It's been said that you can tell that a photographic image was generated by artificial intelligence if the number of fingers or teeth are wrong. The industry is well aware of that, and recent updates have dramatically improved how many fingers humans have in such images. But they still have a way to go in understanding humans overall.

Dan Leveille has been experimenting with the March 16th update to the AI program Midjourney. While the people generated are more realistic than ever, Leveille noticed it has a real problem understanding spaghetti and how people in the real world eat it. It's as if spaghetti were specifically invented to make a mess. You can see more images at Geeks Are Sexy.

But let's consider how neural networks learn. They are given boatloads of publicly-available images from the internet. Considering that the 'net is a repository of the world's knowledge, that makes sense. But what kind of spaghetti-eating photographs do everyday people post on social media? The times it makes a mess. There is little entertainment value in posting a picture of someone eating spaghetti in a normal manner, and we don't really want to share pictures of ourselves eating. But we love to make other people laugh. Midjourney was most likely inundated with thousands of images of toddlers and drunk people trying to manage a plate of spaghetti with hilarious results. So this is what you get.  

Scientists nominated them, a jury narrowed them down to five finalists, and then the public voted. The overwhelming favorite was Concholepas concholepas, also known as the Chilean abalone, locally called locos. The Chilean abalone has been crowned the International Mollusc of the Year for 2023. This abalone, found in Chile and Peru, is a murex snail that develops a spectacular seashell. It is culturally significant, but is now endangered because it is also delicious.  

As the International Mollusc of the Year, the Chilean abalone has won an important prize. Its genome will be sequenced as an aid to studying these sea creatures and how they adapt to polluted ocean conditions. This will be particularly useful, as the abalone's haemocyanin (an alternative to hemoglobin that makes the abalone's blood change colors depending on oxygen level) contains properties that appear to fight cancer in humans.

Read more about the Chilean abalone, plus the four other finalists in the International Mollusc of the Year contest. They include a giant deep-sea oyster, a leopard slug, and two lovely nudibranchs. -via Metafilter

The gravestone of George Spencer Millet tells a sad tale. The boy worked at the New York Metropolitan Life Building in Manhattan. On February 15, 1909, he mentioned to his co-workers that it was his 15th birthday. The young ladies in the office said they would give him kisses for his birthday. That wouldn't be proper during work hours, so they waited until the office closed at 4:30. Then at least six women descended on young Millet in a frenzy.

The problem was that Millet had an ink eraser in his pocket, a sharp instrument resembling a knife. As he was knocked down by the women set on kissing him, the ink eraser pierced his heart, and he died soon after. One of the women was arrested, but charges were dropped after the exact cause of death was determined. Read the story of the boy who was kissed to death at Amusing Planet.

Jean-Yves Blondeau invented the roller suit, consisting of body protection and 32 wheels distributed over the body, as a design student. He introduced it to the world in 1995, and custom-builds them for skating enthusiasts ever since. As you might guess, they are very expensive. You may have seen these suits in movies, variety shows, or the occasional public relations stunt. Now you can not only learn the story behind the suit, but watch the Rollerman show it off. Yes, even at age 52, Blondeau takes the suit out buggyrollin. Make sure you watch at least until the night time version is shown, and the new self-propelled version. I would say something like "don't try this at home," but I don't know anyone who could afford to, much less be able to survive it. -via Nag on the Lake

In 1923, Viennese author Felix Salten published his novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods. It was a coming-of-age story about a young deer. Walt Disney later obtained the rights to it and produced the 1942 animated movie Bambi. That movie is now a children's classic, although is often remembered as traumatic for the offscreen death of Bambi's mother at the hands of a hunter. That trauma doesn't hold a candle to the original novel.

Bambi, a Life in the Woods was not a children's book at all. The novel did not depict forest creatures as particularly cute. The main plot follows Bambi as he grows up and learns to live in fear of man, the biggest danger for deer. His relatives and friends are, one by one, shot and killed by hunters. Even Bambi suffers a gunshot wound. It was well understood in Austria that Salten's novel was an allegory for the pogroms against Jews in pre-Nazi Europe. In 1935, the Nazis banned Salten's novel and its sequel Bambi's Children, and included it in public book burnings. Original editions are therefore quite rare.

So how did Bambi go from a terrifying allegory to a cute young Disney character? That's part of the story of Bambi's first hundred years, as told at The Guardian. -via Damn Interesting

When NASA astronauts return to the moon with the Artemis space program, they'll be wearing all new moonwalk suits by Axiom Space. The contracting company calls these suits Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Units, or AxEMUs for short. Axion unveiled the prototype for these suits last week, although the finished product will be white for temperature control. The suit you see in the images above actually has a gray cover over it, to protect the prototype during training and keep some details secret from competitors.  

What we know is that this suit comes with an attached life support system worn like a backpack and headlights on the helmet. It is sized to fit 90% of American men and women. And it is designed to allow a range of movement far beyond what was available for the Apollo missions. The AxEMU will be NASA's first new spacesuit in 40 years, and should be ready by the time Artemis 3 launches for the moon in 2025. Read more about the space suit at Smithsonian.

In the 19th century, there was a race between various explorers and their nations to be the first to reach the North Pole. That quest was finally accomplished by Robert Peary in 1909, or possibly it was Matthew Henson, or even Frederick Cook in 1908. Those expeditions followed many others that were unsuccessful. The luckier of those failed expeditions turned back at some point. In 1897, S. A. Andrée had the bright idea to just fly to the North Pole using the only available air vehicle of the time, a balloon. What could possibly go wrong? Andrée was not a seasoned explorer of the Arctic or anywhere else. He was a balloonist, and was very enthusiastic (and naive) about the possibilities of flight. The three-man Arctic balloon expedition set off from Svalbard in July of that year, determined to bring glory to Sweden by reaching the North Pole. They were not seen again until 1930.

32. Franklin D. Roosevelt pic.twitter.com/TfUJhpVh02

— Cam Harless (@hamcarless) March 21, 2023

If you got a kick out of Cam Harless' Gallery of US Presidents with Mullets, you're going to love his latest project. Presumably with the help of an artificial intelligence image generator, he has made comic book characters out of our presidents. Supervillains, to be exact. You'll love seeing Barack Obama as the Joker, Abraham Lincoln as a zombie, and others as various mad scientists, robots, aliens, warlocks, demons, butchers, and clowns. Since Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms, he gets to be both Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. I love how Franklin Roosevelt's wheelchair was incorporated into his supervillain persona. And although I never thought Calvin Coolidge looked anything like Edgar Allan Poe, it works in a comic book universe. It's still impossible to make Jimmy Carter look evil.   

Thanks!

— Miss Cellania (@misscellania) March 21, 2023

See all 46 presidents plus a bonus Ben Franklin as comic book villains at Twitter. Or at Threadreader, if you prefer. -via Fark

You probably knew that the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once won almost all the Oscars at this year's Academy Awards (seven major awards). If you haven't seen the movie, you might be wondering what all the hoopla is about. Screen Junkies has you covered with this Honest Trailer. Just kidding; you will probably be just as confused after you watch this video. Is EEAAO a comedy, science fiction, action-adventure, a superhero film, a martial arts movie, or a family drama? All of those, actually. Any selection of clips they could have possibly shown us would be altogether nonsensical, but ask anyone who has seen the movie, and they will tell you that it really all comes together in a way that wins Oscars. This Honest Trailer pokes fun at how ridiculous the visuals are, but even they agree that Everything Everywhere All At Once is a surprisingly good film. 

When tiling a floor, most folks want to see a repeating pattern that shows attention to detail and pleasant symmetry. But in geometry, experts explore patterns that do not repeat. This is called aperiodic tiling. The Wikipedia entry on aperiodic tiling is flagged as "too technical for most readers to understand," and they are right. A challenge in geometry has been to find the lowest number of tile shapes that will produce a non-repeating pattern. Up until now, Penrose tiling, discovered by Roger Penrose, has been the lowest, with two tiles, shown above. It looks pretty symmetrical to me, but the caveat is that while these tiles don't have translation symmetry, they may have reflection symmetry and rotational symmetry. Penrose tiles look really nice on the floor of a round room. The search for a single tile shape that produces aperiodic tiling is called the Einstein problem, because the German words "ein stein" mean "one tile."

However, just yesterday a new science paper was submitted claiming an aperiodic tiling shape that uses only one tile! They call the shape of this tile "the hat." It looks more like a shirt to me, but how cool is this floor pattern?

Please visit https://t.co/MXh2q8k1I9 for more information. There you'll find an interactive, browser-based application for constructing your own patches of hats. 5/6

— Craig S. Kaplan (@cs_kaplan) March 21, 2023

The paper is awaiting peer review before publication. There's a lot to unpack here for geometry geeks, but for the rest of us, can you imagine trying to lay a floor with the hat? It would be like putting a chaotic jigsaw puzzle together with grout. -via Metafilter

(Top image credit: Parcly Taxel)

The 1992 movie Encino Man could have been a lot different. Ben Stiller was in the lead to get the role of the caveman unearthed in Encino, and made this screen test with Keith Coogan (Adventures in Babysitting) and Jeff Maynard (of the Ferris Bueller TV series) playing the teenagers who dug him up. So why didn't Stiller get the role? The filmmakers started to explain that Stiller didn't appear in the movie because of a scheduling conflict, but then went all in on how they just really wanted Brendan Fraser after seeing his screen test. Pauly Shore found this sequence in his archives just a few days ago and decided to let us all in on what might have been. I cannot find the corresponding clip online (without posting the entire film) from the finished movie starring Fraser, Shore, and Sean Astin. -via Cracked

People who care about proper use of the English language find themselves aghast on a daily basis when they hang out on the internet. They are astounded at how many people don't know the difference between there, their, and they're. I used to be bothered by "crutch" words, as in too many "likes" between other words, or when people start every sentence with the words "basically" or "actually," although the latest incarnation is when people start talking by saying "I mean..." when that should be a reframing of a previous statement, and never be the first thing you say. Although the older I get, the less I am bothered by how other people use or misuse words.

Another thing that annoys some people is when someone says "literally" when they mean "figuratively." Maybe we should calm down about that because it's nothing new. In fact, dictionaries have added second definitions of "literally" to acknowledge its use as an intensifier. Authors such as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens have used it in this way in some classic novels. Read eight literally literary examples of this use of "literally" at Mental Floss. Maybe it will lower your blood pressure about the subject.

The Slow Mo Guys, Gavin Free and Dan Gruchy, have been bringing us fascinating videos for years. The BBC brings us a retrospective of some of their wildest stunts captured on their high-speed cameras. Some of these clips will bring back memories, while others will be new to you. We also learn a bit about how they do it, which is more complicated than you might think on a digital high-speed camera. We also get to meet their newest toy, a high-speed robotic camera arm. As to why they do it, well, it's fun, and 14 million YouTube subscribers is nothing to sneeze at. That's just a bit more than the BBC! -via Damn Interesting

The person who coined the name "walkie-talkie" must've been a fan of baby talk. He is unknown, but it was either the US military or one of their contractors who developed the transceiver during World War II. Walkie-talkie is descriptive, and so much better than "hand-held portable two-way radio transceiver," but if they wanted to be adult about it, they would have named it "walk 'n' talk," which is just as descriptive, still rhymes, and has fewer syllables. But walkie-talkie it is.

What if other things got their names in this cutesy manner? A fork would be a stabby-grabby.  A spoon would be a soupy-scoopy. A microwave would be a heaty-eatie. All very descriptive, but cute. There are plenty of renamed objects that follow this format that you can read at Reader's Digest. -via Boing Boing

(Image credit: Erkaha)

DebonairHeads is an artist in Texas who makes action figures, Polly Pocket type dolls, and other toys resembling pop culture folks you would never expect to see in a toy shop. My Little Danny comes in packaging that will remind you of My Little Pony, but the doll is Danny Trejo! Well, the star of many action films, including several directed by his second cousin Robert Rodriguez, deserves his own action figure, even if it is little.

The crowd at reddit wants one of these for their own, but alas, they are not for sale. My Little Danny is a work of art. DebonairHeads hand-sculpted the face and rooted all the hair. We will never find out if it really smells like tacos. Continue reading to see more of DebonairHeads' work.