In hindsight, visiting this cache might have been a mistake as a storm was beginning to roll in, but I got there before things got TOO hairy! I was in the vicinity preparing an
adventure-trail thingy along the coast path anyway, and couldn’t miss the opportunity to head for this exciting location. And it was a real treat to see a container like this: I’ve only
ever seen them before when I’ve placed them myself (e.g. GC7QG1Z). Great container, hide, and description: FP awarded. TNLN, TFTC!
Okay, I’m going for it! I’m driving from Oxford to Penzance this morning and having just watched the sun rise over Sedgemoor Services off the M5 I’ve determined that I’m ahead of
schedule by enough that I can justify a diversion, so I’m going to try for this hashpoint as I “pass”. Typing from mobile, apologies for lack of formatting ans any spelling errors; I’ll
fix them later.
Expedition
Driving from Oxford to Penzance in the world’s-smallest-rental-car isn’t a fun adventure. What is fun, though, is hitting up a graticule I’ve never hashed in before to see if I can find
the day’s hashpoint while en-route.
Parking the awfulmobile in a country lane, I followed the road and then a country footpath towards the hashpoint. I say “footpath”, but the public right of way was in dire need of
maintenance and the nettles and hedges were encroaching badly upon it. Which was troublesome, because the other side of the footpath was marked by an electric fence that I
didn’t want to touch, and so I had to shuffle sideways-at-times through the first field. The second field was easier-going, and I got a great view of the distant storm beginning to roll
in which would soak me later, as I hid adventure-game clues atop a cliff near Penzance. The third field
appeared to be where the hashpoint would be, and it was crossed by the public right of way, but I was surprised to find that the electric fence returned and now barred my way. Luckily
its owner had seen fit to put a length of plastic piping around the live wire so it was possible to jump over without burning my crotch, but this seemed a little not-the-done-thing
regardless.
The hashpoint was right in the middle of the field and an easy find. Certainly easier than the short-but-exciting hike there and back.
Photos
The gap between the electric fence and the bushes is allegedly a footpath
Nothing but farmland for miles around – the nearest settlement in the distance
That looks like a safe concession to your electric fence crossing a right of way
As she passed through Oxfordshire on Sunday, she spotted the stricken cow.
…
Delightful. The “urban mermaid” Lindsey Cole has been swimming along the Thames as a mermaid in
order to raise awareness of plastic pollution. She spotted what she thought was a big white plastic sack and swam on, indicating to her support boat to pick it up… but when they caught
up they realised that it was a drowning cow! Some while later, they arranged for its successful rescue.
You may recall that on Halloween I mentioned that the Bodleian had released a mini choose-your-own-adventure-like adventure game book, available freely online. I decided that this didn’t go quite far
enough and I’ve adapted it into a hypertext game, below. (This was also an excuse for me to play with Chapbook, Chris Klimas‘s new under-development story format for Twine.
If the thing you were waiting for before you experienced Shadows Out of Time was it to be playable in your browser, wait no longer: click here to play the game…
How well does the algorithm perform? Setting it up to work in LIME can be a bit of a pain, depending on your environment. The examples on Tulio Ribeiro’s Github repo are in Python and
have been optimised for Jupyter notebooks. I decided to get the code for a basic image analyser running in a Docker container, which involved much head-scratching and the installation
of numerous Python libraries and packages along with a bunch of pre-trained models. As ever, the code needed a bit of massaging to get it to run in my environment, but once that was
done, it worked well.
Below are three output images showing the explanation for the top three classifications of the red car above:
In these images, the green area are positive for the image and the red areas negative. What’s interesting here (and this is just my explanation) is that the plus and minuses for
convertible and sports car are quite different, although to our minds convertible and sports car are probably similar.
…
A fascinating look at how an neural-net powered AI picture classifier can be reverse-engineered to explain the features of the pictures it saw and how they influenced its decisions. The
existence of tools that can perform this kind of work has important implications for the explicability of the output of automated decision-making systems,
which becomes ever-more relevant as neural nets are used to drive cars, assess loan applications, and so on.
Remember all the funny examples of neural nets which could identify wolves fine so long as they had snowy backgrounds, because of bias in their training set? The same thing happens with
real-world applications, too, resulting in AIs that take on the worst of the biases of the world around them, making them racist, sexist, etc. We need audibility so we can understand
and retrain AIs.
Checked-in following recent report of “broken hinge”. Hinge is fine, but this kind of container is designed so that the hinge can be easily detached and the lid removed completely – so
long as you come at it from the right angle it’s pretty easy to put it back together again. All is well at GZ; cache is particularly easy to find now it’s a little more wintery but I
don’t think there’s any increased risk of muggling. Happy hunting!
I love to discover people who are hugely and deeply passionate about things that seem inconsequential to the rest of the world. Especially when they’re especially able to express that
passion and how exciting their special-thing is, to them. This video (and to a lesser extent the others in the Small Thing Big Idea series) really embodies that; man, this woman
really likes pencils.
A challenging find this morning, and not in the good way! After an extended search the cache was eventually found on the other side of some fallen (spiky) bushes from the published
coordinates. From the logs it looks like it was moved some time ago but the coordinates were never updated? Cache contents very damp and log baggie holed – log still usable, but not for
long. Contents need maintenence ASAP, container might survive either year or two if frost doesn’t crack the seal. SL, TFTC.
Staying at the conference centre down the road I got up early this morning to come out and find this cache before breakfast. After a little while struggling to make out the letters on
the gravestone in the dim November morning light I was eventually able to find the cache. Don’t understand the checksum, though! SL, TFTC.
Inspirational, well thought-out proposal for a flag for unified, “for Earth” projects. The website is terrible, but the artwork’s great, and it’s always nice to see an artist focus on
the idea of “uniting humanity” in spite of our politically-fractured world.
Last week, I attended W3C TPAC as well as the CSS Working Group meeting there. Various changes were made to specifications, and discussions had which I feel are of interest to web
designers and developers. In this article, I’ll explain a little bit about what happens at TPAC, and show some examples and demos of the things we discussed at TPAC for CSS in
particular.
…
This article describes proposals for the future of CSS, some of which are really interesting. It includes mention of:
CSS scrollbars – defining the look and feel of scrollbars. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not actually new: Internet Explorer 5.5 (and
contemporaneous version of Opera) supported a proprietary CSS extension that did the same thing back in 2000!
Aspect ratio units – this long-needed feature would make it possible to e.g. state that a box is square
(or 4:3, or whatever), which has huge value for CSS grid layouts: I’m excited by this one.
:where() – although I’ll be steering clear until they decide whether the related :matches() becomes :is(), I can see a million uses for this (and its widespread
existence would dramatically reduce the amount that I feel the need to use a preprocessor!).
