Month: October 2023

Walking with Yuki. An old acquaintance has grown up

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Reading a book about mushrooms, I stumbled upon an interesting fact. In 1997, used diapers made up 6% of urban waste, now this figure has increased to 15% in some areas (source – Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, 2010).

Sport: seven miles to lagman and plov and seven miles back

Progress bar

Autumn: 50% complete

How the 5x camera works on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. The wind blew away my metro ticket and threw it onto the tracks. To avoid paying at the exit, I took two photos from one spot: a regular one and a 5x. On the zoomed-in one, the number and date are readable.

I’m currently in Atlanta, where this week a large group of us planned work for the next three months. And to wake people up in the morning for fun, we organized a hall to play rock-paper-scissors to find the absolute winner of the hall. Where I realized, I cannot play the American version of rock-paper-scissors. In the USA, they play it like this: they beat their fist on the palm on “rock”, then beat on “scissors”, then beat on “paper”, and then they say “shoot” and show their hand. Generally, we also have four counts (“rock, scissors, onion, mage”), but it’s not quickly apparent because there are exactly three words and no “shoot”. (Also, we have a longer version “rock, scissors, onion, mage, tsu, ye, fa”; however, in the USA, a version without “shoot” is also common)

Obviously, against a random number generator any strategy you take, the probability is 30%. But there are interesting studies on how to play against real people. Here are its findings:

1) winners repeat: people tend to repeat what helped them win last time. If you showed rock and won against scissors, you are more likely (than 1/3) to show rock again.

2) losers change: when losing, people tend to change strategy (showed rock, lost, why show it again)

From this, some hints on how to win:

1) if you lost, in the next round show what was not shown this time (if rock and scissors were shown, show paper)

2) if you won, then in the next round show what your opponent lost with the previous time

3) if it’s a tie, choose randomly

By the way, there’s a robot that wins at “Rock-Paper-Scissors” 100% of the time. But it cheats – it watches the micro-movements of your hand and anticipates by showing the opposite. Google “Janken Robot”

A bit of cuteness on a Friday morning

Dall-E 3 is now in ChatGPT!

An interesting article caught my eye. It turns out that according to statistics, 90% of Chinese teenagers suffer from myopia, with the world average at 22%. Moreover, if you consider other regions, only 1.2% of inhabitants of Nepalese villages, 4% of South African children, and 12% of American teenagers suffer from myopia. Imagine, according to the data in the article, in Seoul 96.5% of 19-year-olds are myopic. That is, almost everyone. The question is why myopia among teenagers in China and Korea is so prevalent.

Previously, this was attributed to genetics, but just 60 years ago, the percentage of myopic teenagers in China was only 10-20%. Clearly, it’s not just genetics.

At first, they blamed reading. It was suggested that focusing on letters gradually changes vision. But with the advent of computers being ubiquitous, enough data has accumulated that doesn’t quite align with the conclusions about reading, and ultimately, this hypothesis has become much fainter.

It turned out that a lack of natural light significantly affects this condition. Scientists have discovered that children who spend more time outdoors are less likely to develop myopia.

Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and science needs a mechanism. There are several hypotheses that attempt to explain how this happens.

The most compelling seems to be the hypothesis called the light and dopamine hypothesis, which suggests that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, thereby maintaining the correct shape of the retina. Research on chickens seems to have confirmed this idea. Retinal dopamine is produced depending on the circadian cycle, instructing the eye to switch from night vision, based on rod cells, to daylight vision, based on cone cells. Thus, spending less time outdoors and more time indoors (under the influence of artificial light) disrupts this cycle and normal eye function.