Understanding the Fear of Leaving Appliances On | August 13 2026, 00:51

I recently started wondering, why are we so afraid of leaving the gas or the iron on? I’m afraid too, but I’ve been thinking about why. Because look, nothing happens on its own – the gas would burn for a month, and the iron would heat the air for the same month and use electricity. Until what? The iron theoretically could burn out as its lifespan is exhausted. Then it would just switch off. It cannot explode or burst into open flames – irons are not like that anymore. Gas – what could happen with it? The flame won’t just blow out by itself. Draughts are not typical in our enclosed spaces, but even if they were, it would take a very strong gust of wind to completely extinguish the flame.

Gas burns, producing carbon dioxide and water vapor — that is if combustion is complete. Well, let’s assume it’s not complete, but in the worst case, a small amount of carbon monoxide will accumulate. That’s not good, but remember, we left the gas on at home and went out.

The only scary scenario is if we forgot a pot of soup on the stove, which theoretically could spill over and then there would be methane release and a potential explosion (Interestingly, in Europe many gas stoves are equipped with a thermocouple flame failure device and turn off the gas if there’s no heat (i.e., spillover). That’s not yet common practice here.)

The alarm here is not an irrational failure but a perfectly rational reaction to the risk structure: the probability is low, but the outcome could be catastrophic and irreversible (fire, explosion, risking lives in neighboring apartments). When the expected damage is enormous even with a low probability, it is evolutionarily and culturally advantageous to be overcautious. But technically (ideally) leaving the iron or gas on shouldn’t result in any mishaps for those hours until you remember about them. And we worry not about the iron that’s left on, but about not being able to check whether it was turned off. The brain honestly signals no data and the stakes are high” — and with the cost of checking it taking thirty seconds versus the cost of a mistake costing an apartment, this is a mathematically flawless alarm

Redefining Recruitment: AI Agents as the Future of Resumes | August 11 2026, 20:19

I have published a new article about how the interaction between companies and candidates for positions within these companies may look. The main thesis is that we’ve sat too long with these PDF resumes. It feels like a greeting from the last century. There is an interesting trend – essentially, interactive resumes in the form of AI agents for candidates and AI agents for companies, communicating with each other 24/7. Agents in the sense that celebrities and athletes have them. I was quite surprised that there is no movement in this direction, even though technologically, it seems, the required level has been reached.

https://hybrismart.com/2026/08/11/the-cv-as-an-ai-artifact/

https://hybrismart.com/2026/08/11/the-cv-as-an-ai-artifact/

Mapping the Minds of Search & RecSys: A Comprehensive Directory | August 10 2026, 03:56

84 researchers, 40+ laboratories — who’s who in Search & RecSys, all on one page.

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

Google, Meta, Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, CMU, UMass, UCSD, and others — for each person links to their website, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, key papers. Plus the h-index and number of citations from Semantic Scholar.

Made it for myself, because it’s more convenient to quickly see who publishes what. Couldn’t find anything ready-made — had to compile it myself. Seems useful, I hope not only to me.

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

https://www.testmysearch.com/who-is-who.html

Navigating Medical Titles: Why Dentists Aren’t Just Doctors | August 09 2026, 12:44

Interestingly, a dentist and a therapist are not covered by the same term ‘doctor’; that is, you would not say ‘doctor appointment’ for a dentist, but rather ‘dentist appointment’, and in various documents, it’s listed as ‘doctor or dentist’. They also hold different degrees (MD/DO and DDS/DMD). And of course, they have different insurances. Perhaps the reasons are historical – barbers used to deal with teeth, meaning they were distinct trades.

Adding to this are optometrists as yet another separate category, but this is understandable and justified.

Exploring the Depths of Unicode’s Complex Symbols | August 09 2026, 12:22

It’s amazing that Unicode includes such complex “characters” as shown in the picture. This is a single character. When the Unicode table had accommodated all the alphabets of the world, arrows, circles, and there was still a ton of free space left that needed filling, the capacity was used up. It has space for about 1.1 million characters, and font designers are doing their best) Chinese and Korean occupy 71% of the existing characters.

Also, Unicode includes some cool ligatures. For example, the following text is one “character” ﷽ (Basmala). Here on Facebook, it doesn’t display quite right because of the fonts, the full version can be seen here: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%EF%B7%BD where ﷺ and ﷻ also live

Moreover, Unicode includes hieroglyphs that do not exist. An investigation in 1997 discovered, for example, the origin of 妛: the compilers wanted to record “山 over 女,” but could not print the composite sign — so they printed 山 and 女 separately, cut them out with scissors, glued them on a sheet and made a copy. On the copy, the seam line of the two pieces of paper looked like a stroke and was included in the hieroglyph. Now it remains so forever

The Evolution of Mermaids in Russian Folklore: From Legged Creatures to Aquatic Tails | August 08 2026, 02:15

WOW, it turns out that mermaids in Russia actually had legs, and if you asked about the tail, they would tickle you to death or drown the curious in the nearest pond. A specific feature — tousled blonde hair, hence the phrase from Dal “walks like a mermaid.” The name itself, however, is not from the type of blonde hair, but from “rusalki” — a spring commemorative festival.

And the tail actually came from sea maidens (mermaids). Mermaids are an invention of peoples living by the sea. In general, how mermaids merged with them in our perception is unclear, but it happened relatively recently.

Although there is one assumption. In Andersen’s tale, the little mermaid — literally a sea maiden (Den Lille Havfrue). But in Russian translation, it was called “Rusalka.” Lermontov has a poem “The Mermaid” from 1831, where she swims in a river. Surely the modern reader imagines a tail. There’s also a tale by Orest Somov, where the mermaid runs away from her mother, and her unfaithful lover—the Pole, was tickled to death by mermaids.

I illustrate with an 1871 painting by Ivan Kramskoy. With legs and Makovsky’s “Mermaids” (1879) – Makovsky painted it on an estate on the border of Chernigov and Poltava provinces, near Dikanka — that very Gogolian Ukrainian night, i.e., the same literary source as Kramskoy. They would have been very surprised by a tail. Also adding Prushkovsky’s Mermaids” (water nymphs) from 1877. Also attaching a drawing by Ivan Bilibin (1934).

By the way, those who depict mermaids with tails on trees – think about how she climbed up there.

Deciphering Tolstoy: Lost in Translation | August 06 2026, 21:36

I wonder what word our Leo Tolstoy had in mind in “War and Peace,” “lost the wolf” or something harsher? I take the English translation off the shelf, there it’s b——ed, apparently buggered, so it’s definitely “lost the wolf.”

A Close Encounter with a Giant Horsefly: Insights and Discoveries | August 05 2026, 01:33

I just had a huge, about three and a half centimeters across, loud buzzing black fly come into my room. I caught it with a blanket and shoved it into a vase, inspected it closely and Googled it. It turned out to be a black horsefly (Tabanus atratus), female. The females are vampires. They need fresh blood. For the eggs. And their bites are very painful. Essentially, a horsefly’s mouth is like scissors. A pair of serrated mandibles which they use to saw into the skin, opening up capillaries, and then they lick up the blood from the resulting pool. It’s said that their bites hurt a lot because you are literally being cut by these scissors. An anticoagulant is injected into the blood to prevent it from clotting, so the wound oozes for a long time after the horsefly has flown away. They can easily bite through fabric, so a shirt offers no protection.

So, it turns out that horseflies are possibly the fastest flying insects on the planet. Males of the genus Hybomitra (which also live here) are credited with speeds up to 145 km/h, and this, by some estimates, is the record for horizontal flight among insects (though this figure is indirectly obtained: an entomologist made a male chase a bullet shot from an air rifle, it intercepted it in the air, meaning it was flying faster than the pellet). Furthermore, horseflies are attracted to polarized light. This is how they find water — a smooth surface reflects light horizontally polarized, and for the horseflies, this is a beacon “here you can lay eggs”. Interestingly, this is also why white horses get significantly fewer bites, because they almost do not polarize reflected light. For these experiments, Gabor Horvat and his colleagues received the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize. Among other things, they smeared full-size horse models with glue and painted dummies to thoroughly check everything.

By the way, I released my captive.

From Bar Joke to Millionaire: The Unbelievable Success of the Pet Rock | August 05 2026, 00:55

Today I found out that the most successful product of Christmas 1975 was a rock. Just a regular rock. Gary Dahl, an advertiser from California, was sitting in a bar and listening to his friends complain about their pets – feeding them, walking them, cleaning up after them – and jokingly said that he had the perfect pet – a rock. It doesn’t need feeding, doesn’t poop, doesn’t die. The joke turned into a business plan over the course of the evening. Dahl bought smooth pebbles from Rosarito Beach in Mexico for about a cent apiece and sold them for $3.95 each. Every rock was shipped in a cardboard carrying box – with air holes “for breathing” and straw bedding inside. And here’s the kicker: the product wasn’t the rock. The product was the accompanying 32-page care and training manual, written stone-faced (pardon the pun): commands like sit” and lie down” are learned instantly, come here” and fetch” are a bit harder, and it executes the command “die” brilliantly.

Within a few months, over a million units were sold, Dahl became a millionaire, he was written about in magazines and invited on television. By early 1976 it was all over, warehouses remained filled with unsold rocks, and attempts to replicate the success with other novelty products failed. Dahl died in 2015, but the Pet Rock brand lives on: the rock in its original packaging can still be purchased today.

(How I came across this. I am currently reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and came across the phrase “They were the Pet Rock of parenting.” – referring to Amy’s parents. I did not understand it and went to google what this Pet Rock was.)