In news surprising only to CSI writers, AI researchers have discovered there is an inherent resolution limit to “upsampling” pixelated faces.

Duke University researchers have created an AI algorithm (“PULSE”) that pixelates an uploaded picture of a human face and then explores the range of possible (computer-generated) human faces that could produce that pixelated face.

For starters, Rudin said, “We kind of proved that you can’t do facial recognition from blurry images because there are so many possibilities. So zoom and enhance, beyond a certain threshold level, cannot possibly exist.”

“A lot of algorithms in the past have tried to recover the high-resolution image from the low-res/high-res pair,” Rudin said. But according to her, that’s probably the wrong approach. Most real-world applications of this upsampling problem would involve having access to only the low-res original image. That would be the starting point from which one would try to recreate the high-resolution equivalent of that low-res original.

“When we finally abandoned trying to come up with the ground truth, we then were able to take the low-res [picture] and try to construct many very good high-res images,” Rudin said.

So while PULSE looks beyond the failure point of facial recognition applications, she said, it may still find applications in fields that grapple with their own blurry images–among them, astronomy, medicine, microscopy, and satellite imagery.

So basically no matter how good our AI gets, we’ll never be able to achieve bad-TV-levels of zooming and enhancing. But how about hacking? Will AI ever let us get to a point where we can just randomly bash on a keyboard and achieve elite levels of hacking?

Keep going for some more samples, as well as examples of how problematic the AI can be depending on biased training data.

Source: Geekologie – Researchers discover resolution limit to “upsampling” of pixelated faces

This is an oddly prescient scene from Season 6 Episode 24 of Futurama, “Cold Warriors”, that addresses both issues of quarantine and police brutality. The Simpsons usually gets a lot of credit for “doing it first”, but this is spookily on the nose for 2020. Since they were so right about this, I can only assume this means we’ll be spending the second half of 2020 giving all glory to the Hypnotoad.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Futurama predicts the first half of 2020

Remember back in 2013 when a lady in Spain tried to restore a famous fresco and the resulting “Monkey Christ” was, uh, less than spectacular? Well apparently Spain didn’t learn their lesson and it’s happened again.

Conservation experts in Spain have called for a tightening of the laws covering restoration work after a copy of a famous painting by the baroque artist Bartolomé Esteban Murillo became the latest in a long line of artworks to suffer a damaging and disfiguring repair.

A private art collector in Valencia was reportedly charged €1,200 by a furniture restorer to have the picture of the Immaculate Conception cleaned. However, the job did not go as planned and the face of the Virgin Mary was left unrecognisable despite two attempts to restore it to its original state.

You know, it’s really not that bad. I mean the restorer was blind, right? It’s not so bad for a blind person. Wait, what? They weren’t blind? They had functional eyes and the gift of sight? But then I guess their hands must have been smashed with hammers. What’s that? Their hands were also fully functional? No missing fingers or anything? Look, next time just hire my niece. She’s only four, but she would charge less and still do a better job. And when she inevitable screws it up (but not as bad as this person) you could just say, “But she was only four” and everybody would go “Awww” and forget about the whole thing.

Keep going for a shot of the “Monkey Christ” which, if you don’t remember, is as hilarious as it is terrible.

Source: Geekologie – Another day, another botched art restoration

A meteorite-like object fell in Rajasthan, causing an explosion heard 2 km away and leaving a one-foot deep crater. The 2.78 kg object was emitting heat when discovered, and once cooled was sent to a jeweler to be analyzed:

The officials concerned also got it tested in a private lab located at the jeweller’s shop in Sanchore who confirmed that the piece had metallic properties of Germanium, Platinium, Nickel and Iron (10.23 per cent of nickel, 85.86 per cent of iron, platinum 0.5 per cent, cobbit 0.78 per cent, geranium 0.02 per cent, antimony 0.01 per cent niobium 0.01 and other 3.02 per cent).

Looks like a space booger if ever I saw one. “What’s a space booger?” It’s a booger, but from space. Duh! I don’t know why I always have to explain myself to people.

Keep going for a couple more shots of the space booger.

Source: Geekologie – Strange meteorite-like object falls from sky in India

Algonuts is the product of techno-artist shardcore, who trained a machine learning network on 18,000 of Charles Shulz Peanuts strips:

Charles Shulz, the creator and artist of the Peanuts comic strip, produced thousands of comics over 50 years. As a result, he is one of the few artists who have enough ‘content’ to train a styleGAN2 model. By extracting each frame from nearly 18,000 comic strips I was able to harvest 63,800 distinct images featuring Charlie, Snoopy, Peppermint Patty and the rest of the gang – plenty of food for the network to chew on.

Several hundred hours of computational time later, a network containing the ‘visual DNA’ of Peanuts emerged.

The results are interesting because you can clearly tell it’s Peanuts, but they also make absolutely no visual sense. It’s like when people look at my face. They can tell I’m super handsome, just none of my features really go together. Wait, when people turn away and scream it means you’re handsome, right?

Keep going for one more sample of nightmare Peanuts.

Source: Geekologie – Algonuts is machine generated Peanuts

This is a video of a group of ants running off with a half-eaten chicken nugget. And I get it. I’ve ran off with my fair share of half-eaten chicken nuggets too. But did I get mine off the ground? Of course not. I’m not an animal. I prefer to source mine from the garbage like a gentleman.

Keep going for the full video of true teamwork in action.

Source: Geekologie – Ants running off with a chicken nugget

West Virginians have started a Change.org petition to replace every statue of a Confederate icon with one of Mothman. It sounds like a joke, but the Mothman was actually first sighted in West Virginia in 1966 and has an actual cultural history there. According to an interview with Brenna, the one started the petition:

“These monuments aren’t ‘celebrating history’; they were specifically created to intimidate Black Americans,” Brenna says. “Statues aren’t needed to ‘remember the past’ when so many are still experiencing the repercussions today. Therefore, all monuments honoring the racist and oppressive history of the Confederacy should be removed. And who better to replace them than the Mothman?”

It’s a pretty good idea, though I’d prefer if people supported my Change.org petition instead, which would replace the Confederate statues with statues of myself. Mothman is great and all, but did he once eat four Wendy’s Baconators by himself without throwing up? I’m the real hero here.

Source: Geekologie – West Virginians petition to replace every Confederate statue with one of Mothman

This is Dixie, the most polite mini-daschund you ever did see. After seeing her human wipe their feet on the doormat she walked over and did the same. From the owner:

“Took our dogs out for an evening walk as always, the grass had a small amount of residual moisture on it after a previous downpour. Our dogs love to run around in the grass and got very wet as a result. Dixie, our little miniature dachshund, always wipes her paws when they are wet even after a bath.”

My dog does something similar, only instead of wiping her paws on the doormat she prefers to take a dump on my sofa and eat all my shoes. Twinsies, right?!

Keep going for the full adorable video.

Source: Geekologie – Polite Dachshund wipes paws before entering house

Here’s a video of an oversize load-carrying truck in Canada scraping an overpass bridge. According to the insurance company if the driver had managed to change just one more lane to the left he would have had enough clearance to clear it, although I don’t see why. I guess they build their bridges lopsided in Canada? I guess I understand. It’s the same reason I always saw a leg off every table and chair I own. Why live life like a normal person when every meal can be a disaster?

Keep going for the trucker who aaalmost made it.

Source: Geekologie – Truck just barely doesn’t make it under overpass

The Apple Watch has a feature that ejects water from the watch’s speaker when you turn the Digital Crown and The Slow Mo Guys made a slow-motion video of it in action. According to Apple’s support site:

When Water Lock is on, your Apple Watch Series 2 or later doesn’t respond to touch on its display. This prevents accidental input while you’re in water. When you turn off Water Lock, your watch ejects any water that remains in its speaker.

My Nintendo Switch has a similar feature, only instead of turning a dial to eject the water, you hit it with a hammer until all the water leaks out. The feature only works once, though, and kind of voids the warranty.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Slow-motion video of an Apple Watch ejecting water

An unidentified floating object was spotted in Japan, leading Japanese citizens to wonder if it was a UFO or some device to spread novel coronavirus. According to The Japan Times:

“It is not something flown by the meteorological agency, and we don’t have a clue what it is,” an agency official said. “We checked with the Sendai Municipal Government and the Self-Defense Forces, but they don’t know either.”

The YouTube comments are filled with people dismissing it as a weather balloon despite experts straight up saying it isn’t. But what do experts know? Obviously the guy sitting in his mother’s basement knows more about weather balloons than the people who actually use and deploy them. You know what else they know a lot about? How flat the Earth is. If there’s one thing basement experts know a lot about, it’s that. And what a woman’s naked body looks like.

Keep going for a couple videos of the unidentified floating object.

Source: Geekologie – Unidentified floating object spotted in Japan

This is a video of a rock-bouncer climbing what appears to be a vertical dirt wall. Maybe it’s the angle of the camera, but it literally looks like no vehicle should be able to go up without breaking at least a few laws of physics.

Friends and rock racers got together over a weekend to ‘play around’ in their bouncers (like monster trucks but way cooler) and work out any problems that the buggies might have. Rock bouncing is a form of racing but coming up hills that are next to impossible to climb but these guys do it. They compete in different races over the southern US for money, trophies and bragging rights.

A rock-bouncer is one of those things I didn’t even know existed and now I can’t live without. Describing it as “like monster trucks but way cooler” was enticing enough, but seeing it drive up a vertical wall just made my 8-year-old self pee himself. Oh, no, that was my today-self. I peed mysef.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Rock-bouncer defies gravity to climb dirt wall

This is a video of a guy who mapped his Oculus VR world to his actual apartment. It’s a super clever idea, although one wonders why he stuck with the same size TV. I get the sofas and other parts of the room, but when you’re in a virtual space your first move should be making your TV the size of the viewable Universe.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Clever: Guy maps VR to his actual apartment

YouTuber Grim Sausage cut together the year 2020 as a disaster movie trailer and it’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen. If this was the trailer for World War Z you’d say the most realistic part was the zombies, because there’s no way Earth could ever get that messed up.

Keep going for the full, terrifying video.

Source: Geekologie – A disaster movie trailer for the year 2020

Joe Barnard is the guy behind BPS.space, a rocketry channel that explores the advancement of real space rockets by building similar components for model rockets. Obviously an endeavor like that is bound to have a lot of failures, and he compiled together a bunch of those in this video. Although is it really a failure when the footage you get is infinitely more entertaining than if things had gone right? It’s basically the entire premise behind NASCAR and the only I have any friends at all. When they laugh at me it means they like me, right?

Source: Geekologie – Compilation of model rocket launch failures

The Monaco Grand Prix was cancelled due to COVID-19 back in May, so Ferrari took the opportunity to film this short, Le Grand Rendez-Vous. It features their driver Charles Leclerc racing around the roads in Ferrari’s plug-in hybrid electric, the SF90 Stradale, and the whole thing was shot with 17 people in Monaco using six iPhone 11 Pros, nine Go Pros and one Sony Venice Camera.

Calling this thing a short film is being generous, as Ferrari is clearly better at building cars than they are at telling stories. The car is admittedly nice, but the story makes absolutely no sense. My home sex tape had more of a story, and that just featured me rocking back and forth on my bed weeping. The reviews on PornHub have not been kind.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Ferrari made a short film featuring their SF90 Stradale plug-in hybrid

This is a video demonstrating the unique properties of a gömböc: a shape that only has two equilibrium points (one stable and one unstable) instead of the usual minimum four. What this means is that it will always right itself no matter how you set it down. I’m too dumb to understand what a stable or unstable equilibrium point is, so I’ll let The Action Lab explain:

Hi everyone, some are confused about why there is only one unstable equilibrium on the Gomboc since you can set it along anywhere on the upper edge and it will tip over. An unstable equilibrium is not simply an edge where it will tip over, but it has a specific definition. The equilibrium points are where the derivative of the potential energy of the shape is zero. To see if it is an unstable or stable equilibrium, then you check to see if the second derivative is positive or negative. If the second derivative of the potential energy is negative then it is an unstable equilibrium. If the second derivative is positive it means that the equilibrium stable. Non-mathematically this means that the unstable equilibrium is the point that it theoretically could be balanced because the weight is equal all around the point, but it would fall over at the slightest wind or movement.

So basically magic. A gömböc is a magical shape. There’s a penis joke to be made here, but this is a sophisticated site full of monocles and top hats. We’re too busy sipping wine and tasting cheese to make any of those kinds of jokes.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Video demonstration of the self-righting shape Gömböc

YouTuber Imperator Cuts re-cut Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones into a trailer in the style of The Nice Guys. They actually manage to make some of the humor work and miraculously give Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen some chemistry. That line about hating sand? It works here! From this trailer you would have no idea that the actual Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones is so bad scientists are wondering if it’s the real cause of Covid-19.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – ‘Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones’ recut as a buddy cop trailer

In what can only be described as peak internet, Reddit user theMalleableDuck managed to Rickroll the actual Rick Astley. You can read the original thread here, though the screenshot captures the essence of it.

Upon further inspection, there’s no evidence Rick Astley actually clicked the link, so if we want to be as pedantic as possible about this, what we have here is a Rick Astley-approved attempt at Rickrolling Rick Astley. Although honestly, to even attempt it is worth applause. Somebody buy this guy some memes. They’ve earned it.

Source: Geekologie – Beautiful bastard Rickrolls the actual Rick Astley