After our Amazon trip we needed a break so we landed in Galápagos earlier this week and have been chilling at an amazing place called Finch Bay Hotel on the South side of Santa Cruz island. Tomorrow morning we head off for a 12 day cruise on a yacht to see lots of different critters across multiple islands. Meanwhile here’s a few locals…
Our local population of swamp hens (Porphyrio melanotus) have just had a clutch of eight chicks. They’re now parading around the paddock under the wary, very beady eyes of their parents.
Thankfully Lord Viking and Princess Wandacakes are snoozing, as they tend to do during the day (lazy little buggers) although I wouldn’t fancy their chances against these tough birds.
A slightly off-topic post, but fear not, there are still plenty of cats!
Some of you may have heard of Stable Diffusion – but if you haven’t, it is basically a very clever piece of software that takes as input natural language instructions, and creates, after a short period of time, images of what you told it to make.
Note that this software is not searching the Web for pictures that match what you asked for – it is generating completely original art based on what you tell it to make!
I hesitate to call it ‘AI’ because it’s a very misleading term. What this is, is the incredible powers of pattern recognition and machine learning applied to huge data sets, in glorious action. When I did my Masters in AI back in 1992 we were using the similar basis of pattern recognition, but today’s efforts are supercharged with much smarter models and a huge leap in computer processing power.
The following art was produced when I told it to produce “ginger maine coon painted by roger dean” (for those of you who don’t know Roger Dean, find out more here.) I’d say Stable Diffusion did an excellent job of capturing both the maine coon-ness and the Dean-ness.
Then I tried “ginger maine coon steampunk pilot with sword”. You’ll note from these that Stable Diffusion has a somewhat interesting manner of interpreting some instructions!
And finally, perhaps my favourite selection of all was produced when I asked for “giant ginger maine coon playing on a roger dean landscape”. Utterly majestic!
I am going to have so much fun with this!
You can also go and have a play with Stable Diffusion yourself here!
This is pretty awesome. The first 17 minutes and 58 seconds are enough to make this a classic piece of video. Jon Anderson is on top form. The orchestra is amazing.
Filed under #fuckingexcellent
Ever wanted to hear a 23+ minute prog epic about the Victorian engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel?
You’re welcome. It’s stunningly good. Out very soon.
We had some land cleared over the weekend, using a Bobcat with a mulching attachment. The land was mostly bramble, with a few fallen pines. Very steep, very unusable.
Here’s an idea of what it does (not our video, but similarly cool).
And here’s the result. Now we need to do something with it before the weeds grow back again. The kittens have already been for a sniff and a frolic on it. Pretty sure the pukekos are annoyed that we’ve cleared their house too.
The guys were so skilled with this Spinning Maw of Death that they managed to keep the fruit trees that we were only vaguely aware of. So we have quince, limes, more lemons, guava and ice cream bean (Inga edulis). Happy days!
Another cool feature of my Nikon P1000 – it can take long exposure timelapses and stitch them together.
In this example I woke up early (or was woken up early by a certain ginger Princess) so got up to make coffee at about 5am and decided to stick the camera outside for a while.
The process takes 25-second exposures for a total of 150 minutes and then automatically stitches them, so you get the stars showing their gradual movement (well, it’s Earth’s movement, but you know what I mean) through the sky.
If I had the patience, and if the sun wasn’t about to come up, I would have let it go for longer. But I think this pic is still quite nice.
I’ve had my Nikon P1000 for nearly a year and have only just started to read the manual. It has some quite interesting features, like being able to create time lapse videos. This one was taken over 25 minutes, facing South-ish.
Maybe not what we think. We must go back.
Horrifyingly beautiful and very descriptive of our modern times.
Lord Viking & Princess Wanda 