I think you’re underselling the shittiness of Ventura winning the MN gubernatorial election in 1998. He won with 37% of the vote because he was running against human jar of mayonnaise Norm Coleman (34%) and Skip Humphrey (28%), whose claim to fame was that his parents were big in MN politics (both parents former…

It was a great DIY custom mode that everyone who had that friend who always picked Oddjob came up with.

Wait, am I not the resident Random Internet Jagoff? Should people be giving me time?

In the NPR article it said they coded 70 (IIRC) other Lennon-McCartney songs of known providence as the training data. Not having bothered to read the original paper, I’d like to at least believe they did some leave-one-out or k-fold cross validation on the training set to verify it’s a believable model. But I’m sure…

I believe you that that’s the technical, legal way it works. I was asking in a more philosophical sense, because those other parts do matter, and often are what’s recognizable from the song, e.g. so many samples are taken from a drum fill or bass lick created by someone who isn’t the credited writer.

I was going based on a heavy skim of the NPR article, but hadn’t gotten around to looking at the actual paper. It only makes sense that they were only looking at the music itself though, yeah.

I don’t think there was. Paul claims John wrote the lyrics and then he wrote a melody around it. John claims that all Paul did was write the middle eight.

If you read the linked NPR article, the bag of words model was 3 different bag of words models; one for words, one for chord transitions, one for note transitions.…

I would say especially with the collaborative way Beatles songs were being written at that point (after they went to India you could use the singer-wrote-it model almost 100%). There’s kind of an epistemological question of “what does it mean to write a song?” Is it just the melody? The lyrics? The fake harpsichord (do…

Whale sharks can get damn near that big (they average 32ft and specimens up to 59ft have been reported). Scientists observed some juvenile whale sharks (about 20ft) and they ate about 46lbs a day. Granted, they’re filter feeders (they eat plankton and small fish), unlike most sharks, but the amount of calories to…

Classic AV Club: It can be two things.

Hoo boy was it unpopular hot garbage. When I saw it in the theater there were only 2 other people, and they came in the same car as me. It’s a shame that a show as good as TNG generated such bad movies.

That is to say, they’re counting on enough people spending $20/year per individual or $35/year per family on NSO who wouldn’t have spent $20 or $35/year on Virtual Console games.

Be glad that the US and EU versions have controllers that plug in and you can get extension cords for them. The Japanese version has them hard wired just like the original Famicon (and scaled down to be in proportion to the mini console).

Given that the upcoming Nintendo Switch Online subscription service (like Playstation Network or XBox Live) is launching with 20 NES games and a promise of “more games added regularly”, I think their future plan is just to offer a selection of classic games prix fixe through the service subscription instead of à la…

Seriously. He had a decade of pre-production on LOTR. The Hobbit got dumped in his lap with a fixed release date after del Toro dropped out.

Ron Howard was going to film school at USC for directing (he never actually graduated) during “Happy Days” and he cajoled Roger Corman into letting him direct a movie to get some experience in exchange for being in another Corman flick. He wanted to be a director from fairly early in his career.

Topher Grace said he…

And to be clear for anyone who doesn’t know the history, “got rid of” means “had them sent to concentration camps or had them brutally murdered on the spot”, not just kicked them out. You know, pretty much what you’d expect with the Nazis.

I see the point you’re making now (bolding the “would’ve” just made me initially think, “Is this some weird prescriptivist bugbear I wasn’t previously familiar with?”), but I’m still not entirely in agreement with you on whether a native speaker would generate it. I can 100% buy that a copy editor would change it, but…

Are you trying to claim that “would’ve” isn’t a word and shows poor grasp of English? That sentence is perfectly clear and that’s a perfectly cromulant word. The dumbass thing would be to use “would of”.