Author Archives: Nicolas Malevé
Detecting the Manchurian Candidate
In the Manchurian Candidate, it is revealed that the Communists have been using the soldier Shaw as a sleeper agent, a guiltless assassin subconsciously activated by seeing the “Queen of Diamonds” playing card while playing solitaire. Provoked by the appearance of the card, he obeys orders which he then forgets. Isn’t an image just like […]
How to develop a picture from a corpse’s eye
“The morning of November 16, 1880, Wilhelm Friedrich Kühne (1837–1900), a professor of physiology at the University of Heidelberg, dissected the head of an executed murderer in his dark room within minutes of the man’s death. Kühne worked around the contracting muscles in the left eye socket to remove the eye and develop an image […]
A printing press of one’s own
A museum without walls has been opened to us, and it will carry infinitely farther that limited revelation of the world of art which the real museums offer is within their walls: in answer to their appeal, the plastic arts have produced their printing press. Museum Without Walls, André Malraux.
Containment
The minimal message of a photograph may be less simple than we first thought. Instead of it being: I have decided that seeing this is worth recording , we may now decode it as: The degree to which I believe this is worth looking at can be judged by all that I am willingly not […]
Regression = prediction
[…] these sorts of problems break down into two types: regression problems, in which you need to predict some number, such as weight, given a bunch of other numbers, such as height; and classification problems, in which you need to assign a label, such as spam, given a bunch of numbers, for examples word counts […]
Green Mamba
Tensorflow, an open source library for Machine Learning developed by Google, comes with a demo program that labels images. The output of the program contains the labels (or class names) and their scores. The score represents the probability of the image to belong to a certain class. green mamba (score = 0.43074) vine snake (score […]
Bochman’s face recognition system
The Major Bochmann was head of the passport division on the Eastern side of Checkpoint Charlie […]. He developed a facial recognition system, designed to teach the border guards to scrutinize faces and look for features that cannot be altered. The aim was to assess the authenticity of passport photos for those who were trying […]
A book worm’s micrography
From http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/hooke.html Hooke’s reputation in the history of biology largely rests on his book Micrographia, published in 1665. Hooke devised […] one of the best such microscopes of his time, and used it in his demonstrations at the Royal Society’s meetings. With it he observed organisms as diverse as insects, sponges, bryozoans, foraminifera, and bird […]
Innate species
Although every “acquired species” comes through imagination, Bonaventure creates another category of species, called innate species, that are imprinted directly on the memory. Bonaventure writes, “Memory has to be informed not only from the outside by phantasms but also from the above, by receiving and having in itself simple forms that cannot enter through the […]