Month: July 2018

I would use a tall cylinder with a handle, the size of a frying pan, instead of a lid, to allow the hot air to freely rise upwards, while also preventing it from splashing sideways. However, the cylinder is quite bulky. Perhaps there are simpler solutions? (Reducing the flame is not an option, as high heat is sometimes necessary, plus it splashes, albeit not as much, even on the lowest “flame”)

Perfect. Couldn’t find the author. There’s a superb collection in the comments here: https://loony_picture.d3.ru/mona-loony-871050/?sorting=rating

Today, I covered half of Washington, clocking in at 40 km on my bike and 5 km on foot on Roosevelt Island.

Washington is undoubtedly better equipped for cyclists than the average American town. I’d even say that in Washington, things are perfect in this regard, but once you step outside, in the smaller towns, cyclists are pushed to the sidelines. Take, for instance, the Washington & Old Dominion Trail, which is 45 km long and about a half-hour’s drive from my house. Getting there isn’t super convenient, but once you do, it’s like stepping onto a freeway. Occasionally, you plan a route – 20 miles on the bike versus 7 in the car. You immediately start looking for another place.

Planes can land at Reagan Airport literally every minute, while the local metro, unlike Moscow’s, just doesn’t have that capability. Sometimes you have to wait 15-25 minutes for it. How come?

Groundhog Day again today 😉

Please provide the text you’d like to have translated.

Walked through the forest at night, taking pictures of landscapes.

Today is my groundhog day. They appeared three times along the way.

By the way, people use Markov chains to generate meaningless texts. Modern smartphones use word pair statistics from others’ and your own sentences to suggest the next word. Try writing anything offensive – it will continue correctly;) so, a Markov chain is a sequence of such assumptions based on the statistics of combinations. In my almost childhood, they tried to deceive search engines by generating placeholder pages with supposedly real text and advertising links inside (they’ve long caught on to this trick). Also, I used this mechanism to create random words, which can be read effortlessly (filled the dictionary with them and obfuscated data from real logs for blog publication).

There’s another interesting application. You probably didn’t know that Markov chains underlie Google’s method of sorting search results. If we draw parallels with words, then here the pairs are often-used words – pairs of sites linked by hyperlinks. There is an interesting property of the Markov chain: if it is long enough, and there is enough data, then in the “long distance,” the probability of the outcome (words in case of suggestions) does not depend on the word you started writing with, assuming we’re talking about a long chain. So, the higher the probability, the higher the pagerank, the closer to the start the result will be. Well, it’s understood that Google has seriously modified the algorithm, but the principles of this stuff with links and Google’s Pagerank are very similar;)

https://meduza.io/shapito/2018/07/13/prochital-na-meduze-chto

Funny) how to hack an American service. I needed to make six 5×5 cm photos, which in the States are called “for passport”. I go to Walgreens. Price – 45 bucks (3×15), but the photos are taken by cashiers with a soapbox camera against a wall. I go to CVS – same money, but you can bring your own flash drive. Thanks to Konstantin Cherkasov for the idea, and to Vitalii Menshutin for the photo of me using my DSLR. I put six 2×2″ photos on a 4×6″ print and print it at a price 200 (!) times cheaper. I wasn’t lazy and found a promo code to reduce the price from 0.33 per photo to 0.22. And yet, someone pays 45!