Month: October 2018

Any pool players here? Today, I entered the office in our building where there’s a small room with a pool table, and decided to test how theoretical calculations stack up against practice. And somehow, nothing aligns for me. In theory, I calculated where to hit the ball so that after two bounces it would fall into the pocket. In practice, “the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection” only applies to the first bounce, the second bounce behaves oddly. The ball almost flies backwards.

In red – what I expected, in blue – what actually happens. I understand that the ball might be spinning, but I really tried to hit it in the center, and with one bounce I even sometimes pocket the ball on the first try, with two I am still not skilled, and also the theory doesn’t hold up. But overall, I’m still “green” in pool. Why is that?

Can you guess the language?

P.S. First guessed by George Aristov and Fyodor Saveliev!

This is Glagolitic script. It’s late, 20th century. It is a distant relative of Cyrillic. Glagolitic was developed by Cyril and Methodius. All these “az buki vedi” – it comes from here. For example, the last word here is “PRISHESTVIYA”. Here’s the alphabet:

Update: Svetlana Beregulina and Roman Moguchiy helped figure it out again. The language is Old Church Slavonic or Croatian, hard to tell (Croatian originated from Old Church Slavonic, like Russian, but it is closer to that ancient language). And the script is Glagolitic. Actually, the question was about the script, but I called it a language.

Fascinating architecture

Especially for the USA

Most likely an architect’s house

Watched a 2-hour lecture on Kubernetes by Ilya Klimov (javascript.ninja). Finally got around to it. Highly recommend to those interested, very enlightening.

#etude

Today on 228,000,000 phones in the USA, a presidential alert blared at full volume. However, you cannot unsubscribe from it, and some group from New York is suing the government for the right to have the option to unsubscribe.

An interesting article on Habr about how text editors are structured. Back in my school and university days, I myself tried to write such editors, and there were no such analyses then:) I learned a lot of new things for myself.

A very interesting lecture on the anatomy of the brain. Not a single slide, just three hours of a talking head. But it’s captivating. Indeed, after the first hour, new information begins to overwhelm the brain.

(website visitor agreement management service, 3rd party)

I give away this idea. Someone should invent a service that supports Terms & Conditions, which are present on virtually every major website and for which there likely are neither proper tools nor people for support.

The service should be able to:

1. Display the document text in a format that is both convenient and easy to read, with navigation.

2. Track changes in the text and display them separately, in a convenient and readable format, with a version for printing, highlighting important sections (if the client deems it necessary) while also allowing access to older versions of the document.

3. Obtain and store user consent.

4. Not ask the user again if they have already consented.

5. Ask again if there are changes, store this status, and not ask again.

6. Notify by email when the rules change. Do not allow access to the service until the user accepts the changes.

7. Deliver the rules by mail, if the client thinks it’s necessary.

8. Support different terms&conditions on the same site. For different categories of users, for different services, for different languages, etc. Ideally – using common fragments to ease administration.

9. In the future, it is not out of the question that services will offer multiple agreements depending on how the user agrees to use the service. With new regulations in the EU, this is very realistic. Then, managing these agreements will be a real headache.

A very interesting analysis –

(in the image — the amount of payload launched by customer country)

Some bold statements:

“The CEO of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, accused the head of the American company SpaceX, Elon Musk, of dumping in the space launch market with the aim of ousting Russia. (…) According to Rogozin, Musk receives about 150 million dollars from the Pentagon for each launch. ‘He is paid extra to enter the market with a cheap product,’ noted the head of Roscosmos. He admitted that under such conditions, Russia is unable to compete. Roscosmos cannot demand from the Ministry of Defense a launch price that would be 3 – 5 times more expensive, Rogozin highlighted, adding that such a game would be unfair. Nonetheless, the head of Roscosmos promised that in the near future, Russia will once again lead in the market of launching payloads into space using carrier rockets. According to him, next year Russia will conduct the second launch of the heavy rocket ‘Angara’, and from 2021 will start its mass production. ‘We will return and be the first again, I promise you,’ Rogozin declared.”

Sad to say.

Dmitry Akhmerov