Rediscovering Réaumur: The Forgotten Temperature Scale | May 28 2026, 21:48

LOL, it turns out that besides Fahrenheit and Celsius scales, there was another scale, and relatively recently. The attached photo is mine, taken in 2009 in Baku at a friend’s house.

So where did this Réaumur come from? In 1730, he proposed a temperature scale, one degree of which equals 1/80 of the difference between the boiling point of water and the melting point of ice. Why 80? Because it’s easier to remember, although in fact Réaumur took only one reference point – the melting point of ice. Hence, the “zeros” of the Celsius and Réaumur scales coincide. And one degree of Réaumur corresponds to a temperature change during which the volume of alcohol increases or decreases by 1/1000.

In Réaumur’s days, there were already several different scales, including the widely known Fahrenheit scale, which is still used in some countries, including the States (and which I have never gotten used to). In France, the use of this scale was abolished on April 1, 1794, in connection with the transition to the metric system. The Réaumur scale was used in Tsarist Russia until the 1917 revolution. But in general, the 18th century was a mess with this, and few people know that besides these Kelvin, Celsius, and Fahrenheit, their scales were also invented by Rankine, Rømer, Newton, Delisle, and Réaumur.

Navigating Price Adjustment Policies at Major Retailers | May 27 2026, 21:53

I found out that if you bought a jacket or a TV (for instance, at Target, Best Buy, or Costco), and a week later that item went on sale, you can come back with your receipt within 14–30 days. This is an official policy of almost all major Western retailers, it’s a standard of customer service and is called Price Adjustment. However, a receipt is often necessary. Most stores suspend this policy during the Black Friday season, Cyber Monday, and special holiday promotions.

Script Evolution: Creating Multi-Dimensional Word Art | May 27 2026, 21:12

I created a script that generates inscriptions readable as three different words from the left, right, and top. Overall, this is a development of what I had in my previous post – there it was only left-right. One script generates triplets of words from a dictionary, which technically can be done. Another creates a 3D model that can be thrown onto a printer (might do that today), and the third does a visualization of this model – see video

Scripting Letter-Matched Phrase Translations | May 27 2026, 18:28

Made a script that creates stuff like this. You can translate different phrases into each other, as long as the number of letters matches. Now thinking about printing it on a 3D printer, it’s all ready

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.