“Developed at Google’s Zurich office in 2014 and released to the wider world last summer, Deep Dream uses artificial neural networks, a style of computing inspired by the brain and nervous systems, to learn to recognise shapes in pictures.”
Tag: 03.28.16
William Randolph Hearst Really Did Try To Ruin Orson Welles
“Previously unpublished documents have revealed the scale of a plot by the media mogul William Randolph Hearst to discredit Orson Welles and destroy Citizen Kane, the 1941 film about the rise and fall of the fictional newspaper proprietor Charles Foster Kane.”
The State Of Palmyra’s Great Ruins After ISIS Fled
“There remained little hope for the heritage site amid fears that if ISIS ever retreated, its militants would rig bombs to the ruins as they fled.”
As Machines Become Smarter, Will We Get A Universal Translator? (Here’s Why It’s Difficult)
“It’s so difficult for computers because translation doesn’t—or shouldn’t—involve simply translating words, sentences or paragraphs. Rather, it’s about translating meaning. And in order to infer meaning from a specific utterance, humans have to interpret a multitude of elements at the same time.”
Critics Hated “Batman V Superman” But It’s A Box Office Smash. So Who Cares About Critics? They Don’t Matter
“The results are a devastating rebuke to the power of mainstream American critics at a time when many newspapers have already outsourced their reviews to wire services and the rise of bloggers has de-professionalized the practice of assessing a film’s attributes and demerits.”
So The Public Disagrees With Critics? Sorry, But It Doesn’t Matter (And That’s Not How Criticism Works)
“Why this apparently overwhelming, unquenchable urge to argue that box office receipts prove the irrelevance and impotence of criticism? Could it be that the movie business feels defensive, maybe even ashamed, of peddling so much profitable dreck, and—whatever the numbers may say—a critic’s reproaches still have the power to sting?”
ISIS Is Driven From Palmyra; Archaeologists Think Some Of The Destruction Can Be Reversed
“Syrian troops on Sunday regained Palmyra, and for the first time since May 2015, when ISIS took the city famed for its 2,000-year-old temples and Greco-Roman ruins, the extent of damage inside the UNESCO World Heritage Site became apparent. ‘We were expecting the worst,’ Maamoun Abdulkarim, Syria’s antiquities chief, [said]. ‘But the landscape, in general, is in good shape.'”
Library Scofflaws – Why Some Get Fined, Some Get Forgiven, And Some Get Arrested
“Over the years, libraries have fined patrons for not bringing back books and offered no-questions-asked return periods. They’ve published the names of book scofflaws in local newspapers. They’ve paid personal calls on people who hold onto books past their due dates, and even sicced the police on particularly recalcitrant readers. And they still don’t really know how to get their books back.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.28.16
The Old and the New Dancing Together
In a program essay by Susan Yung for the Paul Taylor’s American Modern Dance season (through April 3), guest choreographer Doug Elkins mentions that Taylor’s Esplanade was the first dance he ever saw on PBS’s Dance in America and … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-03-28
Once in a lifetime
I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company (it’s changed its name, but I can’t get used to the new one) at Lincoln Center on Saturday afternoon. Regular readers of this blog may recall … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-03-28
Indy Decides to Outsource Exhibition Decisions
For the last few years, the Indianapolis Museum of Art has, it seems to me, been on a crazy trajectory. As soon as it does something smart, it turns around and undermines itself. Now it… … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-03-28
The Strange Case of Orwell’s Typewriter
My curiosity was aroused by this sentence: His manual typewriter — rather suitably, in the light of his faint anarchist leanings — was later bestowed by Sonia on the 1960s hippy-radical news-sheet, the International Times.… … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-03-28
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A Tenor’s Rare Met Encore And What It Means
“We did five performances and right from the first one you could actually see what was happening with the public,” he says. “And as we say in the theater, ‘What the public demands, you give.'”