Television personality Hal Sparks admits he has unusual taste when it comes to home decor. His Chinatown apartment is outfitted with a classic arcade game, a giant gold rooster -- and a large bone from the nether regions of a blubbery marine mammal. "I have a walrus penis that looks like an ivory bat," the 47-year-old actor said. "With a zombie apocalypse, this will be my weapon of choice." Sparks, who plays Nelson Burkhard in Netflix's "Fuller House" and is known for roles in Showtime's "Queer as Folk" and Disney's "Lab Rats," said his love of Chinese culture drew him to Chinatown, where he rents a two-bedroom unit.

Lots of gangster movies end in a shoot-out. Director Ben Wheatley's new tough-guy flick, Free Fire, begins with shots fired--and never stops. The entire movie is a firefight. "It started from reading an FBI transcript of a gun battle in Miami that happened in the 1980s. It was kind of forensic blow-by-blow report," Wheatley says.

I wanted to review one of Netflix's new, original movies this week, but after checking out The Discovery, Sandy Wexler, and Win It All, I was uninspired. In any case, I dug into some other, much brighter gems to highlight. How about a couple of horror movies that wouldn't be out of place at a 1970s grindhouse? How about a couple of sci-fi movies that are based on actual ideas rather than explosions? I could go on, but don't just take it from me. Peep the whole curated list of 13 movies below--and then start streaming.

By the way, you can listen to a neuron fire here (what you're actually hearing is the electro-chemical firing of a neuron, converted to audio). Some electrodes want to take the relationship to the next level and will go for a technique called the patch clamp, whereby it'll get rid of its electrode tip, leaving just a tiny little tube called a glass pipette,21 and it'll actually directly assault a neuron by sucking a "patch" of its membrane into the tube, allowing for even finer measurements:39 A patch clamp also has the benefit that, unlike all the other methods we've discussed, because it's physically touching the neuron, it can not only record but stimulate the neuron,22 injecting current or holding voltage at a set level to do specific tests (other methods can stimulate neurons, but only entire groups together). Finally, electrodes can fully defile the neuron and actually penetrate through the membrane, which is called sharp electrode recording. If the tip is sharp enough, this won't destroy the cell--the membrane will actually seal around the electrode, making it very easy to stimulate the neuron or record the voltage difference between the inside and outside of the neuron. But this is a short-term technique--a punctured neuron won't survive long.

This file photo taken on May 1, 2015 shows Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk unveiling large utility scale home batteries at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California. Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk said his latest company Neuralink Corp is working to link the human brain with a machine interface by creating micron-sized devices. Neuralink is aiming to bring to the market a product that helps with certain severe brain injuries due to stroke, cancer lesion etc, in about four years, Musk said in an interview with website Wait But Why. "If I were to communicate a concept to you, you would essentially engage in consensual telepathy," Musk said in the interview published on Thursday. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will create computers so sophisticated and godlike that humans will need to implant "neural laces" in their brains to keep up, Musk said in a tech conference last year. "There are a bunch of concepts in your head that then your brain has to try to compress into this incredibly low data rate called speech or typing," Musk said in the latest interview.

The fact that developer Double Fine Productions has chosen to remaster the classic 1995 point-and-click adventure Full Throttle isn't in itself remarkable. The LucasArts titles of the mid-1990s are widely loved and celebrated, and we have already seen updates of stablemates Grim Fandango and Day of the Tentacle. What is remarkable is that the strength of the narrative design, silly gags and beautiful vistas hasn't diminished at all. Holding a PS4 controller in front of the new version, it's obvious that the 20-year-old game is 10 times more ambitious than most commercially-made video games today. Not in the action of the game, in which your biker man Ben merely solves increasingly obscure puzzles involving the collection and application of objects to scenery (most memorably illustrated in the classic command "Slam face on bar").

In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness, which took place around the 10th century A.D.: the advent of silent reading. Human beings have been reading for thousands of years, but in antiquity, the normal thing was to read aloud. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. The words no longer needed to occupy the time required to pronounce them. They could exist in interior space, rushing on or barely begun, fully deciphered or only half-said, while the reader's thoughts inspected them at leisure, drawing new notions from them, allowing comparisons from memory or from other books left open for simultaneous perusal.

In 2011, entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen wrote his famous,"Why Software Is Eating the World" in the Wall Street Journal. Today, that story would more likely read, "Why Artificial Intelligence Is Eating the World." The market for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies-- from voice and image recognition to chat bots to self-driving cars-- is hot. A Narrative Science survey found last year that 38% of enterprises are already using AI, and that number will grow to 62% by 2018. Like the tech industry at large, the field of artificial Intelligence is dominated by white men.

Frantz Beautifully shot in black and white with the occasional warm burst of color, French writer-director François Ozon's intricately layered post-World War I drama puts a feminist spin on Ernst Lubitsch's 1932 antiwar film "Broken Lullaby." Graduation A film of gripping moral suspense from the writer-director Cristian Mungiu, this tough, clear-eyed and humane movie follows a father (Adrien Titieni) who will do anything to help his daughter (Maria Dragus) escape post-Ceausescu Romania. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki A lovely piece of work from Finland, a sweet, warmly observed tale about a boxer falling in love before his biggest bout overlaid with just the right amount of Scandinavian melancholy. I Am Not Your Negro As directed by the gifted Raoul Peck, this documentary on James Baldwin uses the entire spectrum of movie effects, not only spoken language but also sound, music, editing and all manner of visuals, to create a cinematic essay that is powerful and painfully relevant. La La Land Starring a well-paired Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, writer-director Damien Chazelle's tuneful tribute to classic movie musicals is often stronger in concept than execution, but it's lovely and transporting all the same.

If you're not already a listener of the "This Week in Machine Learning & AI" podcast, today is an opportune day to become one. Mighty AI's own Principal Data Scientist, Angie Hugeback, was show host and creator Sam Charrington's most recent guest, and the episode turned out pretty dang great if we do say so ourselves. Sam and Angie chatted about cool data science and machine learning projects Angie has lead and been a part of throughout her career, the many challenges and considerations involved in generating high-quality AI training data, and more. Give it a listen if you're interested in: Hit play below or check it out on iTunes, SoundCloud, Google Play, or Stitcher. A big thank you goes out to Sam at This Week in Machine Learning & AI for the opportunity.