Month: November 2020

Came across an interesting fact: Down syndrome was called “mongolism” for a hundred years, until the Mongolian People’s Republic wrote to the WHO that it was not nice to do so. Then, gradually, the term fell out of use. The U.S. National Institutes of Health even recommended removing “Down” from the syndrome’s name, because Down did not have the disease, and it seemed as though he did. But they were ignored.

“You like to-may-toes and I like to-mah-toes …”

An accent spills the beans about where a person spent their early years. Some New Zealanders claim that Australians pronounce “fish and chips” as “feesh and cheeps,” while some Australians assert that New Zealanders pronounce it as “fush and chups.” Apparently, this phrase can be used as a short, but reliable test.

Today I stumbled upon an interesting video from 1958, explaining how speech is linked to the place in the USA where a person grew up. The lecturer demonstrates phrases that can quite accurately determine where the speaker is from. Quite interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8ZNnlYvXw0

Today I had a conversation with mom. She says she’s into music therapy, listening to Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Wow, I say, tell me what you’re listening to. And she puts something on. “Rain Waltz” by Chopin. I listen and realize, Chopin could not have composed this in the mid-19th century, no way. Turns out, with a bit of Googling, that the so-called “Rain Waltz” attributed to Chopin was actually written by the contemporary composer Yaroslav Nikitin, and arranged by Sergey Kuznetsov, the one who created almost all hits of the “Laskoviy May” band. Google “Chopin autumn waltz”—you’ll be surprised.

Moving on. She puts on “Spring Waltz.” Says it’s by Chopin. Beautiful, isn’t it! But I hear it, and it’s definitely not Chopin, but who is it? Hard to tell, I’m no Shazam. I ask Siri – it identifies “Marriage d’amour” by Paul de Senneville and Olivier Toussaint. What classic? Written the year I was born.

Then Vivaldi, she says, listen to this. And she puts on – surprise, “Song from a Secret Garden.” I say, that’s not Vivaldi, and play this piece by Rolf Løvland for my mom right there on the piano (it’s a simple one). Seems she called it “Soul”?

“So, wait, does this mean I’m being duped? And Tchaikovsky—isn’t Tchaikovsky?” But Tchaikovsky turned out to be the real Tchaikovsky.

Overall, fake news has long been around in music. And the main thing is, it’s unclear what to do about it. For the sake of likes, ignorant reposters add whatever they can.

How do you like that, Elon Musk?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ4DnVfWYQ

We need a button or a menu item in the browser that shows a list of all tabs from all windows where audio is playing for a quick jump to close that damn window. Why hasn’t anyone thought of this yet?

A very interesting lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6avJHaC3C2U

I only post worthwhile videos on Facebook, so take a look, you won’t regret it (especially if you understand programmers even a little)

“Software and technology has changed every aspect of the world we live in. At one extreme are the ‘mission critical’ applications – the code that runs our banks, our hospitals, our airports, and phone networks. Then there’s the code we all use every day to browse the web, watch movies, create spreadsheets… not quite so critical, but still code that solves problems and delivers services.

But what about the code that only exists because somebody wanted to write it? Code created just to make people smile, laugh, maybe even dance? Maybe even code that does nothing at all, created just to see if it was possible?

Join Dylan Beattie – programmer, musician, and creator of the Rockstar programming language – for an entertaining look at the art of code. We’ll look at the origins of programming as an art form, from Conway’s Game of Life to the 1970s demoscene and the earliest Obfuscated C competitions. We’ll talk about esoteric languages and quines – how DO you create a program that prints its own source code? We’ll look at quine relays, code golf, and generative art, and we’ll explore the phenomenon of live coding as performance – from the pioneers of electronic music to modern algoraves and live coding platforms like Sonic Pi.”

What a funny newsletter we received from the “Electronic Journal”. This is an “electronic diary” used by a couple thousand schools in Russia, from Moscow all the way to the outskirts. And look, they’re offering scholarships to American schools! Let’s start reading.

As they say, “fact check”. Firstly, it turns out they are not offering scholarships, but a chance to get a discount on a scholarship. What a strange school. Amerigo. We google it — it shows that the annual cost is $62,850. We follow the link. On the Amerigo website, the price range is from $40,850-$57,000. That’s still a lot, but okay, schools vary. But they are listed. Let’s go to the first one, Carmel Catholic High School. It has a website, there’s tuition. $12,950 per year. How about that difference? By the way, this is quite a low price for a private school. All the schools in their list are Catholic. It’s a cheaper option for private schooling. Catholic ones average up to $10-15K/year. Right next to me there’s BASIS Mclean, a non-Catholic school, costing $26,600. But they don’t sell with 50% off 🙂 In general, the level of private schools in the US is pretty good compared to public ones, but darn it, marketers write such nonsense. Such marketers.

In the same letter, for some reason they write about the average SAT score — a whopping 1272 points. They write with enthusiasm. Elizaveta Alieva, check this out. That’s where you should have studied! With such scores, one can dream about universities at the level of Temple University (100th place) or perhaps higher, if very lucky or if there’s a lot more than just grades. “Annually, nearly 100% of graduates continue their education at universities, including prestigious ones like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, NYU, Yale…”. Tricky phrase. Just so you know—a perfect SAT score is 1600, and you need at least 1500, if not nearly perfect, to get into Stanford. If the school’s average score is 1272, yet so many get into the “Ivy League”, it means there must be some really studious folks scoring 1000 on the SAT at that school.

Good lecture on English pronunciation

Kay Herbert, Speech-Language Pathologist

This is how I work. Outside the second-floor window, there’s this guy standing all day with a jackhammer pounding the wall. Seriously, all day long, he has a lot to hammer away. He’ll be back again on Monday.

It’s quite strange to explain to people far from the profession that what’s on my monitor is not a Matrix screensaver, but rather informative Hybris logs from Kubernetes, which I stared at for several minutes and probably at some point exclaimed “eureka” because I eventually spotted the cause of a failure in them.

But as a screensaver, it’s pretty cool too

Here, we also have our own November 7th. The note ends with the words “it was like the day the Berlin Wall fell. On Nov. 7 we were liberated.”