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Odds And Ends And Anything You Fancy

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After almost a thousand years, the Austrian village of Fucking is changing it's name. Is nothing sacred these days?
 
After almost a thousand years, the Austrian village of Fucking is changing it's name. Is nothing sacred these days?
They're fed up of visitors and their bad jokes????

Maybe they don't realise that the only reason they get ANY visitors is because of their name. In these times where various local regulations have devastated the tourism industry, you' think that they'd be glad to have a unique selling point like a funny name...

Of course here in the UK we have our fair share of funny place names, such as this amusing selection;
 
Returning to the UK - Oxford in 1963
I looked hard but failed to spot Old Slave on that outside riverside terrace, probably because it was mid-winter. It was a favourite watering hole in the early '60s when my parents met other grown-ups who lived in Oxford, but the two nippers, me and my cousin, were confined to those outside tables, or more likely, sitting on that wall with legs dangling over the river.
As for the restaurant fare, ours would be a glass of lemonade and a bag of crisps.
I had no idea the food was like that, children were not allowed in pubs in those days, and I would imagine my parents would have thought it a bit pricey, Berni Inns being more their style.
And no, I didn't try to tickle a trout!
 
I looked hard but failed to spot Old Slave on that outside riverside terrace, probably because it was mid-winter. It was a favourite watering hole in the early '60s when my parents met other grown-ups who lived in Oxford, but the two nippers, me and my cousin, were confined to those outside tables, or more likely, sitting on that wall with legs dangling over the river.
As for the restaurant fare, ours would be a glass of lemonade and a bag of crisps.
I had no idea the food was like that, children were not allowed in pubs in those days, and I would imagine my parents would have thought it a bit pricey, Berni Inns being more their style.
And no, I didn't try to tickle a trout!
I am so glad to have sparked fond memories. In later years, Inspector Morse and Lewis frequented The Trout while solving cases. Who knows, someday soon Musa and Jack might have some real ale there?
 
Amazing and creepy
the 'generative adversarial network' concept can lead to some very interesting results.

What's important to remember is that these so-called 'artificial intelligence' systems produce those results without any kind of 'understanding' or 'world knowledge' ... that's what the article points out when they show the failures, such as the algorithm not 'knowing' that most of the times, earrings come in matching pairs or the frames of glasses have end pieces that are the same on either side.
The algorithm doesn't even have any internal representation or variable space to describe what earrings or eyeglasses are and what their defining properties and categories of type would be.

Similar to the GPT algorithm accidentally learning to count (poorly), although it doesn't have any internal implementation for any kind of notion of a number-space.
 
another interesting result from the 'deep learning' crowd,

also written up here

back in the 90's this still pretty much appeared a hopeless problem.
 
Eating unusual foods, Soho Style 1954
More ramblings from an old codger "who was there"

My father used to run a small grocery store in the 1950's, and I was 'baby sat' there sometimes. So I had a good look round, and there were a few very long thin packets wrapped in blue paper, with foreign writing on.
"What are these funny things, Dad?"
"Them's called spaghetti, lad."
"What d'you do with'em, Dad?"
"I dunno, I just sells them."

I don't think we were particularly unique in our very conservative tastes, spaghetti was 'foreign muck', and we would have laughed at all the other shapes with their tongue-twister names.
As for rice, that was only for baking with milk and sugar as a dessert, never used as a main carbs source.

I still wonder who were these 'sophisticated' people in this rural backwater who did buy the spaghetti, must have been those in the 'big house' who were a different breed to us common folk.

And when it came to our own kids, pasta was a staple, and they were proficient with chopsticks very early on.
 
And when it came to our own kids, pasta was a staple, and they were proficient with chopsticks very early on.
I was born in the mid-50s. Both my parents were first generation American-born and both were Catholic. Its amazing how the Church did influence our diets back then. There was no meat on Fridays (all year!) and forget about it during Lent except on Sundays. I guess it was OK to sin on the Lord's day...
 
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