Month: October 2023

Typing

Interesting article. It turns out that according to statistics, 90% of Chinese teenagers suffer from myopia, with the global average being 22%. Meanwhile, only 1.2% of residents in Nepalese villages, 4% of South African children, and 12% of American teenagers suffer from myopia. The question is why.

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

Imagine, according to the data from the article, 96.5% of 19-year-olds in Seoul are myopic. Basically, almost everyone.

Initially, they blamed reading. Supposedly focusing on the letters gradually alters vision. But with the advent of computers everywhere, enough data has been gathered that didn’t quite agree with the conclusions about reading, and eventually, this hypothesis faded significantly.

It turned out that a lack of natural light significantly influences the condition. Scientists discovered that children who spend more time outdoors are less likely to become myopic.

Of course, correlation does not imply causation, and science needs a mechanism. There are several hypotheses that try to explain how this happens. The most promising seems to be the light and dopamine hypothesis, which states that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, thereby maintaining the correct shape of the retina. Research in chickens seems to have confirmed this idea. Retinal dopamine is produced depending on the diurnal cycle, signaling the eye to switch from nocturnal vision, based on rod cells, to daytime vision, based on cone cells. Thus, spending less time outdoors and more time indoors (under artificial light) disrupts this cycle and the normal functioning of the eye.

https://www.zmescience.com/feature-post/myopia-eye-china/

It turns out that fortepiano is not at all what we think of as a piano today. The fortepiano is an early version of the piano, known since the invention of the instrument by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1698 until the beginning of the 19th century. In fact, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven wrote for the fortepiano.

Literally, ‘fortepiano’ means loud-soft. The French equivalent, pianoforte, means soft-loud.

Interestingly, unlike violins, for example, grand pianos with each passing year (well, decade) only deteriorate in sound quality, and repairing them is quite expensive. Moreover, more modern designs significantly outperform less modern ones by a considerable margin.

I still consider the purchase of an electronic Kawaii one of the best ideas to spend money in recent years. Well, okay, after buying a house.

On a flight from Dubai, I decided to watch a movie. Despite the magnificence of Emirates, their movie selection is so-so, and you can’t watch from your own devices, only with these silly headphones. Well okay, after much thought I chose to watch Bezos. About the path of the main Amazon guy.

Biographical films really need to be done well. The director Hoa Le (who is that anyway?) didn’t quite pull it off. It turned out to be boring, sluggish, chaotic, and superficial, and I turned it off halfway through. Everything was bad there. The acting, the script, the cinematography. The husband comes home and says, “I’ve come up with some nonsense, and it seems like it might work. Quit your good job, and let’s sell the house, and I’ll spend all the money on a startup that’s supposed to take off.” The wife is upset, then a minute later, all is well, like, “okay, let’s do it.” They both quit their jobs and then go to their parents to ask for a lot of money because it turns out they don’t have enough for the startup. Wasn’t that clear before? The parents are upset, a minute later, all is well, here’s the check. Couldn’t it have been the other way around? First to the parents, then sell? And that’s how everything goes there. It’s even unclear how Amazon (or Bezos) eventually agreed to the release of such junk.

The Marriott in Atlanta practices something interesting. You book a hotel with breakfast. Just the standard American fare – scrambled eggs, potatoes, bacon, sausages. Everything is buffet style, except for the drinks: they bring as many as you need, but they do bring them. In the end, you receive a bill where the cost of breakfast ($19) is itemized, there’s an optional line for tipping, and a place for your signature, which is required. In the USA, it is customary to leave a 20% tip unless there are serious reasons not to. As a result, the hotel earns tips on top of what is already quite an expensive breakfast.

By the way, I barely found the hotel. Here in Atlanta, PRIDE WEEK was happening, and everything was scooped up. What wasn’t scooped up was beyond the local beltway, and it seems they charge an extra markup on those.

I predict that by around 2025, there will be a service to which you can feed a song of any length, and it will create a version of the duration you need. Or it changes the style from pop to jazz.

I predict that by no later than 2025—and much ahead of that—an AI assistant will be integrated into all development environments. That is, a programmer will write as they can, then select a fragment and press a button to ‘make it normal’. And it won’t even be necessary to write initially – you just write in the comments what you need and voila, there’s your code. This, in some form, exists now but isn’t integrated.

I predict that somewhere around 2025-2026, illustrations for articles and all advertising on the network will not only be made by AI based on a template, but also be adaptive, for instance, resonating with the theme of the article beside which a banner or illustration is displayed. Essentially, articles will also be largely, and sometimes fully, generated by AI.

I think that there will be AI artists in movies and AI musicians. Architects will receive an AI tool that creates a random project in all details according to the specifications and ideas of the artist.

The search by keywords like today’s Google will also soon die out.

“…First: the world is filled with both good and evil — it has always been and will always be so. Second: the boundaries between good and evil are permeable and blurred. And finally, third: angels can become demons, and demons, although sometimes hard to comprehend, can become angels.”

“The Lucifer Effect. Why Good People Turn Evil” by Philip Zimbardo

reading this little book

“It’s Camel, you have to smoke it”

Not surprisingly