John Brosio, Moo (2009)

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Bohemian Seafood Rhapsody

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Nano Banana

Something unusual happened in the world of AI image editing recently. A new model, known as "nano banana," started making the rounds with impressive abilities that landed it at the top of the LMArena leaderboard. Now, Google has revealed that nano banana is an innovation from Google DeepMind, and it's being rolled out to the Gemini app today.

AI image editing allows you to modify images with a prompt rather than mucking around in Photoshop. Google first provided editing capabilities in Gemini earlier this year, and the model was more than competent out of the gate. But like all generative systems, the non-deterministic nature meant that elements of the image would often change in unpredictable ways. Google says nano banana (technically Gemini 2.5 Flash Image) has unrivaled consistency across edits—it can actually remember the details instead of rolling the dice every time you make a change.

Google says subjects will retain their appearance as you edit.

This unlocks several interesting uses for AI image editing. Google suggests uploading a photo of a person and changing their style or attire. For example, you can reimagine someone as a matador or a '90s sitcom character. Because the nano banana model can maintain consistency through edits, the results should still look like the person in the original source image. This is also the case when you make multiple edits in a row. Google says that even down the line, the results should look like the original source material.

Gemini's enhanced image editing can also merge multiple images, allowing you to use them as the fodder for a new image of your choosing. Google's example below takes separate images of a woman and a dog and uses them to generate a new snapshot of the dog getting cuddles—possibly the best use of generative AI yet. Gemini image editing can also merge things in more abstract ways and will follow your prompts to create just about anything that doesn't run afoul of the model's guardrails.

The model remembers details instead of generating completely new things every time.

As with other Google AI image generation models, the output of Gemini 2.5 Flash Image always comes with a visible "AI" watermark in the corner. The image also has an invisible SynthID digital watermark that can be detected even after moderate modification.

You can give the new native image editing a shot today in the Gemini app. Google says the new image model will also roll out soon in the Gemini API, AI Studio, and Vertex AI for developers.

by Ryan Witwan, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Images: Google

[ed. Hot new thing. Try it here. See also: Google aims to be top banana in AI image editing (Axios).]

Chen Baiyi aka 陈白一 aka Chen Bai aka Chen Huan (Chinese, b. 1926-2014, Shaoyang, Hunan Province, China)

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Provo Political Painter

Jon McNaughton, National Emergency and All-American Trump

Provo political painter Jon McNaughton puts Donald Trump at the border with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others in his progressive rogues’ gallery (Salt Lake Tribune).

[ed. Unfortunate that anyone with a modicum of artistic talent would waste their time producing this kind of schlock. It's like a low rent version of AI slop. But someone must buy it. Where do they actually hang these things, over their beds? In their bathroom? Above Fox News channel on their tv? Maybe they're 'saving them' for investment purposes. haha... See also: MAGA World Is So Close to Getting It (Atlantic).]

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[AI.]

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Dahabian/Getty Images

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Kazumasa Nagai — The Yokogawa Philosophy (poster, 1989)

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Maximilian Liebenwein, The Infamous Pond, 1907

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Ralph Ziman, MIG-21 Project (Boeing Museum of Flight, Seattle, WA)
Images: markk

[ed. South African beadwork on a Large scale. All exhibits including Air Force One, the Space Shuttle program, and more here. Don't miss if you're in Seattle.]

Tonight in Jungle Land

50 Years Ago, Bruce Springsteen Made a Masterpiece. It Wasn’t Easy.

Every star’s career is the sum of wild improbabilities. So many things have to line up: ambition, talent, discipline, cultural timing, connections, support, perseverance and more than a little luck. Peter Ames Carlin focuses on a crucial make-or-break moment for Bruce Springsteen with “Tonight in Jungleland: The Making of ‘Born to Run.’”

Springsteen has been a top-tier rock star ever since the August 1975 release of “Born to Run” made him known nationwide. The album, his third, was widely acclaimed as a masterpiece when it came out. It’s the grandly Promethean statement of a 25-year-old rocker pouring all his experience, all his rock-oldie erudition, all his stage-honed reflexes and all his literary and commercial aspirations into songs that unabashedly reach for sweaty glory.

On the album, Springsteen sang about love, escape, dread, transcendence and desperate, determined motion: “It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win,” he announced in its opening song, “Thunder Road.” Half a century later, he clearly won. Yet without some fateful choices and unlikely coincidences in 1974 and 1975, things could have gone very differently. (...)

In 1974, Springsteen was two superb albums into a career that had drawn raves from rock critics and made converts of concert audiences, but didn’t generate nationwide record sales. Meanwhile, the Columbia Records management that had signed and promoted Springsteen had been replaced. The company’s new honchos saw Billy Joel as a better investment.

At one point Springsteen was on a list of acts the label considered dropping. Carlin reports that the son of Columbia’s president was wowed by a Springsteen college concert, and let his father know about it. That may have helped.

Before agreeing to bankroll a third album, the label wanted Springsteen to deliver a single. Working in a cheap studio where equipment constantly broke down and the piano wouldn’t stay in tune, he perfected that single. He piled on instruments for months until he finished the song: “Born to Run” — four pounding, chiming minutes of dread, yearning and last-chance bravado.

The album was forged with idealism and fiercely guarded amateurism. Instead of hiring proven hitmakers, Springsteen insisted on working with his own young guys: his band members and his co-producers (Springsteen’s early manager, Mike Appel, and the critic turned producer Jon Landau). For a year, he agonized over every sound and every note, trying all sorts of alternatives, pressuring himself and the band to make a great album, take after take after take. 

Once the album was done — working until the very last moment, till dawn before the band had to hit the road — Springsteen had so many second thoughts he almost scrapped it. He famously tossed an acetate of the album into a hotel swimming pool. Luckily, he was talked down, and “Born to Run” found the audience Springsteen deserved. (...)

Over the past 50 years, “Born to Run” has been absorbed as one among the many albums in Springsteen’s long and varied catalog. But in 1975 it was a do-or-die statement. The songs are all about dynamics, about the buildup from soft to loud, about the way a sudden drumbeat hits and a sung syllable can be heard and felt. For anyone not already familiar with its story, “Tonight in Jungleland” vividly summons the album’s struggle and its spirit.

by John Pareles, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Tom Hill/WireImage, via Getty Images

Brigitte Yoshiko Pruchnow, Greek Salad, 2024
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Design Your Own Rug!

For my wedding anniversary, I designed and had hand-woven in Afghanistan a rug for my microbiologist wife. The rug mixes traditional Afghanistan designs with some scientific elements including Bunsen burners, test tubes, bacterial petri dishes and other elements.

I started with several AI designs, such as that shown below, to give the weavers an idea of what I was looking for. Some of the AI elements were muddled and very complex and so we developed a blueprint over a few iterations. The blueprint was very accurate to the actual rug.

I am very pleased with the final product. The wool is of high quality, deep and luxurious, and the design is exactly what I intended. My wife loves the rug and will hang it at her office. The price was very reasonable, under $1000. I also like that I employed weavers in a small village in Northern Afghanistan. The whole process took about 6 months.

You can develop your own custom rug from Afghanu Rugs. Tell them Alex sent you. Of course, they also have many beautiful traditional designs. You can even order my design should you so desire!

by Alex Tabarrok, Marginal Revolution | Read more:
Images: the author

27 Notes On Growing Old(er)

1.) Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people - men in particular - to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say how much happier we are than in our insecure twenties, how we wouldn’t swap places with our younger self, oh no, not even if you paid us. Hmm. Sometimes I feel that way, but not always. Some days, ageing feels like a curse, only lightly mitigated by the knowledge that the curse is universal.

2.) Let me summarise the science of how ageing affects physical and mental capability: all the lines on the graph point down. We can slow this multi-dimensional descent but not stop it. The miracle is that most of us are not driven mad by this knowledge. We ought to congratulate ourselves on the depth of our resilience, on our heroic fortitude in the face of adversity - while quietly acknowledging that we rely on a modicum of self-deception to get by.

3.) The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” I love how this evokes the subjectivity of a bewildered child trapped inside an aged body; a boy staring at his wizened hands and wondering what on earth is going on.

4.) One of the weirdest things about the midlife ageing process, as those of you who have passed 40 will know, is that it is discontinuous. It doesn’t happen at a gradual and consistent rate, allowing you time to adjust. After lulling you into a false sense of security, it rushes forward, catching you unawares. It’s like finding yourself dropped into a different world. You may ask yourself, how did I get here?

5.) The physicist Michael Nielsen tells us that the Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam perceived his life as sharply divided into two halves: “In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group. In the second half, he was always the oldest. There was no transitional period.” There was no transitional period.

6.) I think people who had a lot of success early in their careers (not an affliction from which I suffered) feel this more acutely than most. When you’re always the youngest guy in the room, it’s natural to build a whole identity around your precocity. Then suddenly - and it is sudden - you’re not the youngest anymore. You’re one of those anonymous older guys. So now who the hell even are you?

7.) In your twenties, you say “about three years ago” of memories you can only hazily locate on the timeline. Then at some point you suddenly hear yourself say “ about twenty years ago”. And you hear yourself saying it again and again. About things that feel like three years ago.

8.) The short story I think about most is The Swimmer, by John Cheever (later a film). It’s a golden Sunday afternoon in upstate New York in the 1960s. The well-to-do residents of Westchester are out in their gardens sipping cocktails. Neddy, a fit man in early middle age, decides to swim home from the party he’s at by way of his neighbours’ pools, just for a laugh. As he progresses from one pool to another, being made drinks as he goes, the weather and the mood start to get colder and darker. He finds himself being treated with inexplicable hostility and pity by once-friendly neighbours. Bewildered, he finally arrives at his own house, only to find it empty and abandoned. We sense that in the time it took Neddy to swim through a few pools in a mildly drunken haze, whole years, even decades, have passed. We also sense that Neddy is ruined in some way - that he has ruined himself. I’m not ruined, not yet, but Neddy’s bewilderment speaks to me. I only set off a few minutes ago. The sun was still high in the sky.

9.) One reason that the experience of growing old can feel jagged and abrupt is that there is a disconnect between how old we feel and how old we are. You often hear people say “inside I still feel young”. It’s tempting to dismiss that as meaningless happy talk but actually it’s often true, and it’s one of the strangest things about growing older. Neuroscientists use the term “proprioception” to describe a person’s intuitive sense of their own body in space - the position of their arms, the movement of their legs. If it deteriorates, you can’t control your actions without conscious effort. I think there’s a kind of proprioception for age, which for some mysterious evolutionary reason gets switched off around age 40. When you’re 18, you feel 18, when you’re 35 you feel 35, and when you’re 53 you feel…35. You’re constantly having to arbitrate between your felt age and your real age, reminding yourself that you’re not actually that person anymore, making a special effort to act appropriately (maybe you shouldn’t actually go skiing, or drink six pints, certainly not both). If you’re a young person, and you’re talking to an older person, it’s as well to remember that they may well believe, at some level, that they’re the same age as you. Many such conversations are asymmetrical: the young person always aware of the age gap, the older person not so much. [ed. this is kind of interesting]

10.) There hasn’t been enough scientific investigation of ‘felt age’ but there is some. This study finds that people over the age of 70 have, on average, a 13 year gap between their felt age and their real age. So a 73-year-old typically feels about 60. But the study also finds that this gap closes with age, as your body insists, ever-more loudly, on the harsh truth. I should imagine there is a lot of variation here. On announcing his retirement from Berkshire Hathaway, at the age of 94, Warren Buffett told an interviewer he had never felt old until he passed 90. Then, all of a sudden, he did.

11.) Wisdom is meant to be the great compensation for growing older. Though your your knees sound like they’re unlocking a safe when you bend down, and you can’t straighten up without an “oof”, you can at least revel in the depth of your insights into the human condition. Well, yes and no. It is true that we accumulate knowledge (and if we try really hard, more of it than we forget). It’s true that we get a feel for the repeated patterns that constitute so much of human experience, and a clearer sight of the possible mistakes arrayed before us at any point in time (whether or not we make them anyway being another question). But there are countering forces too. The world changes faster than we’re ready for, which borks our pattern-detecting software. We’re endlessly self-deluding; we smooth the random accidents of life into stories that put us in control of our own destiny (this is what The Road Not Taken is really about). We’re also lazier, more set in our ways, more dogmatic, less prone to question our assumptions. If we’re not careful, our ‘wisdom’ makes us stupid. Most cognitive decline is self-inflicted.

12.) In a quasi-scientific study of “wisdom at the end of life”, researchers interviewed people who knew they were dying, mostly old people. These interviews elicited such crystalline insights as, “I think you would have more wisdom if you have empathy and compassion.” Right. “Wisdom means seeing life on life’s terms.” Deep.

13.) People who know they’re approaching the last stop aren’t wiser than the rest of us, they’re just even more self-deluded than we are. I recently listened to an interview with the entrepreneur/self-help guru Alex Hormozi. I liked what he said about those “deathbed regrets” which get spun into cute homilies - I wish I’d stopped to smell the roses, I wish I’d seen more of my children, and so on: “The human condition is that we want it all, and we're not willing to make trades…‘deathbed regrets’ typically have the bias of wanting the other path - the path they could have taken - without considering the cost of that path. So they say "Hey I was really successful and I did all these things, but you know, I would give it all up today to have my family.’ It's like, well yeah, but you didn't, because you actually chose the path that you're on, and you weren't willing to do that. What you are saying right now is that you want it all. Sure. So does everyone.”

14.) Age is just a number, so they say, but numbers are pretty important. This one gives you a rough idea of where you are on the journey between birth and death. You might want to make a note of it is all I’m saying.

15.) Should you act your age? Yes if it means making elegant and creative adaptations to it. No, if it means performing it: striving too hard to convey authority, or worse, behaving like somebody who has given up on life. (...)

16.) There’s an interview with Mick Jagger from when he was 58, in which he’s way more patient than he might have been, while a Dutch interviewer suggests he’s too old to be a rock singer. Jagger is 81 now and still selling out stadiums. Jagger, McCartney and others from their generation have endured decades of being sneered at for not “acting their age”. Few people do that anymore. By stubbornly persisting, they’ve changed our ideas of what that phrase means.

17.) Jagger and McCartney hardly ever engage in age-based self-deprecation. They tend not to make those slightly nervous “I’m just an old geezer” jokes, of the kind that the rest of us start making from the moment we pass 30. I think that might have something to do with the almost ridiculously good time they’re having in their eighties. They play the double game to perfection: simultaneously aware of age and oblivious to it.

18.) There is comedy to savour in it, too, albeit comedy with that British sitcom feeling of being trapped in a losing game, laughter the consolation prize.

19.) What a strange thing to happen to a little boy or girl! Rembrandt’s late self-portraits capture so much about how it feels. That look on his face: pissed-off, amused, baffled, defiant. Here’s my face. Not pretty is it? But it’s the only one I’ve got.

by Ian  Leslie, Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Rembrandt, various stages of life. The Collector.

[ed. Some good points but also 1.) feeling like anyone giving aging advice who's younger than you probably hasn't experienced the whole story yet (up to and including dying); 2.) living every day knowing a bomb could go off at any time, and likely will...eventually; 3.) dealing with the accumulated loss of loved ones and the shared histories that make up life - who we are, what it all meant, and inexorably drifting further out, away from everything that used to define us.] 

Yoann Bourgeois: Stair Dance

Yoann Bourgeois: ‘I want to return to the spirit of childhood' (The Guardian)

Image: YouTube

[ed. Don't miss this one - delightful dance art.]

Ohara Koson, Sandpipers on the Beach, 1930s-40s
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