Words that do Handstands

The Princess Bride disc cover has one -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;CdxyMd9.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;CdxyMd9.jpg</a>

In &quot;Gare du Nord&quot; in Paris: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patricehamel.org&#x2F;index.php?page=2&amp;article=23" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patricehamel.org&#x2F;index.php?page=2&amp;article=23</a><p>entrée &#x2F; sortie (entrance &#x2F; exit)

I&#x27;ve always admired Sun Microsystem&#x27;s ambigram logo:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;d&#x2F;d5&#x2F;SUN_microsystems_logo_ambigram.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;upload.wikimedia.org&#x2F;wikipedia&#x2F;commons&#x2F;d&#x2F;d5&#x2F;SUN_micr...</a>

In high school I would make these and post them on DeviantArt. Was scrolling the Reddit front page and saw my work tattooed on a man&#x27;s arm. Shocked, to say the least.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jacknjellify&#x2F;status&#x2F;820346345429078016" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jacknjellify&#x2F;status&#x2F;820346345429078016</a>

The approach here is unnecessarily constrained because the author is seeking glyphs in advance for all two-letter pairs, &quot;one size fits all&quot;, so it&#x27;s unsurprising that the results are rather ugly and hard to read. If the font were allowed to depend on the desired words, that would add flexibility which might allow automatic production of much prettier solutions such as the artistic &quot;earth air fire water&quot; example (or jwineinger&#x27;s Princess Bride example)

Reminded me of this drawing of the alphabet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.app.goo.gl&#x2F;3pR7TQqohUDqM3hf8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;images.app.goo.gl&#x2F;3pR7TQqohUDqM3hf8</a><p>It&#x27;s not the same, but it&#x27;s left-right symmetrical instead and really neat.

The text is very faint in many places, so I applied some thresholding in GIMP to make it crisper: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cpC3PK9.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;cpC3PK9.png</a><p>There&#x27;s probably a way to adapt the training process to create black and white images directly, e.g. by evaluating the classifiers on the thresholded images, but passing the gradients through to the underlying continuously-valued images.

The author here used the MNIST set of handwritten numbers, but that seems an unnecessary constraint. An infinite (practically) training set is available in the form of existing fonts, which can be used to generate a training set. A set of distortions can be added in automatically to give the net a little more information to work with, and then this same methodology can be applied to generate the single glyph ambigrams.<p>bigram&lt;-&gt;character ambigrams are also feasible, but the search space gets pretty big.

<i>&gt; This process lets us “dream” of images representing whichever characters we want.</i><p>Aside, I&#x27;m really psyched at the idea that the word &quot;dream&quot; has a chance to become an established term of art here. <i>Do</i> androids dream of electric sheep? Well, it depends on the model you&#x27;ve trained them with, obviously.

A lot of ambigrams can be found here:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cerulean.st&#x2F;ambigram&#x2F;indexold.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cerulean.st&#x2F;ambigram&#x2F;indexold.html</a>

This is interesting due to the tight constraints of the roman alphabet<p>Islamic writing in the Arabic script has made use of these tricks for centuries as its script has built-in affordances for it.

The ambigram in Angels and Demons really annoyed me—there it was, and it was very pretty, but the book claimed that &quot;nobody had ever been able to create such a thing&quot;. Yet clearly Dan Brown (or an illustrator he hired) could. It took me out of the book some.

Would be great if someone could come up with a &quot;Pull&quot; sticker that would read &quot;Push&quot; when mirrored.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.johnlangdon.net&#x2F;works&#x2F;angels-demons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.johnlangdon.net&#x2F;works&#x2F;angels-demons&#x2F;</a>

At first, I thought this was going to be about words that are autoantonyms. Here are 25 examples: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;57032&#x2F;25-words-are-their-own-opposites" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mentalfloss.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;57032&#x2F;25-words-are-their-own...</a>

NOW NO SWIMS ON MON

Any good recommendations for a good, discrete gradient descent tutorial, text or Youtube, assuming only calculus?<p>It&#x27;s one of those things I learned the basics of several years ago and have now forgotten (which frustrates me, but is understandable since I don&#x27;t use machine learning at work).

If you like this, check out <i>Inversions</i> by Scott Kim.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=scott+kim+inversions&amp;tbm=isch" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=scott+kim+inversions&amp;tbm=isc...</a><p>The book is out of print, but you can find used copies. It has a Foreword by Douglas Hofstadter and a Backword by Jef Raskin.<p>I bought an autographed copy at a computer show in San Francisco on March 21, 1982. The way Scott autographed the books was by inventing and drawing your own personalized inversion on the spot! Mine reads with my first name right side up and my last name if you turn it upside down.<p>One clever thing I just noticed: my first name has &quot;ae&quot; in it and my last name has &quot;ea&quot;, so that made a natural way to link the inverted names together.<p>Needless to say, this is one of my most treasured books. Thanks Scott!

I can&#x27;t read at all what is written on first image. I guess I couldn&#x27;t on generated images either, but with captions they are barely recognizable.

One idea: try using adversarial training (i.e. train the classifier on examples with bounded perturbations which maximize error).

If you’re into general wordplay I highly recommend <i>Making the Alphabet Dance</i>.

reminds me of:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flipscript.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;flipscript.com</a>

Sweet, love this tattoo generator! ;)

WOWS IS MOM.<p>(WOWS IS MOM standing on her head is a statement, not a question)