BONUS: Man cutting cheese with a chainsaw:

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Adam King, a machine learning/AI engineer, built a web-based demonstration of a neural network that autocompletes a text prompt. I tried it with "Throw out this vegetable now." Here's the result.

Throw out this vegetable now. It's nothing but a mess. And I don't need another salad. Just a little bit of broccoli!

We could serve up this vegetable as a salad with roasted veggies, but I prefer to use it as an entrée. You can even garnish the salad with another vegetable (such as cabbage) to make a simple vegetable-salad bowl with, or use some extra salad mix.

7-Minute Green Salad with Bruschetta, Sweet Potatoes, & Cilantro

INGREDIENTS

Yields 5-6 portions

1/2 pound Brussels sprouts (2-3 bunches)

2 ounces carrots, peeled and cut in half or quarters

1 onion, cut into 1/4-inch pieces

1 celery stalk, trimmed and deveined

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 large sweet potatoes, halved and peeled

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves, chopped

1 pound broccoli, cut into wedges

Juice from 1 lemon

1/4 cup Greek yogurt

salt and pepper, to taste

In a large bowl, stir together the sweet potatoes, leek, and carrot

I don't know French, but that didn't prevent me from being able to play this web-based game. The goal is to get the ball from one pillar to the next by holding down your finger (or mouse cursor) for the right amount of time. If you don't hold down long enough the ball will fall short of its goal. If you hold down too long, the ball overshoots. My high score so far is 194. Read the rest

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Michael Hearst, composer of the classic "Songs for Ice Cream Trucks" and author of the excellent Unusual Creatures, shares this delightful video of seemingly quite dangerous rides at Coney Island in the 1930s and 1940s.

These sanctioned affronts to safety remind me of the fun I had rolling around with my brothers in our station wagon's cargo area on long road trips.

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Fascination used to be a popular arcade game at carnival boardwalks around the country. It's like a cross between Bingo and Skee-Ball. Players compete against each other to roll balls down a table with holes in them. The first player to drop 5 balls in a straight line is the winner. The games disappeared from arcades and today only one play-for-cash arcade remains, in Massachusetts. Tom Scott paid it a visit and squared off against the owner in a friendly game. Read the rest

You're probably familiar with the labyrinth game that challenges you to move a steel ball through a wooden maze that has holes to avoid. This guy made a similar maze, but instead of a marble, he used a drop of water and rolled it across a surface coated in hydrophobic paint.

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Tim of Grand Illusions demonstrates a neat little trick, called the Magic Sword, in which a piece of solid metal seems to pass through another piece of metal.

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This marble run is at a playground called Monkey Town in the Netherlands. The creator says it has "4 tipping containers which can release up to 10,000 marbles in one go! If the biggest 2 containers (with 1000 and 10,000 marbles) are tipping at the same time, it creates a flood of 11,000 marbles!"

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Emoji Builder is a website that lets you make your own emojis. You can also simply click "randomize" and see what you get:

"crying cat face with tongue hanging out and money eyes" -- For those times your cat eats your $800/ounce Loud Dream strain, thinking it's catnip.

"vomiting confounded skeptical face" -- When Trump says the election was rigged.

"angry happy face with cowboy hat and wavy mouth" -- When you find out you've run out of Skoal, but you have been planning to quit smokeless tobacco anyway.

"angry nerdy happy face with open eye" -- It's 3:17am, I'll play one more Splatoon turf war then stop, I promise. Read the rest

@whostheidiotnow maintains a carefully curated selection of tweets: ones where the author types the exact phrase "your an idiot." One man's automated blocklist is another's breakfast entertainment! [via @saladinahmed] Read the rest

No matter where you place it, pointerpointer.com has a photo with someone point at your pointer. Read the rest

This lobster, dubbed Calvin, was headed for the dinner plate—by way of a pot of boiling water—only to be saved because he looked nifty. Ahhh, the capricious nature of humans.

According to an NPR story, this spotted pattern isn't even the most unusual lobster coloration out there. White lobsters are even more rare. They can also, apparently, come in a sort of Miller Lite-can blue.

And they make great pets:

... Gérard de Nerval, the French artist who famously kept a pet lobster, which he named Thibault. He reportedly walked the crustacean in the gardens of the Palais-Royal, on a leash. And he gave a convincing explanation for his choice in non-human companions.

"I have affection for lobsters," Nerval said. "They are tranquil, serious and they know the secrets of the sea."

NPR can point you toward a Harper's article that offers evidence for Thibault's actual existence. I will say this: As a former employee of Red Lobster, the leashed lobster story sounds entirely believable to me. I have personal experience racing lobsters and teaching them to stand on their heads.

Via GrrlScientist

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