Month: December 2017

Made a knife sharpening station out of pins and sticks 😉

Vegetarian colleagues, do you eat marshmallows? Aren’t they made with gelatin?

I understand that this is not exactly a New Year’s Eve question, but perhaps you have some ideas. I’ve figured out the technology for generating forms (surveys, registration, etc.) based on rules (Drools). Here’s the concept: you create a rule (a text file) that says “If the user enters a number greater than 20 and less than 30 in field X, then add a couple more fields to the form, check field Y for completeness, and if it is not filled out, display a message that it needs to be filled.” The uniqueness of this particular approach I was exploring (tohu) is that the logic is based on rules, which means it has a non-linear structure (the order of rule execution is unpredictable, the system executes them quickly, there can be as many as you want, logic is added dynamically without recompiling the project, and rules are formulated in a language close to business. Overall, such a tool is very convenient to use when there are many complex rules (like forms with ten steps, complex validation, and lots of dynamic parts).

Question: In what areas could this be applicable? Loan applications, insurance, what else? Theoretically, the system can handle hundreds or thousands of rules, while loan applications involve at most about 10 rules.

The consultant told me that the names of the cables correspond to colors, chocolate, Pearl, but why vodka?

Watched “Song of the Sea.” A very unusual, tender, unhurried, and very pleasant cartoon with a very soulful soundtrack that fills half of the film. From the director of “The Secret of Kells,” which also ranks high in my list. The simple graphics might be puzzling, but trust me, firstly, they are not simple, and secondly, the mood and color could not have been conveyed in any other rendering. Overall, a wonderful aftertaste, we all liked it, and Lisa is crazy about the visuals. Now, she’ll probably start drawing them;)

https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/pesn-morya-2014-714248/

Sharing an interesting website, sciencealert.com — I recommend it as a rather intriguing source of news. Continuing the theme of discoveries in 2017:

Ben Tippett, a theoretical physicist and mathematician from the University of British Columbia (Canada) has theoretically proven the possibility of time travel both forwards and backwards, using the curvature of space-time in the Universe.

http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-just-came-up-with-a-mathematical-model-for-a-viable-time-machine

The lungs are not only for breathing but also produce blood. The lungs of mammals produce over 10 million platelets per hour, constituting a major portion of the blood platelets circulating through the body.

http://www.sciencealert.com/an-unexpected-new-lung-function-has-been-discovered-and-it-could-disrupt-decades-of-scientific-thought

Scientists from the Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have announced the creation of the first stable semi-synthetic organism.

https://www.sciencealert.com/new-semi-synthetic-organism-can-make-molecules-we-ve-never-seen-before-dna-unnatural

A giant neuron was discovered, encompassing the entire circumference of a mouse’s brain. It likely plays a role in consciousness.

http://www.sciencealert.com/a-giant-neuron-has-been-found-wrapped-around-the-entire-circumference-of-the-brain

After 130 years of studies, scientists might have to rewrite the dinosaur family tree and redefine the theropods, formerly a suborder of saurischians, to avipods.

http://www.sciencealert.com/after-130-years-we-might-have-to-completely-redraw-the-dinosaur-family-tree

A new, seventh geological continent called Zealandia has been found, covering 4.9 million sq. km, with New Zealand and New Caledonia being parts of it.

http://www.sciencealert.com/earth-has-a-brand-new-continent-called-zealandia/

That’s enough for today) lunch break is over, I’m off back to work

What made 2017 memorable? This year, a human gene was edited, SpaceX launched a used Falcon 9 rocket – a very cool breakthrough, Deepmind taught a computer to use the laws of physics to overcome random obstacles, and Boston Dynamics is creating robots that do similar things in reality – I recommend watching a lecture at TED, Water-Gen introduced a device for extracting water from the air, 800 gallons a day, we obtained time crystals – a new “asymmetric” state of matter over time. Biologists discovered that dragonflies have living wings – the veins inside the wings are part of the respiratory system. Physicists created excitonium, a new form of matter whose theoretical existence was predicted in the ’60s, and a new superconductor, metallic hydrogen, predicted in 1935. And the discovery of gravitational waves is also significant (a friend of mine here in the US worked on this project, it was very interesting to talk shortly after the discovery, about LIDO detectors and the complexities involved).

A team from Google has published a peer-reviewed scientific paper describing the principle of human speech synthesis – https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.05884. The examples are interesting –

https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/ There, you can hear both human-spoken and system-synthesized speech. Try to tell them apart. I couldn’t.

Here is how even defects are tied to the brand: it seems, I have a very rare case of battery swelling on an iPhone X. At least, there are mentions of the issue for the eight model, but none for the tenth iPhone. Went to the Apple Store. Left with a brand-new device in 10 minutes. And it made me think, any battery can swell up like this. What would any other manufacturer offer? Ok, we can divide the world into Samsung and everything else. Samsung would replace the device or return my unit with a “repaired” status (which definitely makes it “cheaper”). Would HTC or Lenovo replace the device? And how much time would the replacement take if needed? Would it fit within 10 minutes? An hour? A day? A week?

Secondly. Restoring EVERYTHING on the new phone took about 30 minutes in a fully automatic mode, and I got my phone back just as it was before. Can Android do that? I think yes, the question is in the details…

I think such service deeply ties people to the brand. And not the gadgets and features…

P.S. Added “KASKO” for the little phone at AT&T for 8 bucks a month. It covers everything from cracks and scratches to complete loss of the phone.

@pigeonforge