Linkspam: Support Your Local Police Movie

A rather beautiful shot of Serpico and the Twin Towers headlining the article.

The heroes likewise are strung along a spectrum from the hippie cop Frank Serpico, who nearly paid with his life for exposing the corruption of the New York force, to the uncouth ‘Popeye’ Doyle

The BFI website has quite a nice reprint (if that’s what we’re calling these things…) of a Spring 1974 article on the early 70’s explosion of US cop movies. Many of the movies talked about are ones that have passed me by and appear to have faded from memory, but it is interesting to see how films like Dirty Harry and Serpico were viewed and evaluated at the time.

Read Support Your Local Police Movie at the BFI website.

Linkspam: Using Machine Learning for Geoglyph Detection

PNAS has an interesting paper on using AI and Machine Learning to try and identify new Nazca Pampa geoglyphs in the Peruvian Nazca Desert. It’s a fun little lunchtime skim with a few nice images of some of the newly found geoglyphs.

PNAS: AI-accelerated Nazca survey nearly doubles the number of known figurative geoglyphs and sheds light on their purpose

Linkspam: Bop Spotter

Bop Spotter is an interesting little curio; take an Android phone, set it to run Shazam on a loop, and then hide it somewhere (in this case San Franciscos’s Mission district) with a solar panel attached and suddenly you have the the culture-tasting equivalent of ShotSpotter, generating the unique soundtrack to a particular location. San Franciscos’s Mission is, of course, a very particular environment with a distinct feel too it, so it’d be interesting to see how it would contrast with other locations around the world – though I do suspect that most would end in the brief bang of a controlled explosion.