GEEKOLOGIE RSS TEST THREAD

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Possibly the greatest chess player of all time, Magnus Carlsen, was quizzed on his incredible memory by seeing if he could identify matches based purely on the layout of a chess board.

World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen is put to the test by English Grandmaster David Howell! How many games can he recognise? Please note the Kasparov-Karpov game should show USSR flags for both players.

Spoiler alert: he gets all of them except one, and even that one he eventually gets with a hint. And when you see the match and hear the hint it somehow makes it even more impressive. I don't know a lot about chess but this is almost more impressive than him actually being good at the game. Sure, being the highest rated player of all time and world chess champion is great and all, but why not give all that up and join a traveling circus to really put that talent to work? Keep going for the full video.

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That volcano in Iceland that started erupting after 800 years? Well it's still erupting.

I went to my balcony to film again after hearing there were really huge lava fountains spewing around midnight local time, and lo and behold I caught the 2 biggest ones, filmed around 2am Sunday, May 2nd The footage is a little shaky because of strong wind

Sure, sure, blame the wind for the shaky footage and not the pee-pee and poo-poo leaving your body. How are people just casually still living there? I don't care how many scientists tell me it's safe, if I see something like that out of my window I'm booking the first flight to wherever doesn't have volcanoes.

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The Royal Marines recently ran an exercise testing the $440,000 Gravity Jet Suit to aid in boarding operations and it looks like something out of a James Bond movie. Obviously the future is going to be super annoying when every pizza delivery person is flying around in a jet pack, but for now this remains the coolest thing my 10-year-old self has ever seen. I mean, this and the old Playboy I found out in the woods that one time. Keep going for the full training exercise video.

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The encrypted chat app Signal tried to use Instagram ads to display the data Facebook collects about you and sells access to. Facebook obviously wasn't having any of it and decided to just shut down their ad account instead. Here are some of the ads people would've seen, and they're appropriately scary. I don't even want to imagine what they would've shown me because it probably would've been the first time "tentacle porn" and "anesthesiologist" were used in a sentence together. Keep going for some more of the example ads and read more about the ads on Signal's official blog. Also, use Signal.

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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.

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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. Keep going for the full video.

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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/XfangsLaHX pic.twitter.com/r55ti7bsma

— Brody Logan (@BrodyLogan) May 6, 2021

Keep going for some video of his escapades after the jump.

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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.

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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. Keep going for some more photos from the Crystal Cove State Park Instagram.

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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.

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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. Keep going for the full wholesome video.

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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.

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The 11-foot-8 bridge (nicknamed The Can Opener) is a bridge in North Carolina famous for ruining trucks because of its low height. In 2019 they raised the height of the bridge by 8" making it 12'4", but apparently it wasn't enough because it got a perfect peel last week when it cleanly removed the top of a courier truck. This was the 167th crash since the 11'8" website started filming the bridge in 2008. The bridge is so infamous, local rental companies warn truck renters about the bridge and let them know any damage caused by the bridge isn't covered by insurance. Not that it matters for me, because car rental companies long ago stopped letting me buy the insurance. Why would I buy something if I'm not going to use it? Obviously if you let me buy insurance I'm returning your car banged up and possibly on fire. Keep going for the full video. It sucks for the driver, but it's so satisfying to watch.

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A spherical UFO was filmed in San Diego around the USS Omaha in 2019 and that UFO guy Jeremy Corbell got the footage.

This footage was filmed in the CIC (Combat Information Center) of the USS Omaha on July 15th 2019 in a warning area off San Diego. This footage depicts a UAP event series that reached a crescendo with one of the unknown targets entering the water. No wreckage found. None of the unknown craft were recovered.

Like all UFO footage, it's predictably of terrible quality despite being filmed in 2019 and with military equipment. Is this what the US Navy is working with? Did they not get the memo that cameras are good now? They'd have gotten better footage if they just replaced all their fancy equipment with an iPhone. Keep going for the full video. I want to believe, but I also want there to be UFO footage that isn't always just the absolute lowest quality footage ever captured.

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This is a video of a USAF Boeing/Bell CV-22B Osprey 10-0053 landing at Addenbrooke's hospital helipad for a medical-transfer training operation and then on takeoff literally blowing up the helipad with its rotor wash. I just wonder what would've happened if any of the rubber matting had actually gotten caught in the rotors. Is it like throwing string at a drone where it gets tangled up and basically brings the whole thing down? Are modern helicopters as easy to take down? I've seen rotors decapitate heads though so I'm assuming they're a little more durable. Keep going for the full video.

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Google recently announced Project Starline, a video chat booth that uses computer vision, machine learning, spatial audio, real-time compression, and a specialized light field display system to create a life-size 3D holographic representation of the person you're chatting with. In other words, they took FaceTime and threw a bunch of money and research into it to create the illusion of having somebody sitting on the other side of a window from you. The current setup is only for use in Google offices since it uses custom-built hardware and highly specialized equipment, but the results look extremely promising for the future of video chat. And by the future of video chat I obviously mean porn. Connecting with loved ones is great and all but, I mean, c'mon. Let's be real here. Keep going for the full video and check out the official Project Starline announcement for more. Although I don't know if it's their color scheme or what, but all of their demo footage makes it look like family members visiting each other in prison.

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This is a video of a bunch of teens leading a high speed chase in Florida before coming to a crashing stop on the highway.

Police were called Wednesday for a report of a Fort Lauderdale home being burglarized while people were inside. They got away, but not before police were provided with a description of their vehicle. When cops caught up to the getaway car and tried to pull it over, the suspects refused. Video of the chase shows police vehicles hanging back as the driver appears to make a sudden right turn - across three lanes - and hit at least one other car, barrel into a guardrail and strike an SUV before overturning and spinning to a stop.

The Fort Lauderdale Police Department said five juveniles were taken into custody from inside the car.

When I first watched the video I assumed it was just a lone driver, but then the police just started pulling people out like it was a clown car. The best (worst?) part is how the police literally throw the kids from the car after it crashes. I have no sympathy for them because obviously they put everybody on that freeway at risk, it's just crazy that they probably got more injured during the arrest than their car accident that sent them flying and spinning upside down. Keep going for the full video. The crash happens at about 0:50 and then everything after is pretty much just fuel for online fighting so I'll keep my mouth shut.

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Because the internet ruins everything fun, YouTube skeptic and debunker Mick West released this video explaining that the pyramid-shaped UFO video released by the navy is actually probably just bokeh from a night-vision camera.

New reference footage from night vision monoculars (including the military standard PVS-14) demonstrates pretty conclusively that the supposed flying pyramid UFO actually looks exactly like a slightly out of focus light in the sky - quite possibly just a plane, as the ship was right under a flight path for LAX.

Some of the other lights are identified as Jupiter and some stars. I don't think that means the Navy got it terribly wrong. This was initially unidentified (with the UAP Task Force Investigates), and they maybe even thought it was a triangle for a few minutes. But it's not. It's just some lights in the sky.

We've already established that the military is filming UFOs with their lowest quality potatoes, so it makes sense that all of these UFO sightings are just misidentified video artifacts. It is extremely telling that even in the modern age not a single UFO video has been shot with more clarity than a Game Boy Camera. Keep going for the full debunking video. His case is too solid so I'm willing to accept this UFO video isn't real, but obviously all the other ones are.

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TheMalibuArtist is a drone operator who shoots footage of great white sharks off the coast of California. Well turns out he has a bunch of footage because apparently great white sharks are godamn everywhere. From The Los Angeles Times:

Researchers had long wondered how sharks, beyond the rare bites that make headlines, behave around people. Were they curious? Were they skittish? Or did they just ignore them?

"So far it looks like sharks just don't care," said Lowe. "The surfers can't see them, the swimmers can't see them. But we can now see them from the air. And in those cases the sharks just don't seem to change their path," Lowe added. "Sometimes they'll swim right under a surfer, but they don't circle back. They just keep going."

So turns out this kind of thing has always been happening, it just wasn't until we had drones that we could actually see it. Judging by the videos, it seems like every time you step onto a California beach you're about 100 meters from a great white shark. Which is really just another way of saying I'm never stepping into the ocean again. Keep going for some of TheMalibuArtist's videos (or check out all of his videos on his YouTube page), including one where a great white shark follows a family for 10 minutes, one where a surfer unknowingly touches a great white shark, and one where a giant great white sharks swims incredibly close to a surfer.

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You know how old Kung Fu movies have horrible dubbing where the words don't match up with the mouth at all? Well Flawless AI is a company trying to fix that problem, using neural networks to essentially lip sync dubbing in movies. It's a pretty interesting use of deepfake technology and a nice proof of concept, though the results aren't particularly great and still in the uncanny valley territory. Also, if you're watching a movie with dubs instead of subtitles you're already doing it wrong. The only acceptable use of dubbing is when they edit a movie for TV and have to change the language. In fact, all movies should be edited as if they're going to air on network TV. I present Exhibit A: Work that line into any movie and it automatically gets an Academy Award nomination. Anyhoo, keep going for Flawless AI's demo reel as well as an example of Forrest Gump dubbed into Japanese and Spanish.

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