Saturday, January 13, 2018

Poem for Saturday, Machine Learning, Painting Shakespeare

Sonnet XCIX
By William Shakespeare

The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;
But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stol'n from thee.

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Paul's boss invited Adam to come speak to their work group about machine learning, so after morning chores and leftovers for lunch, we went to Paul's office, where Adam talked for an hour about how TensorFlow and Matlab are used to mine and process data and about his own research during jobs and internships at UMCP, Texas State, and the NIH (and starting next week at NASA) enabling computers to identify emotional expressions, evaluate images, and various mathematical things I don't dare try to explain. It was very interesting even for me who doesn't understand the math involved.

I stopped at the bank with Adam to pick up a cashier's check to pay for his new car, then he went to the Walk the Moon concert downtown with friends and I waited for Paul for dinner, then Blindspot (great this season) and Agents of SHIELD (started strong, now is juggling a lot of new characters I don't really care about, needs to refocus on the team). Plus we watched the pilot of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (free on Amazon Prime this weekend) to see if the Golden Globes were right, and we enjoyed it; will certainly watch some more. Some photos from the Folger Library's Painting Shakespeare exhibit last month:

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The Zuccaro Shakespeare, now widely believed to be an unknown man with Shakespeare's name added later (and not painted by Federico Zuccaro).

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Imogen entering the cave of Belarius from Cymbeline by Richard Westall.

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The Folger's First Folio, now back from touring with a collection of the Folios.

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A fanciful interpretation of Macbeth meeting the witches in a lush fantasy landscape by Francisco Zuccarelli.

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The Infant Shakespeare Attended by Nature and the Passions by George Romney, for which Henry Clay Folger paid over $51,000 in 1927.

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A statue of Shakespeare on permanent display (with temporary holiday decorations).

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Devoted Shakespeare actor and theater manager David Garrick posed with a bust of his hero.

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And me posing with Shakespeare, with props.

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