why-animals-do-the-thing:

little-miss-mash:

ordinaryredtail:

candiikismet:

cats-and-company:

Queen.

I always have to reboot this.

For anyone wondering, this is amazing enrichment for the animal and a great way to involve guests! The lions aren’t forced to play with the rope if they don’t want to, and these guys (and anyone else who tries this out) have an awesome close up and hands on experience, all without having to come in direct contact with the cat!

@why-animals-do-the-thing

This definitely counts as #actually cute. This video is from the San Antonio Zoo, and the lioness’ name is Axelle. As @ordinaryredtail said above, the tug of war interaction is entirely voluntary on her part.

My guess is that the zoo staff did use some positive reinforcement training to teach her how to pick up and pull on the rope at first, because that’s not necessary something a lion would just do on their own. While it’s also probable that she’s rewarded with something tasty did choosing to engage with the members of the public like this, Axelle wouldn’t be engaging if it was a negative experience for her (there aren’t enough snacks in the world to coerce a lion into doing something they find actively distressing). If she didn’t want to participate, she could just walk away.

Some sanctuary and animal rights groups have taken issue with this interaction because they consider it unethical to ask a lion to engage in any “unnatural behavior” “for the benefit of the public,” calling it exploitation. It is worth keeping in mind, however, that learning and engaging in novel behaviors is hugely enriching for animals in human care, and that lions have no concept of exploitation. As long as the lion is not bothered by the presence or noise of the crowd, is not injured or harmed, and is engaging on an entirely voluntary basis, this sort of thing is entirely ethical. It is far safer than any type of interaction where a member of the public is coming into direct context with a big cat, but still allows people to directly experience the sheer strength of a lion up close.

Source: cats-and-company

Aw yeah it’s time for cookies with neural networks

brucesterling:

lewisandquark:

So there’s these computer programs called artificial neural networks that are good at imitating things. By seeing examples of what humans did, they can learn to translate languages, predict product sales, and even categorize text and images as innocuous or explicit (it has a lot of trouble with this last task, as it turns out).

One neural network I use, called textgenrnn, tries its best to imitate any kind of text you give it. I’ve given them paint colors, band names, and even guinea pig names and in each case their results are somewhat… mixed. (Paint colors called Stanky Bean, Stargoon, and Turdly, for example) The problem is that it doesn’t know what any of these words mean - it’s just picking letter combinations that seem likely to it.

This is what happened when I gave it all the cookies from a list of American recipes. This is what human cookies sound like to a neural network.

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Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go whip up a batch of Fluffin Coffee Drops.

For more cookies, including the neural net’s strange obsession with “balls,” as well as bonus material every time I post, you can sign up here.

Want to help with a future project? I’m crowdsourcing a dataset of college essay prompts. Let’s see if a neural net can write some that are more interesting than the usual!

*That’s not entirely fair, as some human being must have illustrated those.

Source: lewisandquark