Month: July 2020

I decided not just to enjoy a cold beer while watching another episode of Brave New World, but also to conduct a simple experiment.

Beer (355 ml) cools from 27.5 degrees to 14.5 in 25 minutes in the freezer when wrapped in a wet paper, and only to 18.1 without the paper. Of course, we all remember from school why, but we still just throw the beer in to chill as is. Yet, in wet paper, it cools down much faster.

Yesterday, I noticed that the armudu glass gifted by Lala Alieva isn’t meant for hot tea. It cracked when brewing. Decided, before throwing it away, to record its final moments on video. I loved it so much 😞 I wonder if all armudu glasses are this sensitive.

Interesting lectures by Severinov, you can start with “Gene Work”. They cover the basics of cytology and bioengineering, but despite the complexity of the topic, they will be understandable and interesting even to children.

Somehow nobody talks or writes about this, but I believe that I will reach retirement age with biocomputers, in which the processor uses artificially grown cells for atomic operations that have an analog nature. It will not be as fast as a digital one, but due to “clustering” and “fuzzy logic,” it will solve qualitatively different problems. At first, a processor will emerge to solve some single task, which will be even hard to articulate to the uninitiated public. Then, a processor that solves a comprehensible task will come out, but only one. Then, about ten years later, the number of tasks it handles will begin to increase.

https://postnauka.ru/author/severinov

Can you whistle loudly? Like, a “heads up, guys!” kind of whistle? With your fingers or not? With one hand or two?

Very.

I listened to several lectures on Post-Science about exoplanets and possible forms of biological life, and came to think that if we ever discover extraterrestrial life, the chances of creationism followers will skyrocket. Why? Because a cell became a cell and its constituent proteins became these specific proteins as a result of evolution, which by definition has a random nature, and life based on principles other than intracellular ones is theoretically conceivable. Moreover, it is conceivable around us.

For example, one could invent such a crazy concept as “living matter” based on micro-interactions between molecules of matter (such as gas) and distributed storage of information defining these interactions. Physically, each individual molecule does not store anything, but its instantaneous state carries the information necessary for such life. Micro-effects in the dynamics between molecules cannot be measured in any way (since trying to measure it would affect the system), and if we’re talking about huge volumes spanning hundreds of kilometers, where the wave of interactions and vibrations makes sense, such a hypothesis will be untestable for another century. If we imagine that such “life” coexists with terrestrial life, it would be impossible for us to detect them, and for them – us.

Alternative life may have its own flow of time, completely incompatible with ours. For example, a million times slower or a million times faster. The concept of intelligence is only understood through comparison with humans. If you think about it, intelligence is just an evolutionary mechanism, and not at all the only possible one.

I think it will be similar with extraterrestrial civilizations. We shouldn’t be looking for little green-headed men, but rather something entirely different, like the things mentioned above. Or something like this

I am planning a trip to this area, 70 km away from us. And I’m laughing. The towns here are selectively named: Another place, Mutual consent, Broomes island…

Reading Anne Frank, I surprisingly discovered for myself that the Russian word pogrom (pogrom) has entered the English, German, and other European languages as a designation for mass attacks on places with concentrated Jewish populations. Only later did it begin to be used in a broader sense. In the text, Anne recalls the Jewish pogroms, known as Kristallnacht.

I wonder why no store in the world offers customers the option to “order” items onto the shelves. For example, I drove to a store three miles from home to buy my favorite wine. It’s not available at the store a mile away, or I would have bought it there. Clearly, a store’s inventory management should not be based solely on the wishes of one customer, but stores don’t even seem to be moving in the direction of listening to this customer.

For instance, there could be a way for customers to suggest items, like “why not bring in that awesome cottage cheese”, and then, if the store brings this cottage cheese and it sells as expected, the customer could get some perks, like discounts or gifts.

“Mashka is reading Yana Mkr’s poem “They will definitely love you for something else”. @[1476954747:2048:Artem Lyskov] recommended it to her. Now she is studying Mayakovsky’s “Poems about the Soviet passport”. She reads coolly, but refuses to record. Liza “instigated” her with Mayakovsky 🙂

I predict that the next generation of touchscreens will be screens whose surface can programmatically change on a physical level, such that you can physically feel a screen button (your finger noticeably presses against it while sliding), and when pressed, it gives the sensation that the button has been pressed.

Currently, engineering solutions for this are expensive (or not as cheap as necessary), but they exist. Next up are miniaturization, cost reduction, and scaling.