There is an annual event NaNoGenMo bit.ly/2EEHefo and even in my opinion it is extremely strange. This is a competition for writing code that generates literary texts (at least 50K words are required). The artistry of most of the resulting texts is under the question for me, but there are some interesting instances. I'll tell you about two of them.

American artist Austin Kleon bit.ly/2yLU8BL came up with the Newspaper Blackout genre bit.ly/2PH6O4m: one takes a sheet of newspaper and blacks out all but a few words that themselves form a new sentence or a short poem. Once upon a time I did something similar with the Moscow metro scheme bit.ly/2S0zKWG. So, the former CTO Safari Liza Daly bit.ly/2CSuOyH automated this process for NaNoGenMo 2016 bit.ly/2NNd0WM. You can use an arbitrary image with the text as an input, and possible sentences are sampled from some kind of probabilistic grammar.

In 2015 Kevan Davis bit.ly/2AgzJqH came up with the another great idea bit.ly/2NQAGcC: let's take each sentence of the input text and replace it with the closest Levenshtein sentence from the key text. I should tell you, Shakespeare's text transcribed by International Code of Maritime Signals, 1969 edition is amazing bit.ly/2OwVlHP

Came across a nice automata/fractal blog bit.ly/2S4uMrI
Also, a harsh article about a sphere coverage with the flowsnake fractal using the Gosper-islands division bit.ly/2R9VE8D

Interactive map of buildings in Amsterdam according to the constuction date bit.ly/2yUrFdf + animation based on this data bit.ly/2CVbHEh.

Yearly frequency of colons in titles of academic articles within literary studies. Source: bit.ly/2O6mexl

As a responce to my yesterday's post Borislav sent me a good article with a colon in the title: "PianoText: Redesigning the Piano Keyboard for Text Entry" bit.ly/2qef4hd

Crazy geeky pumpkin carving from Alex Wer, check out his site bit.ly/2yyEXwA for more amazing works.

There is an interesting effect of self-organization in well-distinguishable macro-structures in large bird swarms bit.ly/QLGwia, which is often referred to as flocking or herding.
It also occurs sometimes in schools of fish bit.ly/1vx4n6R or, for example, in flocks of sheep bit.ly/2i7DVkQ. Such complex behavior always gave rise to a lot of speculation, especially until Ilya Prigogine developed a theory about self-organization in dissipative structures. In 1986, computer graphics specialist Craig Reynolds bit.ly/2AzpAp7 (who participated in making of "Tron" movie) came up with a very simple algorithm called boids (= bird + droids) bit.ly/2Og1d3o. The algorithm has only three basic rules of behavior for each agent and does not require communication between agents: avoid collisions (move away from the local neighbors if they are closer than a certain threshold), move in the same direction as the local neighbors (on average), move towards the center of mass of the local neighbors. These three vectors are averaged and give a working vector for each agent, then we iterate.

The result was so good that it became actively used in computer graphics for the cinema. For example, in the movie "Batman returns" in 1992, the behavior of flocks of bats was calculated using this model bit.ly/2zbl7qS. Similar models are used in different institutions and for more serious purposes, not only for simulating birds bit.ly/2CNHNAK, but also, for example, for modeling the behavior of people in the subway bit.ly/2F2BagX, at stadiums and crowded spaces bit.ly/2yEj3rZ and during fire evacuation bit.ly/2z7Mdik.

Here bit.ly/18Mk2QF you can read the ancient post of Craig Reynolds himself with explanations of how he invented this model. And I myself learned about it from Philip Ball's book The Critical Mass, bit.ly/2ERMcW2, devoted to the usage of physical models for describing various, including social phenomena.

Recently learned about a classification of car parking structures with names for different topologies. Source: 125 pages handbook of recommended practices for the parking construction bit.ly/2Q9OAZm

A.T. Fomenko. Gradient descent. 1976.

Anatoly Timofeyevich Fomenko, famous for his, ahem, extravagant "New chronology" books series, is a good mathematician, for many years works at the Mechanics and Mathematics Faculty of Moscow State University as head of the Department of differential geometry and applications. In his spare time, he has been drawing quite strange pictures since the seventies. I remember the first time I saw his illustrations in his textbook on topology. The picture above is called "Gradient descent", and more works can be viewed on its website: bit.ly/2Qopq9m.

Project DeOldify: restore the colors of old b/w photos using a neural network. Results are very nice, somehow in the spirit of Prokudin-Gorsky. Twitter: bit.ly/2zw2m1s code+pictures: bit.ly/2z2XJwz

Neurolink's getting closer! Folks from Kamitani Lab do reconstruction of the seen image from fMRI data. Cool video: bit.ly/2zDe6PU, more videos bit.ly/2yVCH2C, code bit.ly/2qAiZFb.

And now for something completely different:
* Gretchen Peterson, computer cartographer, published a coloring book for adults where you have to paint maps of cities: amzn.to/2PiuTSN
* Cody Ben Lewis from a kickstarter launched generative socks store string&&loop sells for 12 bucks socks with cats from Google dataset Quick, Draw! bit.ly/2SZpdvl
* it turns out Andy Warhol was the brand ambassador of Commodore and in 1985 performed at the presentation of the computer Amiga: bit.ly/2PM8QDv

I haven't published my projects lately, but now I have something to share. Someone may remember how, a year and a half ago, the music generated by my neural network Pianola, with the help of Ivan Yamshchikov, Andrey Sebrant, Masha Chernova, and a lot of other cool friends, played by a live orchestra with Peter Theremin at the opening of the YaC 2017 conference. Approximately at the same time I thought up to make an infinite music box using the same neural network. Recently I managed to finish it and publish the results: bit.ly/2PQhT6s, youtu.be/Yu8iXOyG8kE.

Yesterday, the open data portal of Zurich published 50 thousand 3D models of city buildings bit.ly/2PTdQ9r

The last three years in the autumn San Francisco hosts a strange event called Roguelike Celebration bit.ly/2MM2qzy. Roughly speaking, is's a conference dedicated to writing computer games of the ancient genre Roguelike bit.ly/2zXtAOA. This genre, a bit similar to RPG, named for one of the first such games, Rogue, made in 1980. Other well-known representatives are NetHack, Moria, ADOM, and as boundary examples are often named Dwarf Fortress and, suddenly, Diablo. Among the genre-forming aspects of roguelikes are hardcoreness, procedural content generation and ASCII graphics usage, which makes the whole genre extremely nerdish.

So, the talks from these Roguelike Celebration events are published online and some of them seem to be quite interesting. As an example, I share a link to the talk "Chess + Rogue = Chogue" bit.ly/2B7uk5K from two professors at the Department of Design and Computation Arts of Concordia University. The authors quite systematically approach the question of how to build an organic hybrid of two very different systems of game rules.

There's a thing, Norwegian Slow TV.
It is argued that the roots of this phenomenon go back to the Warhol’s five-hour film Sleep, filmed in the sixties and showing, as you could guess, a sleeping person. About 10 years ago, the Norwegian NRK pulled the genre on live TV, broadcasting a 7-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo. Then there were a lot of transport sequels, including the 134-hour polar cruise route from Bergen to Kirkenes, also other countries joined with similar projects.

In addition to traveling, other meditative activities went into the business: 18 hours of broadcasting salmon fishing, 12 hours of knitting sweater competition, 8 hours of fireplace burning, you name it. In general, if you have your own bar and you don’t know what to show on the screen instead of boring music clips and sports broadcasts, this is a good way to try.

My personal top includes:
* 24+ hours of reading software license agreements (here is a ten-minute excerpt bit.ly/2qP93Yi),
* Mat Parker from the Numberphile channel throws a coin for an hour and a half trying to throw out 10 eagles in a row, counting statistics (bit.ly/2DspAsT),
* 7 hours of cooking christmas ribs (bit.ly/2TmYqt8).

Suddenly: a Rubik's cube on the Poincare disk bit.ly/2Kepp5U (and check the link, there are more, including the Klein bottle)

Yesterday I mentioned the Klein's bottle and recall a story. 20 years ago I had a chance to attend the course on CG by legendary Shikin and Boreskov. They did a two weeks bootcamp, said "bring us something interesting as a course work" and left. So with a friend of mine, Eugene, we did a portable raytracing of the Klein bagel (kleinbagel.com) with reflections, semitransparency and some other blackjack. To be able to render a few seconds of the video during the available couple of months, from the very beginning we wrote a portable pure C code, and then ran it all the time in parallel on all available our own and other people's computers. When five years ago we recalled that funny pastime, I dug up that code, and it without problems compiled with gcc under cygwin on Win7x64. I turned on the quality to maximum and render this video overnight: https://youtu.be/hj6PLEZQbEo