Month: May 2022

The bird I met this morning seems to be a great supporter of Belgium or Warsaw.

Red-winged blackbird or Красноплечий трупиал. (трупиал! Moreover, there exists a mourning trupial. But this one is the Red-winged)

Just finished reading Life’s Edge by Carl Zimmer. It was the third book of Zimmer I’ve read. Some time ago I decided to read books only aloud. The first book was Harry Potter, a few years ago. Reading aloud helped me stop jumping between paragraphs and resist the temptation to skip boring parts. It also helped me to keep a constant reading speed (which is just 2:20 min per page). I was able to see how the pauses in speech match the punctuation and structure of written sentences. And it helped to start thinking in phrases and word combinations rather than in separate words and grammar rules. It helped to draw attention to how the sentences are built — from time to time it was against my understanding of English grammar (and I googled why and patched my understanding as a result).

These 290 pages took me about 6.5 hours (2:20 per page). I bought the book on Apr, 8, exactly one month ago. On average, it was taking about 15 minutes per day.

I found the book really interesting, but if one has to choose which Zimmer’s to read, then it is better to start with his previous book, “She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity” (2018). “The Planet of Viruses” (2015) was interesting too.

I recorded how I was reading one of the last pages of the book. Since I had never seen that page before, it was not as smooth as it could be. Have you heard my Russian accent? Have you heard my rolling “r”? Interesting to hear some feedback and recommendations from those for whom English is the first language.

I discovered an excellent app for iOS: PiPifier. It’s a Safari extension that enables the use of every HTML5 video in Picture in Picture mode — including Youtube videos which typically don’t support this feature. PiP allows you to listen to or watch Youtube music in the background. It continues to play even if you exit Safari or the Youtube App. Normally, playing in the background is a premium feature (part of Youtube Music). I listen to Youtube while driving, so the background play is tremendously useful.

I always thought I can explain how anything in the world is built, at least to some extent. I always believed that I understood how machine learning functions. I was even developing a chess recognition app which operated effectively. However, the latest updates from this field are truly astonishing. I cannot explain how the trained models can produce such remarkable results.

Look, this model deciphers jokes and unravels narratives. I feel as though I am being deceived. It’s too astonishing to be authentic.

P.s. DALL-E 2 is already impressive

as it generates realistic images and artwork from a description in natural language.

Today I learned that there is Cebuano Wikipedia which has over 6 million articles, making Cebuano the foreign language after English with the most content on the wiki. Most of the articles were created by the bot called Ljsbot. Most of these are machine-translated articles with little to no quality control but still 🙂 6.5M articles – just a bit fewer articles than English. Sverker Johansson has got a great achievement point in his CV.

Also I found that there is a most published author named Philip Parker. He has published over 85,000 books, each of which is completed in less than an hour using algorithms. Parker published the automated books through Icon Group International, using several Icon group subheadings. Most of Parker’s automatically generated books target niche markets such as medicine. Example — the books can be bought on Amazon 😉

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lsjbot.

https://worldcat.org/identities/lccn-n88-265944/

This is a cedar-apple rust fungus (кедрово-яблочный гниющий гриб). Just photographed it after rain poured down all night. After the rain, the fungus turns orange and shows its swollen spore-bearing horns. Before the rain, while it grows, it resembles a coronavirus, a ball of reddish-brown cones with spikes (see the photograph in the comments). The botanical name is Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae.

This is a cedar-apple rust fungus (кедрово-яблочный гниющий гриб). Just photographed it after rain poured down all night. After the rain, the fungus turns orange and shows its swollen spore-bearing horns. Before the rain, while it grows, it resembles a coronavirus, a ball of reddish-brown cones with spikes (see the photograph in the comments). The botanical name is Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae.

A couple of thoughts have crossed my mind

– the apple watch firmly believes that walking my dog counts as a workout for me

– I don’t allow my dog to go into our backyard after dark. Because it’s too late

A couple of thoughts have crossed my mind

– the apple watch firmly believes that walking my dog counts as a workout for me

– I don’t allow my dog to go into our backyard after dark. Because it’s too late

Today is Nadya’s birthday. Well, maybe not exactly eighteen, but somewhere in that range. At least, in spirit.

And while she’s off at yoga somewhere, I’ve been glued to our photos together on my phone.

I’m doing what I can to make each year at least a little happier than the last for her, and to bring more and more vivid colors and impressions into her life 😉 though it’s quite a pleasant activity for both of us, there’s always a bit of chance and luck involved. Just to make sure it’s never quite enough! But overall, we seem to enjoy the same things.

Basically, I wish not to slow down! I’m not even sure who I’m wishing for, it’s her birthday, but I’m wishing for both of us. Because our paces are closely intertwined. And to Nadya, I wish fewer worries, especially in her volleyball coaching life. It’s incredibly hard in sports, but still;)

Kisses and hugs! ♥️

Nadezhda Shulga