Vodka and Revelations: Notes from “Project Hail Mary” Unseen in Film | May 25 2026, 04:15

I’m almost finished with Project Hail Mary. I’ll write separately about my impressions. Today – some notes along the way that somehow didn’t make it into the movie.

Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka from a frighteningly large glass at a meeting, and during the rocket launch, she joyfully screams and downs one shot after another. In her personal baggage for the space flight, 5 liters of vodka in bags are found. Grace directly asks the Russian scientist Dmitry: “Are all Russians crazy?”, to which he smiles and replies: “Yes. It’s the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” Ilyukhina, planning her own death, asks to be provided with heroin. She wants to die from an overdose to experience “maximum pleasure” before death (while the Chinese Yao pragmatically chooses a gun). During the launch of the ship’s modules (cabin, laboratory, and sleeping compartment), broadcasted from the Flight Control Center in Moscow, Russian cosmonaut Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka and yells at the TV: “Don’t screw up my home, bastards from Roscosmos!” But overall, Russian space technologies are occasionally even praised – for instance, it is claimed that experts from around the world have recognized the Russian “Orlan” spacesuit as the safest and most reliable, so it is used in the mission.

When the main character (Grace) sees the Black American scientist Martin Dubois, he turns to the project director Stratton: “Dubois turns out to be Black! Surprising that you allowed that! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk about rap music and basketball?”

When they decide to send Grace to space forcibly, they lock him in a special room at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This room resembles a college dormitory but has a steel door and bars on the windows. The hero quips about this: “Why is there a prison cell at the Baikonur launch complex? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.”

Grace complains about how the work with malfunction reports is organized during the spaceship’s preparation. Instead of sending an email, they bring him stacks of paper documents. Grace: “Because Russians do things a certain way, and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.”

Out of scientific curiosity, Grace decides to observe how his alien friend Rocky eats. It turns out, Rocky is a “monostome”, meaning he both eats and excretes through the same opening in his body. Grace watches as a gray lump falls out of the alien’s stomach with a moist sound, after which Rocky tosses pieces of fresh meat into the same opening. Grace concludes: “The subject defecates from the mouth… Yep, that was pretty disgusting.”

The caricature nature of the characters, stereotypes, fantastic coincidences, and “plot contrivances” like deus ex machina are somewhat annoying.

Exploring Algorithmic Image Processing for Large Format Printing | May 24 2026, 22:40

I’m playing with algorithmic image processing. Images only look interesting when printed in a large format – because all these fine lines merge when scaled to a phone screen. I’ll post a close-up in the comments.

It works like this: an image is given as input, and it is divided into squares of different sizes. Each square represents one number: how dark it is. The darker it is, the more lines are drawn inside. The lines are not straight – they are Bezier splines. They smoothly transition from one square to another because the points at the boundaries are shared. What results is not a grid, but a single continuous thread. Color – the image is split into CMYK channels (like in printing). Each channel is processed separately: its own grid, its own lines. Then the layers are superimposed on each other – and from three or four black-and-white plates, a colored picture emerges.

The image doesn’t look blocky because the splines smoothly transition from one square to another, but there is a problem: dividing the image into 10×10 squares essentially reduces the resolution tenfold. To correct this, several passes are made with different square sizes and shifted grids. The first pass uses large cells, the second is finer and shifted 10 pixels to the right, the third is even finer and shifted diagonally.

The entire process is controlled by a JSON config – separate parameters for each channel, specific settings for each pass within a channel. On output – SVG, which can be scaled to the size of a wall without loss of quality, and PNG, in which CMYK layers are superimposed with transparency.

The Radical Survival Strategy of Elysia marginata: Decapitation and Regrowth | May 24 2026, 21:10

Today I learned about the sea slug Elysia marginata, which (I quote) can lose its head like no other: when this slug is overwhelmed by parasites, it doesn’t go on marathons to Instagram gurus but takes a radical approach — it detaches its head and starts a new life. (I quote Anna Fe above and below because I learned everything from her post) The slug’s neck has a special groove labeled “cut here.” The head separates along this line, not immediately, but over several hours. Having shed its fatty, annoying body, the head, giggling, crawls away, saying “goodbye” to its former self – along with all the parasites, and also with the heart, kidneys, intestines, and reproductive organs. The slug survives understandably – “like everyone else, using its head (it eats with it).”

And here I started thinking: is the definition of a head—where you eat from? How do biologists understand where the head is in some fantastical creature? For example, does a sea cucumber have a head?

I Googled it. Wow, interesting. No, the head is not where you eat from. It is what first encounters the surrounding environment when moving forward. Since this end needs to quickly understand what’s ahead (danger or food), during evolution, two things concentrate there:

1) Main sensory organs (eyes, antennae, locators, chemical receptors)

2) CNS (brain or the largest nerve nodes – ganglia), to instantly process the information received from these organs.

Therefore, they write, when a biologist looks at an unknown fantastical thing,” he looks not for the mouth, but for the main control point. Where there is the highest concentration of nerve cells and receptors, there is the head.

But let’s return to the independent head of the slug. How does it manage without a stomach?

These slugs feed on algae and are able to retain their chloroplasts (structures for photosynthesis) in their tissues. Thus, the head temporarily turns into a plant and gets energy directly from sunlight, while it regrows its new body. The wound on the neck heals within 2 days, a new heart takes about a week to grow, and a fully new torso with all organs—just 20 days.

The former body, meanwhile, just lives its life on the ocean floor. Its heart beats and nerves feel, but poor thing, it cannot eat and eventually dies from exhaustion.

Pianos for Small Hands: A New Trend in Keyboard Design | May 23 2026, 18:04

WOW, there are and are sold pianos with narrower keys for small hands. I play the piano a bit, so the topic is close and clear to me. But my hands are not small, yet now I’m studying Chopin’s Nocturne in C# minor and I understand the pain 🙂 So, I learned that the modern “gold standard” for key width was established in the late 19th century under the pressure of large factories and exclusively for large male hands of European virtuoso pianists. It is believed that because of this, almost all female pianists suffer, plus a quarter of men, and it is physically uncomfortable for them to play complex repertoires, constantly risking chronic tendon injuries. It would seem, well… oops. What else can you say here.

However, as it turns out, there is a solution and it’s actively being sold — these are so-called Stretto pianos or instruments of the DS Standard with slightly reduced keys. These are two new sizes: DS6.0 (universal reduced) and DS5.5 (for very small hands).

Manufacturers have learned how to make interchangeable keyboard blocks, which can be installed into a regular piano in just 5 minutes. Interestingly, a pianist’s muscle memory adjusts to the new size in just half an hour. Honestly, I can’t imagine it. But the fact is – the International Stretto Piano Festival is already taking place worldwide, where they play only on narrow keys.

Such pianos are produced by many,

On the other hand, Martha Argerich, for instance, with her small hands does the impossible (she’s about to turn 85 and she survived fourth stage cancer in her youth; she’s a very cool lady)

Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28

I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.

All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.

If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!

To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:

Tag Posts

==================================================

#Russia 3412

#Thoughts 3146

#Tech 3105

#Culture 2765

#Hobbies 2726

#AI 1603

#Science 1367

#Software 1358

#Travel 1298

#Learning 1138

#Society 1050

#Nature 958

#Education 915

#Business 902

#Art 894

#Programming 889

#Humor 840

#History 807

#Gadgets 750

#Moscow 713

#USA 614

#Cinema 567

#Webdev 493

#Music 476

#Sports 473

#Mindset 443

#Auto 400

#Books 386

…

and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.

Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.

As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.

In the end:

1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free

2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free

3) turso db where all posts are stored – free

4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free

5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).

I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.

Unexpected Perks: A Tale of Four Kettles and a Smart Ring | May 22 2026, 19:21

I ordered a Breville kettle. Costs a hundred bucks. Yes, I could have bought a similar one for 30, but I have all Breville products, plus a kettle is bought for several years. I come home – there’s a box up to my waist at the door. Not that surprised, because Amazon likes to put some little thing in the far corner of a huge box, it’s easier for them. But doubts increased after I couldn’t lift it with one hand. I bring it inside — and there are four kettles.

I open Amazon, check the order – everything’s correct, just one. Maybe they sell a 4-pack for 100 bucks? No, the description says one kettle. I contact support, a robot responds. I select the “brought extra items” option. The robot says “our fault, keep them”. Well, okay, now I have four kettles. Big family, one kettle for each.

Nadia has an Oura Ring 4. She says it has to be charged often. She says it used to last longer. I get in touch with support. A robot responds. I activate my own robot and ask it to draft a good letter to support. Their robot empathizes, says, “I’ll now connect to your ring and understand everything.” Connected, understood. Says, expect a new ring. Today, a plain envelope arrived with the ring inside. If it weren’t for FedEx it’d be easily lost in spam.

I love robots, almost got seven hundred bucks worth of goodies because of them. Well, good, at least the ring was a warranty case, although I expected to be dismissed with my battery complaints.

Well then, I asked the robot to make an illustration for the post.

Asian Fair Discovery: The Uni-ball Pen and Its Surprising Study | May 18 2026, 18:13

We recently had an Asian fair here – Japanese, Chinese, Korean goods, and street food. We bought a pie and some kind of pen for 6 bucks from Japanese vendors, which they beautifully packaged and asked for a review on Instagram. The pen is just a pen. Compared at home with our existing gel pens – no difference. But I Googled it out of curiosity.

“These inks are not just good-looking — they can even help you learn better. A study conducted at Ritsumeikan University in Japan showed that students who reviewed material from notes written with a black Uni-ball One pen retained information better than those who read notes made with regular black ink.”

I wonder who conducts such ridiculous research and who orders it. No surprises at all. Mitsubishi Pencil (the manufacturer of Uni-Ball) goes to the university, finds Professor Masashi Hattori (服部雅史) from the psychology department at Ritsumeikan University, and he organizes a report about a ‘memory reproduction task’ conducted on high school students: it compared the memorization of handwritten text with pens of different ink density, resulting in the conclusion that text written with dense black ink from the sponsoring company was reproduced more accurately than with regular gel ink.

Some of the co-authors of the report were Mitsubishi Pencil employees. There was no peer-reviewed article, only a conference presentation at the 38th Congress of the Japanese Society of Psychonomics (日本基礎心理学会第38回大会) on December 1, 2019; the results were also presented at the 32nd International Congress of Psychology ICP 2020+.

So, that’s the story with this pen 🙂