.
4. Blue Rodeo
There are a few bands that could fill out this list in that I own all their albums, like most of their songs, have maybe seen them in concert – U2, Radiohead, Wilco, Weakerthans, Spirit of the West, Beautiful South, Blur, The Submarines who are a recent discovery – but I think I’ll give the nod to another Canadian band who I find consistently excellent in their albums, who add a bit of a countryish flare to this list and who are often called Canada’s Lennon/McCartney which, based on who is #1 on this list, gives them a big boost in the rankings!
5. Boo Radleys
I had to put at least one feeble attempt at showing my “hipster indie cred” on the list and the Boo Radleys are it. Perhaps best known for a cover of “There She Goes” on the “So I Married An Axe Murderer” soundtrack, they were a second-tier Britpop band when I was in England in 1995. But for whatever reason, they connected with me in a way that other popular bands of the day – Supergrass, Stereophonics, Suede, etc. – didn’t. And while other top-tier bands like Oasis and Blur battled to be the “new Beatles”, I think the Boo Radleys actually deserved that title by being most similar to the Beatles in their endless sonic innovations wrapped in delicious pop wrappers. Yum!
The Westboro Baptist Church are a truly odious group of folks (widely referred to as a hate group) who travel around “protesting” various events that they somehow think are connected to homosexuality. But when they chose to protest a recent Foo Fighters concert, the band had a response planned. (Of course this raises questions about whether it’s better to address groups like this or ignore them.)
Shea and I were out to Indian Head yesterday to take in a fundraiser for the local NDP candidate in this year’s Provincial Election with guest speaker, Dr. Ryan Meili (plus a pretty amazing special guest speaker too.)
Here’s some random thoughts…
– we heard about the fundraiser at a wedding in IH about a month ago when the mother-of-the-bride, who knew we’d worked on Ryan’s campaign, mentioned it to us. (Last night, she apologized for being so brash as to promote the event at her daughter’s wedding but we just laughed – “It was the perfect time to tell us!”)
– Ryan Meili did his talk on “The Politics of Health” and though I’ve heard it before, it’s such a good presentation, I think I could listen to it repeatedly. Ryan’s a great speaker too – very engaging! And happy to hear him mention he’s looking to publish a book on the topic sometime in the new year.
– Also happy to hear him give a solid non-answer when a person in the crowd asked if he’d be getting back in politics – especially since I thought he was firmly in the “no more politics” camp. I think Ryan truly believes what he says in his speech which he tells as a parable – if you notice a drowning kid go by in a river, you’ll go in to save the kid. And if you notice another, you’ll save that one too. And the next one. That’s healthcare. But eventually, you have to go up river to see what’s causing so many kids to end up drowning in the river in the first place. That’s politics. So he knows that politics are the only way to broadly change society in a way that medicine doesn’t allow.
– As someone who’s a big believer in work-life balance (and not just paying lip service to the idea like so many do), I realised that Ryan losing his leadership bid was probably the best thing to happen to him – he got married soon after the leadership convention and now has a baby who was exactly five weeks old yesterday. Had he won the leadership, those timelines might have been drastically different or his life may have been drastically different or both.
– The event ended up with a very high profile special guest – Churchill NDP MP Niki Ashton had been to Saskatoon for an event earlier in the day, made her way to Regina for another event (which we were invited to but had to miss unfortunately) then, since she was en route to Winnipeg, accepted an invite to pop in on the Indian Head event. Great to meet her and though I haven’t made any formal decisions about who I might support in the Federal NDP leadership race (especially since I think only one person has officially declared as running so far!), I will note that, even though Facebook pages for pretty much every potential candidate have sprung up, the “Draft Niki Ashton for NDP Leader” page on is the only one I’ve “liked”…so far.
– I’ve got a few thoughts about how growing up in rural Saskatchewan influenced by view on (and now approach to) politics which I’ll probably try to cover in a longer entry sometime between now and our provincial election in a month and a half.
– I won two McFarlane hockey figurines collectibles in the silent auction – a Wayne Gretzky one as well as one of the greatest player of all-time. 😉
– Shea won a crock pot in the door prize draw too. We already have one but this one’s red so will fit our kitchen decor better. Cool!
– You’re probably not supposed to notice this type of stuff but in a small town where everybody knows everybody, it was interesting to see who showed up. “Oh, of course that cool teacher from high school is an NDP’er! Sure, the parents of my one classmate who went on to be so successful are NDP’ers. Hey, I never expected that grizzled old farmer who likes hunting and restoring old cars to be at an NDP event.” And so on.
Speaking of uphill battles, like many NDP candidates in rural Saskatchewan, I suspect Richard Klyne will have a tough go of it on November 7, especially against a high profile Cabinet minister. But as Ryan said so eloquently in his opening remarks, anyone who chooses to put their name forward as a potential public servant deserves better than the reputation that politicians tend to have in our society.
I admit that I’m such a library nerd that sometimes when I’m bored and can’t think of something to look at on the Internet, I’ll just go to a random library’s web site to see what’s up, what they’re doing, how they present themselves. It’s especially fun to pick libraries that you expect to be unique – Beverly Hills, Washington DC, Nashville – usually only to find that they’re all essentially the same.
I hadn’t stumbled across this one before but researching our upcoming holiday led me to the web site for the Hawaii Public Library System. There was one particular element of their web site – which all library web sites have – that I was especially interested in checking out. But unfortunately, right now, they’ve only got a Janitor II position listed! 😉
