Month: March 2018

Oh! I now know what it’s called: Shlemiel the Painter’s algorithm! An old article from an excellent blog – one of the first on the internet that I started reading (and then abandoned) http://russian.joelonsoftware.com/Articles/BacktoBasics.html

From the courses I’ve recently listened to on Arzamas, I recommend the following:

1. History of Orthodox Culture. https://arzamas.academy/courses/43

2. What is Antiquity?https://arzamas.academy/likbez/antiquity

What is Ancient Greece?

https://arzamas.academy/courses/36

3. How to Understand Japan.

https://arzamas.academy/courses/21

4. How Railroads Changed Russian Life. Co-produced with RZD. Interesting (haven’t finished listening yet, but the beginning is intriguing)

https://arzamas.academy/courses/49

5. How to Listen to Classical Music?

https://arzamas.academy/courses/25

(somewhere halfway interesting and useful)

6. The World of Bulgakov.

https://arzamas.academy/courses/39

7. The Russian Language from “goy esi” to “lol kek” – very interesting

https://arzamas.academy/likbez/ruslang

8. The Siege of Leningrad

https://arzamas.academy/courses/51/

Also, they have the “Inferiority Complex” podcast. There was recently interesting content about the swearing used by Pushkin) https://soundcloud.com/arzamas-academy

If someone has listened to anything else – please recommend.

I’ve also discovered Arkhe (http://arhe.msk.ru/) – but they do not have a mobile app and many lectures require video as slides are needed

Brought from Burning Man to Washington

These mushrooms are alive. Exhibits from burning man, DC

This object is bulky and made of wood. Exhibits from Burning Man, Renwick Gallery, DC.

Exhibits from Burning Man, Renwick Gallery, Washington DC

Besides “as though,” which appears 51 times in the first Harry Potter and zero in the two Narnias, I noticed that Rowling likes to use the verb “stare” – 58 times in “The Sorcerer’s Stone,” while in the two Narnias – 9 times.

Reading the first Harry Potter, I noticed Rowling’s fondness for “as though”.

In the book, this phrase is repeated 51 times, whereas in the first two Narnia books, for example, it does not appear even once. Based on such metrics, one could probably automatically guess the author of a book even from a fragment without proper nouns, if trained on phrases and grammatical patterns.

I wonder why it is generally assumed that extraterrestrial civilizations operate on the same time scale as we do? For instance, we see a stone on planet X. Just a stone. But in reality, it’s a frame from the multimillion-year life of some being. Or, conversely, although this is debatable.

And another important point. It seems obvious to everyone, but still. It’s absolutely impossible to determine if there is life or what is happening somewhere RIGHT NOW. You can determine if something happened some time ago, but you can’t say anything about right now. The further from Earth, the greater the gap in time. Light from the neighboring galaxy takes hundreds of thousands of years. And if we look further – then we are talking about millions of years. Assuming that time there flows faster for an entire species, which may emerge and disappear faster than on Earth – at best, we see traces.

There are two wildly interesting topics right now – the deep-sea world and space. Both are poorly studied – discoveries occur almost every year by recent students. It’s a pity, kids these days aren’t particularly interested in these subjects.

I wonder, why aren’t there decentralized instant messaging systems built on the principles of tor/torrent? Like, having each client assemble a pool of IP addresses that perform further routing of the message across the network, and this pool being dynamic, i.e., constantly updated. That means, if user A sends a message to user B, the message goes through a network of intermediate servers set up by the users themselves, using HTTPS. Since the nodes are ultimately set up by the participants, there is a risk that something might suddenly turn off. Therefore, each node in the network has a reliability rating, which influences others’ decisions about the level of redundancy in sending to this somewhat unreliable network. As soon as a mess-up happens, the reliability rating drops. The provider can only curb such activity by either analyzing the protocol or blocking the IP addresses. If the system of obtaining IP addresses and the protocol are secured, then, in general, the nature of the traffic won’t differ much from ordinary web surfing. Participants need a public IP for this, which is challenging since not everyone has one. But if you could devise a monetization model where these participants earn money from ads passing through them… technically it seems feasible. Where here is the oversight and logical flaws?