Book reviews for December 2022

Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) by Michael Connelly

Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch Universe, #36) by Michael Connelly

3/5

 

JUDAS 62 by Charles Cumming

JUDAS 62 by Charles Cumming

4/5

 

No Plan B (Jack Reacher, #27) by Lee Child

No Plan B (Jack Reacher, #27) by Lee Child

3/5

 

The Maze (John Corey, #8) by Nelson DeMille

The Maze (John Corey, #8) by Nelson DeMille

3/5

 

Stable Diffusion Global Stereotypes

Stable Diffusion Global Stereotypes

What does Stable Diffusion think a typical person looks like from each country?

This image is composed of 248 faces generated with the following prompt:

"photo of a typical person from Vietnam, highly symmetrical face, portrait photography, highly detailed Vietnam background, 4k, 35mm, sharp focus, amazing photo, portrait of the year"

Using seed 960604, 50 iterations, 7.5 scale, and just varying the country name in the prompt text.

There is no gender implied in the prompt but it certainly seems more likely to generate a woman. It seems to find something distinctive about most countries. The region that surprises me the most is Eastern Europe which ends up being very similar. Click the image above for a larger version.

ITHCWY on Mastodon

By . Updated on

A Mastodon in a primordial forest

Well I picked a bad year to dabble back in Twitter. I'm not ready to delete it all again, but I am experimenting with Mastodon. There is an official ITHCWY account here, this is fully automated via the Mastodon API and will publish posts, comments and news shares. It's currently posting its way through the back catalog.  I also have a personal account here. So far Mastodon is a pretty good experience. There is some stress in picking a server but once you're on everything else is easy. Will just have to see if there is a regression to the mean as the number of users continues to increase.

Winter Solstice 2022

Winter Solstice 2022

Winter Solstice 2022 (December 21, 2022 at 21:48 UTC) as rendered in Catfood Earth. Winter starts right now in the Northern Hemisphere, Summer if you happen to be south of the Equator.

Landing at SFO

Landing at SFO

Time lapse of a Boeing 777-300ER landing at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

Shot on a Pixel 6 Pro in 10x timelapse mode wedged into a window with the blind closed. I thought I'd just get some clouds but happily the crew didn't force us to open all the blinds, so the video shows us entering California with heavy clouds (a plane with contrails going the other way right at the start), clouds clearing as we cross California and then the full landing. Bit of dirt on the window unfortunately but still quite happy with the result. The flight was from Frankfurt.

More Bangalore Sunsets

By . Updated on

More Bangalore Sunsets

A sequel to Bangalore Sunsets, from a different floor of the Shangri-La Hotel. In three of the four sequences you can see Bangalore Palace (featured more closely in More Bangalore).

Links for December 2022

By . Updated on
'5G makes my phone pretty worthless'

It does suck. Can we switch it off until it's working?

--

Serious Eats: The Best Garlic Presses of 2022

This headline is exhausting.

--

SFGATE: San Franciscans 'appalled' at New York Times crossword error

Typical Big Pear behavior...

--

The New York Times: Berlin Hotel's Huge Aquarium Bursts, With 1500 Fish Inside

Avoid the fish special for the next few months...

--

Review Geek: Can’t Hear Dialogue on TV? Here’s How to Fix It

Tell the children to shut the fuck up?

--

Saved stories keep reappearing in Google News

My new hobby: trying to remove saved articles from #GoogleNews