Month: February 2024

(necessary comment added two hours after a blank repost and after reading the comments)

It’s interesting that almost everyone perceives this text by Dilyara as an “attack,” because they see a contrast between the lines: “I am smart, while they are stupid and narrow-minded.” Actually, she wrote in such a way that, yes, this can be read between the lines, and it’s bad. But the actual lines say something different.

Dilyara writes that there are groups of people with different values, who grew up in different environments, were raised on different ideals, and who are largely incompatible with her, Dinara. And let’s face it, they are incompatible with many of us as well. However, incompatibility is not bad. That’s just how the world is structured; it’s diverse.

She talks about Russia. But it’s the same here in the USA if you drive around the country. If I get in a car and drive for half an hour to an hour west, I will move from our area with an average household income of 120K per year to a place where the average income is 22K. This is true for any major country. Do you think it’s different in China? France? Germany? It’s more or less the same everywhere.

Dinara gave her own characterization of such a group. Any generalization of people is evil. All people are different. Roughly speaking, each person is a bundle of traits taken from their environment, upbringing, from parents, from school, from television. But to an individual observer, some patterns always seem to appear. That’s what Dilyara noticed. I would remove something, add something else if I were forced to generalize with a soldering iron in hand. Everyone has their own experience, and their own generalizations. I try not to generalize because it is mathematically impossible if you were to formalize all these traits.

But, I think it’s important to understand such groups in some form, to understand their motives, actions, desires. These groups exist everywhere, in the USA, in Russia. They vote. They go out on tractors to rallies in Europe. Sometimes they grab pitchforks and overthrow rulers. And sometimes they ignore what seems important to us, and demand some nonsense that we find unimportant.

In some countries, the proportion of such people is larger, in others smaller. They are certainly not worse than us, nor are we better than them. They are just different from us. Because they grew up in a different context, in a different environment. Of course, when it comes to making decisions, they are guided by the values of their group, not ours.

I thought Dilyara’s post was about this.

I cannot help but recall the controversy around Dima Markov’s photos, which depict provincial Russia as it is, with dirt, trash, alcoholics, graffiti on leaning fences, and the like. For some reason, people react to those with “why show us the very worst, it’s like this everywhere.” Of course, it’s everywhere – take, for example, Louisiana from the first season of True Detective. It’s just life, this is how people live and think. People vary. Every country has its differences. Maybe in somewhere like Luxembourg or Norway, their proportion is smaller – just because of a different distribution of capital population versus provincial population, but all large countries are more or less the same in this regard.

Well, that’s the comment.

I’m finishing a tasty bulgur with chicken and along the way got curious about what this creature really is. It turns out that bulgur, couscous, and semolina—all are made from wheat, from hard varieties, but each in a slightly different way. Bulgur is made from whole grains that are steamed, dried, and ground. Couscous and semolina are made from milled wheat (known as semolina), but for couscous, the milled product is rolled into balls, whereas in the case of semolina, it is not. Essentially, couscous is balls of semolina.

Now for a mix of other things.

A typhoon is a marine hurricane specifically in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean. A twister and a tornado are the same thing.

Black, green, white teas, and oolong are produced from the leaves of the same plant, Camellia sinensis. The differences in color, taste, and aroma are determined by the degree of fermentation of the leaves and the methods of their processing.

The same difference applies to olives and olives. Green fruits of the olive tree have always been called “olives,” and the black ones – “olives,” but essentially, it’s the same plant—olives. The main difference is just the period in which they are collected. Green ones are picked before ripening, black ones—after. The difference in color is primarily due to the maturity of the olive oil at collection, but it also depends on how they are processed. Green ones are soaked in a solution containing alkali, then fermented in brine. The longer they ferment, the less bitter and more delicate they become.

Cilantro and coriander are the same plant. Cilantro, as I understand, is the Georgian name for coriander. Or you could say that coriander is the spice (seeds of cilantro), cilantro is the greens (leaves).

Tarragon and estragon are also the same plant. Moreover, it is wormwood 🙂 (don’t be alarmed, it’s the genus Artemisia, not a specific plant). In English—Tarragon, and in Latin, it’s even called Artemisia dracunculus. Dracunculus!

Thyme and savory are also the same. Thymus vulgaris.

Oregano is common marjoram.

Black pepper and white pepper both come from the fruits of the Piper nigrum plant. The difference between them lies in the method of processing: black pepper is made from unripe, dried fruits, while white pepper is obtained by removing the outer skin from ripe fruits.

Asparagus and asparagus are the same thing. Asparagus is the scientific name for asparagus.

Quinoa is kind of like a swan. Just a different subspecies. By the way, quinoa fruits are considered fruits 🙂

Turmeric and turmeric are the same thing. There are three kinds, and all three can be consumed under the name Indian saffron. By the way, the plant is also called Hidden-lilies. Pretty.

But I’m not joking about croutons, toasts, and kombucha, which is a tea mushroom 🙂

P.S. A good addition from Alexi Kaskevich (thanks!)

“Not only black and white pepper (spices) are fruits of the same Piper nigrum plant, but the green pepper (spice) is also fruits of the same plant (just collected unripe)

But pink pepper (spice) – fruits of a totally different plant (different genus, different family, different subclass – in general, a completely different branch of evolution)

Moreover, in the store, let alone the market, you probably can’t always find out exactly what you are buying – as pink pepper (spice) fruits of three different plants are sold, only two of which are close relatives (and relatives of cashew – from the family Anacardiaceae), and the third from a different genus and family, but from the same subclass Rosids)”

The thunder outside is very loud. Yuka is behaving very thoughtfully. He climbed on all the chairs in turn for some reason. For some reason, he thinks he is safer up there.

Who came up with using the word size for adhesives for sizing canvas! Just like that, they write, “Paper is typically sized by the manufacturer.” And try to figure out what this size means. And importantly, googling it is quite the task, because with all the related words like canvas, sizes easily refers to the dimensions of the canvases.

AAAA!!! How Excel on Mac annoys me. I need to have json strings in a column. That is, the cell should include something like this:

“classId”: “T”

If I simply transfer this line through the clipboard into the cell, it becomes classId: “T”, that is, the quotes around classId are automatically removed. What the heck? I need to transfer 90 lines, and they are getting killed in the process.

Well, okay, I decide to import them via CSV importer. Where I directly indicate that the separator is a tab. The same nonsense.

Well, I think, it’s freaking out because of the quotes. Let me replace all quotes with tildes, import them, and then replace them back with quotes in Excel. Cool, it imports, but doesn’t replace! As it turns out, the tilde in Microsoft is an escape character, and to replace a tilde, you need to replace two tildes in a row ~~. Of course, this isn’t written in the Find & Replace window.

Next, I need to do the same thing, but end up with two columns, the first would have classId, and the second – this piece of JSON — “classId” : “T”. If I copy from the test file to Excel through the clipboard, it somehow decides that the delimiter is a space, not a tab, and gives me several columns, the first storing classId”classId”, and the second – : “T”. What the hell Excel tries to recognize format from the clipboard???

Next, if I copy from any office application text to ChatGPT, besides the text, an image of this text is also copied. I constantly have to delete it because ChatGPT is surprised why a picture was attached. And this is only with office applications.

Next, I need to copy a list of 50 lines into Excel, filling cells after applying a filter to one of the columns. That is, I have around 200 lines there, I filter by criterion 50, and I want to insert text so that the first line fills the first filtered cell (with an absolute number of 13, for example), and the second fills the cell below (with an absolute number of 21). I take this list into the clipboard, and do Paste into the column, and see not 50 lines, but conditionally 10. Because, apparently, the other 40 were inserted into cells that are not visible because of the filter – that is, into cells between 13 and 21 from the example above.

In addition, all formulas in Excel have different names and syntax depending on the system language and locale. That is, it’s enough that parameter separators may be commas in one case, and semicolons in another, so the function names look different for different languages.

So, they have this function DSTDEVP (standard deviation for population with condition). If you move from a computer where the system language is set to English to a computer where the interface is not in English, then the formulas have these names:

English: DSTDEVP

Spanish: DESVEST.PB

French: ECARTYPEPB

German: STABW.DB

Italian: DEV.ST.P.DA

Portuguese: DESVPAD.PB

Russian: СТАНДОТКЛНУСЛ

It had to be complicated. Of course, my knowledge of French is not enough to make DSTDEVP into ECARTYPEPB. I had French set up so I wouldn’t forget, but because of such things, I switched back to English, keeping French on my phone. Yes, it’s worth noting that making the Microsoft Office language different from the system language without “hacks” is not possible. The hack is to physically delete the system language localization files from the Microsoft Office package, and then it defaults back to English.

Of course, I know solutions for all these problems. But darn it, how does Microsoft manage to keep a leadership in the market with such lousy applications. Yes, everything else is worse. Various OpenOffice and native Numbers (never seen a live user), unfortunately, have even more disadvantages.

Today, the ERS-2 satellite will fall somewhere to Earth, unclear where, unclear how significant the fragments will be.

Today I found out that, apparently, mermaids in Russia actually had legs, and asking about a tail would get you tickled to death or drowned in the nearest pond. A specific characteristic was tousled blond hair, hence the name and the phrase from Dal, “walks like a mermaid.”

And the tail actually came from sea maidens (mermaids). Sea maidens are an invention of coastal people. Overall, how mermaids in our perception merged with them is unclear, but it happened relatively recently.

Though there is one suggestion. In Andersen’s tale, the little mermaid is literally a sea maiden (Den Lille Havfrue). But in the Russian translation, it was called The Little Mermaid.

Lermontov has a poem titled The Mermaid from 1831, where she swims in the river. Surely, the modern reader imagines a tail. There’s also a fairy tale by Orest Somov, where the mermaid runs away from her mother and tickles a soldier to death.

Illustrating with paintings “Mermaids” by Prushkovsky from 1877 and the eponymous painting by Ivan Kramskoy from 1871. With legs. A tail would have been quite a surprise for them.

Study: Trust in scientists. Surveyed 71,417 people from 67 countries.

I can just imagine the dialogue:

– Hello, this is the scientists from the University of Zurich. We are studying the levels of trust in scientists across different nations

– Go away with your surveys and don’t call me anymore!

– Thank you, so you don’t trust us, we will note that down.

Overall, quite interesting. Perhaps that’s why ^^^^ Russia can be found on the fourth line from the bottom, at 64th place out of 67. Egypt is first. India with its Ayurveda is second. Even ahead are Nigeria, Kenya, and Bangladesh, mind you, Australia too. It’s not about how much people understand various scientific recommendations, but how much they prefer them to non-scientific ones.

This is a preprint, there may still be some inaccuracies found. But the work looks quite substantial.

Link in the comments

Yesterday I took a picture in Washington. Ramen, it turns out, was borrowed by the Japanese from China, where (in China) it is called lamian (拉麵 / 拉面). That is, it turns out, the most authentic ramen is actually lamian. I always thought it was Korean cuisine.

In Korea, ramen, more popularly known as “ramyeon” (라면), became popular after the Korean War and was partly inspired by Japanese ramen.

That is to say, most likely, it was first and remains the Chinese lamian (拉面), then Japan adapted the recipe, and it became ramen, and from there it went to Korea as ramyeon (라면).

I tip my hat to those who came up with this idea, approved it, and implemented it. I just left the national archives, the most guarded museum that houses the birth certificate of the USA and master copies of the constitution and its amendments. All of this is located in the rotunda, where even photographs are not allowed. And there, you can buy a little corner with a mattress and spend the night for about half the price of any hotel within several miles. Well, okay, you need a child, otherwise, it’s not possible. And not every day, just a couple of times a year. But, you must agree, it’s a brilliant idea!