All The Vibes
GOOD LINKS 2024-01-19: AI-Dropcaps / Metas $10bn AGI-GPU-Cluster / Fucked Up By Psyops / Arctic Ice Startups / RIP Pitchfork / Why Monsters are dangerous / Raiding the 20th Century and much more.
All the Vibes in the Aurosphere: "A man’s head seen from the side and divided into various areas labeled according to the vibrations supposedly emanating from the brain", by Sivartha, Dr. Alesha, from The book of life, 1898.
I also ran variations of “A man’s head seen from the side and divided into various areas labeled according to the vibrations supposedly emanating from the brain” through Dall-E and these are some of the results:
Famed artist Marina Abramović is selling homeopathic wellness crap and come on! The artist of "the artist is present", the grand dame of performance art, who made a carreer of being on the cutting edge and being authentically real going knee deep into the bullshit department? I hope this is an art stunt.
Gwerns page on Dropcap Generation With AI. Dropcaps (or Initials) are large letters at the beginning of chapters, mostly used in books but also in some periodicals. Gwerns results are fun and okay, until you look closely at the letter forms with a professional typographers eye (i'm a trained typesetter and worked as a typographer and illustrator from mid 90s to mid 2000s). I can't help but register the shaky, uneven letterforms coming out of AI. It's okay for fun dropcaps to use on a website where you want initials with cats, i guess.
Related, AI Can Now Mimic Handwriting: "Researchers at Abu Dhabi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) say they have developed technology that can imitate someone’s handwriting based on just a few paragraphs of written material."
Generating pixel images of handwriting that plausibly resembles your Handwriting seems trivial to me (by nowadays standards) compared to AI-generation of good fonts that meet industry standards for readability. As i said above about the Gwern-letters, they are still shaky and uneven and good luck reading a book in such a font without bleeding from the eyeholes.
I wrote a comment on Reddit a year ago about why AI still fails at typography: "typographers need reliably good looking fonts down to the tiniest, smallest details measured in fractions of didot points down to 0.01mm and AI fails miserably at those details at the moment".
AI, at the moment, is usable for fun illustrative web-typography projects like Gwerns dropcaps, but it's nowhere close at generating professional type. However, with Adobe already providing good vector-models within Illustrator, this might change very soon.
Meta is developing open source AGI, says Zuckerberg, and they're training Llama 3 right now while "building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap, including 350k H100s by the end of this year -- and overall almost 600k H100s equivalents of compute if you include other GPUs". 1 H100-GPU costs 30k bucks, so Meta is building an AI-infrastructure worth a whopping 10 billion dollars for it's "open source AGI".
Speaking of Open Source AI, in IEEE Spectrum, David Evan Harris writes about how Open-Source AI Is Uniquely Dangerous. Tech-Bros and Open Source Dogmatists are predictably up in arms and they are wrong.
Harris makes a lot of suggestions in the piece about regulation, but doesn't go very deep into why open source AI may turn out to be particulary harmful pieces of software. It's because they are automatizing the interpolation of knowledge, and i wrote a piece on exactly that: Against open sourcing Automatized Knowledge Interpolators.
I don't think the open source paradigm is suitable to prevent harmful effects of automatic knowledge interpolation, but i'm also under no illusion that this ship has sailed and that this and that corporation will continue to release ever more powerful open source AI-models. I guess we'll all find out how that goes.
How OpenAI is approaching 2024 worldwide elections. Besides other stuff, they "don’t allow people to build applications for political campaigning and lobbying", but it's unclear to me how this is supposed to work. Lobbying is identifying legislation relevant to companies and sending a lot of emails to politicians, and GPTs have already proven to be mighty useful for that. I'm not sure how OpenAI wants to stop ChatGPT from summarizing legal language and writing emails. Ofcourse, there's already an AI Automation Platform for Lobbyists too, and if OpenAI manages to stop those, there's always open source AI for them to fall back on. Good luck stopping those.
Other points are nobrainers: No mimetic AI that pretend to be candidates or institutions, no GPT-apps that misrepresent the voting process. Again, Open Source AI is a sure fallback for bad actors here, but hey, at least OpenAI has a webpage which says they care, right?
I'm not sure that AI will have that much of an impact on the 24 election, besides some automatized sendouts, and claiming that the 24-election will be the "AI election" seems a bit industry hype to me, because open source models trained on voting patterns combined with demographics are not there yet. But i'm very sure in the 28 election, they will be in place.
In AI girlfriends? What about AI boyfriends?, Katherine Dee dives deep into the fictosexual world of AI-companions and writes about young women who engage in romantic roleplay with AI-bots.
GTA 5 actor goes nuclear on AI company that made a voice chatbot of him: "I just hate these fuckers, and am pissed as fuck that our shitty union is so damn weak that this will soon be an issue on legit work, not just some lame douchebag tryna make $$ off of our voices."
Dorothy Gambrell drawing an issue of her webcomic Cat and Girl "on being listed in the court document of artists whose work was used to train Midjourney with 4000 of my closest friends and Willem De Kooning". She's on Substack, too.
AI models that don’t violate copyright are getting a new certification label: "Fairly Trained — founded by former Stability AI vice president for audio Ed Newton-Rex — adds a label to companies that prove they asked for permission to use copyrighted training data. Newton-Rex started Fairly Trained after he quit Stability AI in November, citing generative AI was 'exploiting creators'."
As critical as i am about AI, i can see tremendous value coming out of medical and scientific applications, if done responsibly and thoughtfully: New AI tool can screen kids for rheumatic heart disease: "Researchers at Children’s National have developed a new AI-powered tool for diagnosing rheumatic heart disease long before a patient needs surgery. Collaborating with staff at the Uganda Heart Institute, the team designed a system that will allow trained nurses to screen and diagnose children early on, when they can still be treated with penicillin for less than $1 a year. Early treatment could save thousands from having to undergo surgery."
Google DeepMind introduces AlphaGeometry: An Olympiad-level AI system for geometry: "In a benchmarking test of 30 Olympiad geometry problems, AlphaGeometry solved 25 within the standard Olympiad time limit."
Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants? Yes: "participants who had access to an AI assistant based on OpenAI's codex-davinci-002 model wrote significantly less secure code than those without access."
OpenAI Is Working With US Military on Cybersecurity Tools. I don't think that coop will stay at cybersecurity tools.
OpenAI must defend ChatGPT fabrications after failing to defeat libel suit and Dave Fanning launches defamation case against Microsoft. AI making stuff up about real people gonna stay with us for a while.
Garbage AI on Google News: "404 Media reviewed multiple examples of AI rip-offs making their way into Google News. Google said it doesn't focus on how an article was produced—by an AI or human—opening the way for more AI-generated articles."
In Is A.I. the Death of I.P.? at The New Yorker, Louis Menand summarizes all the contradictions and problems coming with the AI-Copyright-discourse, and he makes some fairly good points pro AI. Most important to me, he makes the point that "every type of cultural product is a public good", per se, because when you release a song onto the world and i can hear it, in a very concrete perceptual sense, it belongs to me, because it is ingrained into my brain.
He then goes on to argue that AI is not "robbing the commons" because it is just doing what humans do when they remember and interpolate old poems in their brain and generate new ones: "I don’t need permission to read those older poems. Why should ChatGPT?"
The answer to that particular question seems simple to me: Because AI is neither a human nor a public good. If AI would be a public good, akin to public libraries, i wouldn't argue pro copyright. You could even argue that, if AI were run as public goods, that publishers have an obligation to contribute their published texts to the training data.
But AI right now is a software tool made by large corporations and is built into office tools that generate billions in revenue. In case of OpenAI they are closed, proprietary software, and if your closed office tool is also a Batman-generator, then you have to pay licenses to Warner.
I know that my stance on open source AI is contradictive here: I think you can solve the copyright question by running them as public goods, releasing the latent spaces generated by statistical analysis of a trillion tons of knowledge as free tools available to anyone. But those latent spaces are also Automatized Knowledge Interpolators you could describe as “knowledge fusion reactors”, and i think this makes them inherently dangerous, because they not only include Batman-generators, but Bomb-Instruction-generators too.
I can't solve this contradiction in my thinking about open source AI, and lucky me, i don't have to, i just have to live with the ambivalence, and i can.
Closing keynote speech by James Bridle for Critical AI in the Art Museum at the Australian National University, you can find materials and recordings of all talks from that symposium on their website. James Bridle (who wrote some of the most on point books on this digital age emerging since the 2010s, namely New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future and Ways of Being - Beyond human Intelligance). He's also the guy who coined the term The New Aesthetic, which describes the way that algorithmic aesthetics and their glitches are manifesting in the real, physical work, resulting in often times strange, otherworldly outcomes.
I've been following Bridles work as a citical artist working with algorithms and tech for more than 15 years now, and his writings and ideas about new aesthetics have informed my way of thinking about tech since forever. In this talk, he starts with the remark that the vision of AI and AGI are incredibly narrow, that these tools account to merely Corporate Intelligences, which you can observe in their terminology too, where it's all about benchmarks and that AGI is supposed to solve "all tasks", which is an incredibly narrow minded look at intelligence that can only come out of a business-obsessed world like Silicon Valley, which results in dumbing down art into mere image making and intelligence into task solving. Good guy all around. Listen to him.
Some talks i watched (or want to watch) from the 37th Chaos Computer Club conference which took place in Hamburg a few weeks ago. All links go to Youtube-versions of the talks, you can find all of them on the 37C3-website, too. The talks are in english language if not annotated otherwise:
Scholz greift durch: Die AfD wird verboten - Deepfakes auch! (in german): German artists Center for political beauty on their elaborate deepfake-artpiece about a ban of a rightwing extremist Nazi-party, which i blogged about here.
What I Learned from Loab: AI as a creative adversary: "The artist behind the viral cryptid Loab reflects on her critical relationship to AI art tools"
YOU’VE JUST BEEN FUCKED BY PSYOPS: Artist Trevor Paglen, who you might know from his artistic works during the Edward Snowden-days of the NSA/Prism-scandal, on "How the history of military and government PSYOPS involving mind-control, UFOs, magic, and remote-control zombies, explains the future of AI and generative media."
Synthetic Sentience: Cognitive scientist and AI-researcher Joscha Bach talking about his psychedelic theories on artificial life and AI-visions and it's just as crazy as it always is.
Image Making Fatigue: Robert Seidel on the "silent restructuring of society, (in which) artists become templates for a digitally assembled future, challenging traditional hierarchies as history collapses into the present."
Another day, another groundbreaking study showing kids learn better on paper, not screens. Related: What happens when a school bans smartphones? A complete transformation and Why Spencer Cox wants to get cellphones out of schools. As i keep saying: Get digital crap out of schools, pronto.
The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same: The Guardian has an excerpt from Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka, in which he talks about what i call "The Big Flat Now" for some years now, the weird flatness, sameness and atemporality in aesthetics caused by algorithms pushing everyone towards congregating memetics. This excerpt seems to be an update from his 2016-article on the same topic: Welcome to AirSpace.
In How Group Chats Rule the World, Sophie Haigney writes about what is called the dark forest web, in which as a "response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream" (Yancey Strickler, The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet). The dark forest web is exactly that: Group Chats on messaging apps like Whatsapp and Telegram or on Discord-servers. What makes the dark forest web dark is that those chats are not indexed by Google and are somewhat disconnected from the open web.
Haigney fails to mention the darker side of the dark forest web: the wild virality of desinformation and conspiracy theories on Telegram, or large groups of people riling each other up into manhunts, or the democratized large-scale peer-surveillance attacks against individuals which already were a thing back in 2014 when Ashe Dryden first wrote about them in Social Networking as Peer Surveillance. With the dark forest web, those peer surveillance techniques also vanish out of sight from the wider digital public. This makes the already gossipy nature of social media even more opaque, limiting access to some well connected insiders who invite you or don't.
I am and always was highly suspicious about groups in general and insiders/"VIPs" specifically, and this dark forest group thing makes the web even more tribalistic than before. So, no, i don't consider this a good development at all.
‘The tide has turned’: why parents are suing US social media firms after their children’s death: "Social media firms have faced scrutiny from Congress over their impact on young users, but parents who have lost kids to online harm are now leading the charge".
Court documents underscore Meta's 'historical reluctance' to protect children on Instagram and Children on Instagram and Facebook Were Frequent Targets of Sexual Harassment: "Children using Instagram and Facebook META have been frequent targets of sexual harassment, according to a 2021 internal Meta Platforms presentation that estimated that 100,000 minors each day received photos of adult genitalia or other sexually abusive content (...) the finding had been flagged to executives several years earlier, and that they had rejected a staff recommendation that the company adjust the design of the algorithm".
The online hate campaign turning Indonesians against Rohingya refugees: "In late December, a mob stormed a building sheltering refugee families, including children, forcing 137 people on to trucks. They were taken to a government building, where protesters demanded they be removed. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said at the time the incident was caused by 'a coordinated online campaign of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech against refugees'."
Asking people to “do the research” on fake news stories makes them seem more believable, not less. Because conspiracy theories and desinformation are often times very outlandish and new, there are not that much search results. When you then go and "do the research", all you get is multiplications of that conspirational claims, and that additional exposure increases the likeliness you believe the story. Bad stuff.
Solving Social Media’s ‘Local Paradox’: "Local social networks are often filled with just as much misinformation, racism, and toxicity as global platforms, with effects that can be even more severe", because people are directly affected locally. The solution, as always, is strong moderation. Who knew? (Certainly not Substack.)
All the garbage I found on Substack in 1 hour. It's a lot of garbage you can find on Substack in 1 hour, including nazis and conspiracy lunatics.
Greenland startup begins shipping glacier ice to cocktail bars in the UAE: "Arctic Ice harvests ice from the fjords of Greenland, and then ships them to the United Arab Emirates to sell to exclusive bars".
Meanwhile, Greenland is losing 30m tonnes of ice an hour: "The Greenland ice cap is losing an average of 30m tonnes of ice an hour due to the climate crisis, a study has revealed, which is 20% more than was previously thought" and which amounts to more than 6000 gigatons of ice loss. If the startup is fast enough, they can make sell those 1000 gigatons missed by science for a billion ice dollars to the Emirates before we hit any tipping points.
Good move: EU bans ‘misleading’ environmental claims that rely on offsetting: "On Wednesday, members of the European parliament voted to outlaw the use of terms such as 'environmentally friendly', 'natural', 'biodegradable', 'climate neutral' or 'eco' without evidence, while introducing a total ban on using carbon offsetting schemes to substantiate the claims."
‘Cheaper to save the world than destroy it’: why capitalism is going green. Bloomberg writer Akshat Rathi argues that "The root of the climate crisis is 'not capitalism but the corruption of capitalism'". In other words, neoliberalism and tax evasion. It's capitalism, after all, which sent prices for solar panels into a free fall, and i'm very convinced that green capitalism is very feasible and achievable.
Accompanying that green capitalism is investor activism like this: Group of 27 Shell investors co-file new climate resolution: "A group of 27 investors that own around 5% of Shell’s shares has co-filed an independent resolution urging the energy company to set tighter climate targets, the biggest such drive to date."
A new kind of climate denial has taken over on YouTube. Dunking on renewable energy is the new climate change denial.
Who would've thought that PR companies are full of it: PR giant Edelman worked with Koch network, despite climate pledges.
That Koch Network also is responsible for a large scale smear attack on climate scientist Michael Mann in 2012, which is now going to court: US climate scientist’s defamation case over online attacks finally comes to trial. So Edelman helped companies from the Koch network to greenwash their activities while those assholes financed a large scale attack on a reputable climate scientist. This is the corruption of capitalism on full display.
Space Solar Power Project Ends First In-Space Mission with Successes and Lessons. I don't think there's enough time to build working infrastructure for energy consumption by space solar energy to solve for climate change, but these are promising results for longterm alternative energy solutions nevertheless.
How to Build a Small Solar Power System: "Everything you need to know to build stand-alone photovoltaic systems that can power almost anything you want." Also at Low Tech Mag: "Consumer societies produce enough plastic waste to power at least 10% of motorized road traffic. Dutch designer Gijs Schalkx grabbed the opportunity and now drives his car on the waste he collects."
Brains Are Not Required When It Comes to Thinking and Solving Problems — Simple Cells Can Do It. Scientific American on the work of biologist Michael Levin: "Until recently, most scientists held that true cognition arrived with the first brains half a billion years ago. Without intricate clusters of neurons, behavior was merely a kind of reflex. But Levin and several other researchers believe otherwise. He doesn't deny that brains are awesome, paragons of computational speed and power. But he sees the differences between cell clumps and brains as ones of degree, not kind. In fact, Levin suspects that cognition probably evolved as cells started to collaborate to carry out the incredibly difficult task of building complex organisms and then got souped-up into brains to allow animals to move and think faster."
It's all about matter organizing itself into ever more complex ways of processing information from the environment, with neurons and brains being "just" the latest (biological) iteration of that, and possibly there are higher forms of cognition we don't even recognize as such yet, namely collective consiousnesses and cosmopsychism. Levin doesn't go so far, sticking with hard empirical science.
If you're interested in this stuff, he maintains a blog at Forms of life, forms of mind, where he quite regular posts papers on current research in collective intelligence and stuff that inspires his work.
In Does language mirror the mind? An intellectual history, linguist James McElvenny retells the history of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language shapes mind and perception. To me as a predominantly visual thinker with only a weak and often times completely absent inner monologue, this question seems a bit funny tbh, besides being interesting ofcourse. For a visual thinker, it's hardly true that a constant inner use of language can shape perception of the world. Then again, most people do have a constant inner river of language, and who am i to say that this does not shape their perception of reality.
Cannabis found to activate specific hunger neurons in brain: "After exposing mice to vaporized cannabis sativa, researchers used a billion chocolate cookies and three thousand pizzas to feed off the hungry rodents who ran around in circles screaming from the top of their tiny lungs for sweets and foods and cheeseburgers and pizza with a trillion billion tons of cheese and finally, the researchers concluded that, yes, cannabis activates hunger neurons in the brain. Stunner." Yeah i made that up.
Nature on The consciousness wars: can scientists ever agree on how the mind works? "There are dozens of theories of how the brain produces conscious experience, and a new type of study is testing some of them head-to-head."
Daniel Dennett is having a laugh and I'm finding myself more and more siding with theorists claiming that consciousness is an illusion and there is no hard problem of consciousness, because if you solve for the "soft problem" (how brain regions work that contribute to consciousness experience), then you solve for consciousness altogether. Consciousness then is just what you experience when those modules work together enabling you to weave together those experience into a narrative (your self).
It's a bit like driving a car: When you explain how the parts of a car work and how they are joined, you can explain driving, and your self is the miles you go.
Apropos Dennett: He debated Robert Sapolsky recently on the question Do We Have Freewill? I haven't seen this one yet, but i bet it's interesting.
Why monsters are dangerous: Anomalous animals are "good to think with".
Study reveals a universal pattern of brain wave frequencies across mammalian species: Mammals across species show the same patterns of "neuron activity (that is) is dominated by rapid oscillations known as gamma waves (and where) In the deeper layers, slower oscillations called alpha and beta waves predominate". All mammals have six layers in the cortex and all show similar synchronization patterns of brainwaves and in 50 years we all have Cyranos, i swear.
Condé Nast Restructures Pitchfork And Lays Off Staff. I don't know if you can castrate a hipster publication and tastemaker more than by folding it into something like GQ, which is exclusively read by suckers, posers and wannabes. GQ is very much the antithesis of Pitchfork, and integrating the formerly tastemaker into such an abomination means a deathknell, which means that we lost a cornerstone of music online journalism that heavily influenced the popcultural landscape for nearly 30 years.
I wholeheartedly agree with Casey Newtons closing remarks in his piece on How platforms killed Pitchfork:
On one level it’s impressive that Spotify can perfectly capture my musical taste in a series of data points, and regurgitate it to me in a series of weekly playlists. But as good as it has gotten, I can’t remember the last time it pointed me to something I never expected I would like, but ultimately fell totally in love with.
For that you needed someone who could go beyond the data to tell you the story: of the artist, of the genre, of the music they made. For that you needed criticism.
For that, in other words, you needed Pitchfork. And while it may have dimmed in its power over the years, it will always loom large in my mind — as a publication that met its moment with actual, discernible taste, and shared its tastes with the world, right up until the moment that the algorithms flattening our culture washed Pitchfork away, too.
Trailer for Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, a new documentary on the "master filmmaker, auteur, poet, truth seeker, explorer, brand, meme, actor, lauded voice artiste, doomsayer, legend".
Here's the Sundance trailer for Krazy House starring Nick Frost and Alicia Silverstone: "Set in the 1990s, Krazy House is about a religious homemaker named Bernie (Frost) who discovers that the workmen hired to make home repairs are actually Russian criminals planning on looting the house and robbing them of whatever they can get their hands on. Now, Bernie and his family are stuck in a dangerous situation, forced to rip apart their own home looking for treasure, but there will be plenty of bleakly hilarious moments of levity as Bernie slowly loses his mind trying to keep his family safe."
Godzilla Minus One/Minus Color, the best Kaiju-movie from 2023, is back in cinemas in black and white. I still haven't seen the b&w-version of Mad Max: Fury Road, mostly because at the time of its release, i watched that movie twenty times or so and had some sort of Fury Road-fatigue. Maybe i'll watch both of those in a double feature.
More trailers worth watching: Adam Sandler is Spaceman; rich asshats hunt down refugees in The Hunted; Guy Ritchies Netflix-series The Gentlemen looks promising but also the guy hasn't done anything really worthwhile since Snatch so we'll see about that; Red Right Hand from Eshom Nelms looks like a decent kick ass crime thriller; korean metafictional Cobweb from Kim Jee-woon is a story about a director obsessed with reshooting the ending of his film; The End We Start From is a climate change themed desaster film from the UK; French spider horror movie Vermines creeps me out.
28 of Hardcore Punk Legends ramble about their record collections. There's a bunch of things that make me happy. People talking about their collections is one of them.
DJ Foods Raiding the 20th Century - A History of the Cut Up is 20 years old: I remember blogging about this on my old blog in 2005 or something, an hour long bonkers ride through the history of remixes, turntablism and mashups. Here's a MP3 of that beast on WFMU, still available after 20 years, and here's a tracklist from the blog of Andreas, one of the very first readers of my old blog (greeting!) Here's a version from Youtube, and it still kicks some serious ass:
Roman dodecahedron: "An unusually large and fine example of the mysterious Roman dodecahedron has been unearthed in a community dig at Norton Disney in Lincolnshire. Only about 130 of these hollow 12-sided copper alloy objects have been found in the northern and western provinces of the Roman Empire. This is only the 33rd example found in England. None have been found in Rome, and there are no references to them in the ancient sources, inscriptions, frescoes, mosaics or any other medium to explain their purpose or function."
No, the James Webb Space Telescope hasn’t found life out there—at least not yet: "It is anticipated that JWST observations may lead to the initial identification of potential biosignatures that could make habitability more or less likely for a given exoplanet." With the NASAs Europa-missions later this decade, we may get an astrobiological double whammy. As i said earlier, i don't believe in any "green men"-version of alien life, but i do think that life in space is abundand, but, as on earth, compared to simple life forms, complex organisms are very rare. There are 5 million trillion trillion bacteria on the habitable planet earth compared to merely 9 billion human primates, for instance, and i expect those numbers in space to be not that much different.
The Un-Brie-Lievable History of Tyromancy: "This fortune-telling practice uses cheese to predict everything from your future spouse to your next career move". Look, i don't believe in any fortune telling superstitious esoteric hogwash crap, but i do believe that Urkel is cool and his i share his love for cheese, so there's that.
Quantamag explains a paper i linked to earlier: Math’s ‘Game of Life’ Reveals Long-Sought Repeating Patterns. Conway's Game of Life is a simple set of rules for cells on a 2-dimensional grid that can result in extremely complex patterns. It is turing complete which also means that you can build a computer in it. Those rules cause the cells on the grid to oscilate between states (see below for 2-, 3- and 15-state oscillations), and the paper now found that you can find "periodic patterns of every possible length" up to 61 states. (Higher numbers are possible by looping lower state oscillations.)
Rare copy of The Amazing Spider-Man No 1 sells for more than £1m: A near mint copy of spidey #1 sold for "a record-setting $1.38m". You can find high res scans of that particular 9.8-graded issue on the website of Heritage Auctions: The Amazing Spider-Man #1 Curator Pedigree (Marvel, 1963) CGC NM/MT | Lot #91026.
You can buy yourself a final resting place besides that of Karl Marx, for the very unmarxist price tag of £25,000. This is almost as funny as the Karl Marx MasterCard. Almost.