Month: October 2019

Here is HBO, which, seemingly a globally renowned cable and satellite network with dozens of great series, has a site with a monstrously inconvenient interface. There, movies are simply listed in alphabetical order with a crude breakdown into eight categories from ACTION to SUSPENSE. The only banner that highlights a featured movie among the bunch only contains a picture and the title.

I just watched their new Watchmen, the first episode. After all, series based on comics are a world of their own. For instance, in the middle of the episode, some kind of extraterrestrial squids start falling from the sky, and then they are completely forgotten by the end of the episode. It turns out, the average American will recognize this as a reference to the giant telepathic squid from outer space that concludes the comic. The director of the movie (not the series) Watchmen did not include this squid in the plot because “leave the squid out, I would have had to spend about thirty minutes explaining why it’s needed there”. But in the series, they didn’t bother 😉 and that’s how it is there. Literally every question requires a Google search. These aren’t the fairy tales I grew up on 😉

By the way, what’s happening with the air in Moscow right now? Specifically, everything about pm2.5

compared to the “normal” index in Moscow, which is around 50 (in an industrial place like Houston, packed with oil refineries, it’s about 70, and in China over industrial cities – it’s like now in Moscow)

Houston. Last time I posted pictures from a film camera, now it’s time to dissect an iPhone. Digital ones always come later, they need to be analyzed, and that takes time. But the film photos were all good 😉

A very interesting presentation of the results of Elon Musk’s Neuralink project. Scientists are reporting, there are many cool slides. They are developing brain-machine neural interfaces: essentially an implanted Bluetooth-like I/O port for a small part of the brain, which a person can control after some training. The presentation is from July, but I only got around to it now. The link includes a translation too. The N1 chip was shown, which will be implanted in the brain. According to the company, Neuralink may begin clinical trials with humans in 2020.

Apple took 12 years to introduce a sharpen feature in their mobile photo editing app

Field trip

It turned out that Netflix started with renting DVDs. At that time, they were the online competitor of Blockbuster, which had about 10,000 stores in 2004. Now, Blockbuster is down to just one store in Oregon. Yet, the DVD rental market here in the states has not died. There’s a Redbox on every corner (about 40,000 in the country). Renting a movie costs from $1.75, which is cheaper than any streaming service. But they are dying out, of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOAIU2WpIUQ

Today, Typhoon Hagibis struck Japan. I became curious about the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon. It turns out, the difference is only that a typhoon is a hurricane in the Far East and East Asia. It is believed that a typhoon is a gradually developing hurricane, but there are significantly fewer destructive typhoons than destructive hurricanes, so this is kind of an exception. Meteorologists call them both tropical cyclones.

Lens calibration

A very interesting lecture by Vishnevsky about mushrooms. A large part of the lecture discusses the origin of life. Very insightful section, highly recommended. All of Vishnevsky’s lectures are interesting, but today’s is particularly so.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ6xg97R_Ig