why do photos of empty hospitals scare me so much……… wild
OMG I ACTUALLY HAVE AN ANSWER!!! Psychology student part of tumblr, here! There’s a phenomenon in the brain, although I can’t remember the world, where your brain doesn’t understand emptiness in a space you’ve becomes used to seeing people in, and, your survival brain, trying to make up for it, makes you see or feel things that aren’t there, this is common with empty stores that are usually bustling, train stations, abandoned buildings, etc. The reason you become unsettled or scared is because the part of your brain responsible for survival is like: “wait. Everyone’s gone. Does this mean danger? Should I leave, too?” It’s a survival thing, apparently!
That….that makes a lot of sense, actually.
My mom was a teacher at my high school when I was there. On half days that were teacher institute days (kids got out but teachers didn’t) if I didn’t have plans with someone else to leave with I’d be stuck there till she got off. I’d go down to the cafeteria for snacks (we had some vending machines) while all the teachers were in there meetings and even though I knew there were teachers or administration close by in various classrooms, even though it was the middle of the day and we had these HUGE floor to ceiling windows (so it was bright and sunny), it still felt so quiet and…wrong. I’d grab my snacks and high tail it back to moms room like I was in a horror movie.
Same goes for churches. Creepy as anything when they’re empty. We used to play hide and seek in the dark in this old church when I was in college and it was scary as fuck especially since there was a big graveyard right outside.
Good job leading that ship onto the rocks, high-five!
That’s was a fun project I got myself into on a self-dare. The title comes from that tiny tiny figure on the lighthouse getting a high-five from the Chtulhu-like creature. Sadly this picture was a victim of the 2017 computer crash that caused the loss of several of my original HD files, so the zoom-ins (old WIP screenshots I had made and posted on instagram) are the last proof of this even being the case.
The Mythbusters tested what would happen if a ball was shot at 60 mph off the back of a truck travelling at 60 mph to see what would happen.
It became a perfect example of the relative nature of physics – showing that velocity can vectorially add together. 60 mph in one direction cancels the 60 mph in the other, meaning a net velocity of zero.
thanks, you discovered vectors. Fuck me sideways this is dumb
Yup, everyone has the same level of knowledge as you. There’s no one to learn anything from this.
Just to add, before the Mythbusters did this it was purely a thought experiment and had never been empirically tested at that point. So you are seeing in those two gifs the first actually test of that hypothesis since it had been proposed back in Newtons time.
where is that renaissance painting with those two fellers and a giant fucking random skull on the floor that looks like it was accidentally stretched out in photoshop
THANK YOU
somebody please explain
Someone once told me it’s like that because it was designed to be hung in a stairwell so the skull pops out as you walk past.
…I guess it works but you have to be at a pretty sharp angle
There was a whole trend at one point where artists would include something in their paintings (usually a skull, for whatever reason) that’s super distorted in just the right way so that it looks normal if you hold the painting up to a convex/concave mirror. I have absolutely no idea why. But I think that’s what’s going on here.
In case anyone’s curious, here’s what it looks like when you walk past it irl:
It does have a 3D effect to it! It’s pretty neat, guess it would be even more impressive to people from the 14th century.
Last week I attempted to illustrate some neural net-generated racehorses by turning to another neural net – this time, one that generates images, called BigGAN.
Using Joel Simon’s ganbreeder.app interface, I’m able to see what BigGAN can generate for any of ~1000 categories of objects. Not finding a category for “racehorse”, I decided to use the nearest thing I could find, “horse cart”. Which, um.
But ganbreeder makes it easy to combine multiple categories – if “horse cart” is one point in space and “great grey owl” is another point in space, when you travel on a straight line between them, the horse carts gradually grow feathers and owl faces, ending in something that sort of resembles an owl.
Ganbreeder also allows you to travel AWAY from a destination. So I can start at “horse cart” and then try to remove some of the cartness by deliberately traveling in the exact opposite direction of “shopping cart”. Sure enough, the image morphs into a furry four-legged creature with no more sign of wheels.
[left: 100% horse cart. right: 75% horse cart and -75% shopping cart. bottom: tried to make the face less doglike by also subtracting some dog. success??]
What this also means is that I can take any category of thing and generate its opposite. For example, I can set “guacamole” to -100%, inverting every component that makes it up. It’s kind of like burrowing directly through the earth’s core to find out what’s on the exact opposite side of the planet.
Here’s what’s opposite of guacamole: this tower, this mysterious cloaked figure.
this thing, I regret to inform you, is the opposite of “jeans”
Now, this is just a single neural net’s strange idea of what an opposite is, basically “do exactly the opposite of what you would do to generate a picture of jeans”. If they retrained the neural net on the same data, random fluctuations in the training process might make the opposites look a lot different. But often the opposites have a sort of logic to them. The opposite of tiny indoor things tend to be large landscapes. The opposite of organic things tend to be geometric ones.
Here’s the opposite of “stingray”:
The opposite of “birdhouse” is, rather pleasingly, some kind of cat.
The opposite of “drilling platform” is this leafy green creature.
And the opposite of “eggnog” is a terrifying sight to behold.
You can make your own abominations and opposites with ganbreeder.app!
ifesbob 