Month: March 2025

Understanding Stale Bread and Reheating Effects | March 31 2025, 23:12

I just found out that bread becomes stale not so much because it loses moisture, but because of a process called starch retrogradation. During the baking of bread, the starch in the flour gelatinizes — its granules absorb water, swell, and the structure becomes softer and more pliable. After cooling down and over time, the starch begins to reorganize into a more crystalline structure — this is retrogradation. Moisture indeed escapes, but not all of it and not necessarily to the outside. In the fridge, staling occurs faster precisely because of the accelerated retrogradation of starch at temperatures around 0–5°C.

Therefore, if you reheat stale bread (for example, in a toaster or an oven), the starch partially gelatinizes again, and the bread briefly regains its freshness. However, this effect is temporary. It doesn’t work the same way with French fries, where moisture is expelled more effectively, and the starch is slightly different. Hence, reheating does not break down the crystals without water, and the moisture has already left. The result is a rubbery, “styrofoam-like” texture, especially in fries that were fried in oil.

I’m going to fry some potatoes and eat them with bread

Revolutionary Surface Scanning Device Transforms Text and Texture into 3D Images | March 31 2025, 14:53

I’ve devised a new device that might become part of a future phone, or before that, a niche industrial and scientific tool. It works like this: you place it on any surface, say a paper with text, move it like a mouse, and end up with a 3D scan of the surface displayed on your screen. If there’s text, for example, it can be recognized, even if it’s inside an envelope. However, there probably are better industrial applications for such a device.

Technically: it uses a high-frequency ultrasonic sensor array (100–300 MHz) capable of distinguishing paper microreliefs and ink with up to 20-micron resolution—similar to what’s currently done in fingerprint scanners. A typical Qualcomm 3D Sonic Gen 2 piezo scanner measures 8×8 mm. The sensors have a resolution of up to 500 dpi. Motion data is collected from an IMU and an optical encoder (like in a mouse), to accurately stitch scan fragments into a unified image. It will work in darkness, with poor contrast, on semi-transparent paper, with zero dependence on lighting. It can detect hidden writings, fingerprints, or cleaned areas. Essentially, it will perform an in-depth analysis, down to detecting traces of pencil pressure.

Mysteries of Fungi: From House Invaders to Mind Controllers | March 30 2025, 13:45

A very meaningful, diverse, and captivatingly interesting episode—with Vishnevsky about mushrooms.

Three stories to whet your appetite. The first one is about the house fungus (Serpula lacrymans). It usually starts with a shed, a bathhouse, bridges, or a foundation, especially if it’s partially over water. The house fungus releases tough black mycelial cords (1-2 mm), which spread throughout the house within just a few days. Across the floors, walls, and floors—it’s like something out of sinister sci-fi movies. These cords reach any source of wood. The fungus begins to break down lignin and other components of the wood, and one of the by-products of this process is water. That is, the fungus only needs water at the beginning, and then, once it finds wood, it extracts water on its own, feeding and hydrating itself. Therefore, it is practically impossible to get rid of it. It is tenacious, fast-growing, and extremely destructive. It is capable of turning up to 50% of the wood volume it settles on to dust within a year. That’s why sleepers and footbridges at stations are made not from wood, but from concrete, even where wood is cheaper and despite the fact that wooden sleepers are superior in other properties to concrete ones.

The second story is about “witch’s circles.” Surely you’ve noticed that mushrooms often grow in rings on lawns or at the edges of forests, sometimes tens of meters in diameter. It turns out that the mycelium from the point where it originated transforms into a “donut,” which grows because the inner parts of this donut die off since it has already consumed everything there, while the outer parts continue to expand because there’s still something there. And thus, the mushrooms—the fruiting bodies—grow along this donut. Since the rate of spread is more or less the same, it appears as a perfect circle. Of course, unless it runs into something along the way.

The third is about cordyceps, which infects simple crawling organisms and controls them. Apart from being an interesting fungus on its own, the most expensive mushroom in the world is also a cordyceps (the Chinese variety). But now, about the one that parasitizes ants—you’ve probably heard of it.

It all starts with the fungus penetrating an ant’s body and gradually taking control over its nervous system. When the time comes, cordyceps “tells the ant that it is time to leave its native anthill. If it resists, the fungus employs chemistry: it not only biochemically influences the behavior, but literally “owns the ant. Moreover, it does so not bluntly, but very intricately—with precision to the details.

It entwines the muscles and nerve nodes, blocking any alternate movement. The ant begins to move along a specific trajectory—it climbs a plant, selects a suitable leaf, often one that hangs right above the anthill. It climbs to the underside of the leaf to prevent the sun from drying out its body and the future fungus. Then it moves strictly along the central vein of the leaf—as if along a highway.

When it reaches the middle of this vein, the fungus gives two last commands: 1) Clench the veins with its limbs as tightly as possible and 2) Bite through the vein with its jaws, securing itself definitively.

After this—rapid mycelial growth, the ant dies. From its head, now hanging downwards, begins to sprout the fruiting body of the fungus—a thin “needle, directed straight down over the anthill. When it matures, spores start to pour out of it, like from a shower, directly onto the ants passing below. Everything is calculated perfectly.

Scientists have spent decades trying to understand the “combat chemistry of Cordyceps. It seemed something incredibly complex must be at work. But as it turns out—on the contrary. Everything is simple: relatively primitive hydrocarbons are acting, structurally very similar to… gasoline.

If you take, for example, a bucket of gasoline, come to a forest anthill (especially a large one of red forest ants), stir it up a bit—you will see how the ants start to massively leave the dwelling, climb up the tree, cling to the bark, freezing in strange poses. Then they are released. But with Cordyceps, it’s the same, just with an additive: its hydrocarbons are slightly more complex, and “releasing” is no longer possible.

This is the bug in the ant’s firmware. It’s not some kind of remote control, not a command center. Just a chemical, and the ant “knows what to do. These aren’t random actions, but strictly defined, programmed within it reactions. Under certain substances, it behaves in a strictly defined way.

I recommend listening to it, Vishnevsky is very cool in this topic and it seems inexhaustible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulQyUHsBaa4

Soviet Space Satire: Rescue at Mars and Beyond | March 28 2025, 01:14

I finally got around to a Soviet movie from 1959 showing a rocket landing on a floating platform at the end. The film is quite amusing. It features valiant Soviet cosmonauts rescuing hapless and vile American astronauts who got lost on their way to Mars. By the way, the cosmonauts are dressed in jackets and ties.

The plot goes like this. A two-man crew, under the mandate of science and the communist party, is sent to Mars for strictly scientific purposes. In orbit, the “space shuttle” docks at the station (at the beginning, the chief developer says it hangs above the Earth at tens of thousands of kilometers), docking to prepare for the “final jump” to Mars. Suddenly, a request comes from the American colleagues to accept the “Typhoon” Shuttle at the station. Could our most humane and friendly cosmonauts deny their colleagues, even if they are damned capitalists? During a friendly banquet, the “dumb Yankee”, apparently having had one too many, blurts out about the goals of his project. Much to the surprise of the gracious hosts who did not expect such audacity from their guests, it turns out the goal is Mars, of course, but purely for commercial, acquisitive reasons, such as trading Martian plots, for example. The head of the Soviet expedition, obviously caught off-guard… also having taken one too many, responds admitting similar plans but exclusively in the name of science. The crafty Yankee, after taking some Alka-Seltzer, rats out to his leadership. The American leadership, driven by predatory bourgeois interests, orders an immediate start to Mars, despite the unfavorable astrophysical weather conditions, thereby endangering the most valuable thing – the lives of cosmonauts. Covertly, “under the cover of night”, while the hosts are knocked out, the treacherous Americans weigh anchor. Consequences soon follow; they run out of fuel and are blown towards the Sun, with the expected outcome. SOS! The foolish “Yankee” frantically signals, bathed in snot and tears. Calm and strong Soviet guys in their powerful rocket “Rodina” rush to the rescue and indeed tow the doomed spacecraft, but precious fuel is spent maneuvering, the Americans abandon their junk and transfer to “Rodina”. There’s Mars, its seas and canals already visible, but catastrophically short on fuel. Fortunately, an asteroid named Icarus is passing by, and our brave cosmonauts asteroid-hitch a ride on it. An emergency launch of a cargo spacecraft with fuel follows, but it crashes on approach. It is decided to send another piloted ship because what’s most valuable is human life and friendship. This time, all goes well, the rescued crew lands directly on the floating platform near Yalta, anticipating the pathetic plagiarism with “Falcon”. A crowd with flowers and red banners, pioneers in red scarves warmly welcome the international comical collective (I could not have written that, it’s all pasha_popolam).

Three years later, this propaganda flick caught attention in the USA and was re-edited under the name “Battle Beyond the Sun”. Directed by Roger Corman, assistant producer Jack Hill, and young student Francis Coppola – that’s the kind of films he grew up on! The budding director re-edited and redubbed the film, removing all “anti-American propaganda”, Cyrillic inscriptions, and filmed an additional scene of a battle between two Martian monsters – how could he not. The timeline in the film was shifted to the future, after Earth had suffered a nuclear conflict and was divided into two superpowers – “Northern Hemis” and “Southern Hemis”, located on their respective hemispheres. Coppola also shot several scenes of the battle between two space monsters, one symbolizing a phallus and the other a vagina, and inserted them into Soviet material. These scenes were filmed in a Hollywood studio. Coppola and Hill also filmed scenes from the Rose Parade in Pasadena.

The names of not only Soviet characters but also actors, as well as names in the credits were changed to American ones to mask the film’s origins. For example, Alexander Shvorin and Ivan Pereverzev became “Andy Stuart” and “Edd Perry”, and the directors Mikhail Karyukov and Alexander Kozyr became “Maurice Kaplan” and “Arthur Corwin” – and were demoted to assistant directors. The director of the film in promotional materials and the final version is listed as a certain Thomas Colchart; sources differ on who actually hides behind this name (Karyukov, Kozyr, Coppola, or an American dubbing director).

The entire episode from “The Heavens Call” about the flight from Earth to the orbital station with minimal changes was included in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. Kubrick’s film also included a scene with a video phone call to Earth. The orbital station in Kubrick’s film was copied almost exactly from “The Heavens Call”.

Separately funny, the USSR named the American spacecraft Typhoon – Тайфун. In the USA the word Typhoon is called Hurricane, since typhoon names hurricanes happening around Japan, and understandably in 1959, maybe one out of a hundred Americans knew the word 😉

Links to the original and the pale American copy — in the comments

Sunlit Perspectives: Exploring Joshua LaRock’s Unique Technique | March 26 2025, 23:38

Very interesting contemporary American artist, Joshua LaRock. He has a wide range of works—there are many of them, and they’re technically and emotionally impressive, in my opinion. But I started the gallery with a selection of paintings where the sun is shining directly at the viewer. You actually don’t see this very often in oil paintings. It’s not that it’s particularly difficult to do technically, it’s just that no one really does it. Well, except for the Impressionists. In those very rare cases where it does appear, it usually depicts a sunset or sunrise, but never with people in the foreground.

Posts like this are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and you can find all 148 of them (unlike Facebook, which forgets—or ignores—almost half) in the “Art Rauf Likes section at beinginamerica.com.

Navigating Life’s Complex Journeys and Choices | March 25 2025, 20:56

Once we celebrated a housewarming. Four of us in one cramped apartment, bought on credit. At five thirty in the morning to the car and off to Moscow, every day, an hour and a half to two hours’ drive to the daycare and another half hour to the office. And back in the evening. To avoid traffic jams out of the city and at the railway crossing, you could take a dirt road through the forest, which later turned out not to be shorter at all, but at least it was less boring because you had to drive through mud at speed.

On the one hand, one should have left right after university. To Europe or the USA—it almost doesn’t matter because such a view from the window would be hard to find elsewhere. Perhaps it’s still possible somewhere in China. The world is always bigger than any single country. Even if you return, you’ll be more valuable simply because there are few who come back.

On the other hand, right after university, anywhere but Russia would have been comfortable, but boring. After university, I had nights spent sleeping on office tables, dodging police at the metro who fine you for not having a ticket from the morning train from Kolomna, preparing tender documents for designing a website that seemingly has no purpose, but where the winner and the payer split the money in a specified ratio, and here creativity is needed, talking to clients like strategizing how to coax a secret from a three-year-old who doesn’t want to spill it, and the turbulent joy that comes with success.

There’s no bad experience. Though sometimes you think, this is it, happiness! Nope, darn, just more experience.

Unveiling the Mystery of a Dark Artwork | March 25 2025, 14:04

I stumbled upon this eerie and mesmerizing painting, which appears to depict a mother embracing a demonic entity. In some places on the internet, it is claimed to be called “A Mother’s Love” and is allegedly painted by an artist named Carl Olof Petersen. However, I am quite skeptical because Petersen normally works in a different style. I think it might simply be someone’s guess that everyone else picked up without checking the source.

I tried to dig deeper, but I found no reliable confirmation of either the artist’s name or the title of the painting. It is very likely that this is AI art—indicated by the strange anatomy of the woman’s arm (elbow and forearm).

#artrauflikes

Navigating Job Interviews in the LLM and ML Industry | March 22 2025, 14:05

Mimansa Jaiswal shared her experience of interviewing for researcher/engineer positions in the LLM/machine learning (ML) field last fall. Over 200 applications, 100 interviews, numerous rejections, and several offers—she decided to outline the entire process, as well as the resources she used. It’s extremely beneficial material, especially for those looking for a job in this field.

Link in the comments.

Summary (TLDR):

Startups:

Interview processes are unique and depend on the company’s development stage. Candidates may face 5–6 stages, including programming tasks (often from Leetcode), ML coding, testing fundamental ML knowledge, and cultural fit interviews. Startups may also require face-to-face interviews, multi-day work assignments, or extensive presentations. Processes are less standardized, and roles often include a wide range of responsibilities.

“Unicorns” (e.g., Anthropic, OpenAI, Scale AI):

More structured processes, but still vary from company to company. Candidates face interviews on programming (not always Leetcode-based), ML design, discussions related to LLM, and presentations. The number of stages can be substantial, especially when applying to multiple teams simultaneously.

Large tech companies (e.g., Meta, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft):

Rigid and structured processes, often lasting from 1.5 to 2.5 months. Expect Leetcode-style interviews, ML system design, LLM research design, presentations, and behavioral interviews. Questions can be both general and role-specific.

Main interview components:

Programming tasks: knowledge of data structures and algorithms is tested, practice on Leetcode is necessary.

ML system design: evaluates understanding of system architecture and ability to develop solutions.

Presentations: candidates may present their previous work or research, demonstrating professionalism and communication skills.

Behavioral interviews: assess compatibility with corporate culture and approach to problem-solving.

Key differences by company type:

Startups are less predictable and may prefer candidates ready to take on diverse tasks. “Unicorns” look for specialists with narrow and current skills. Large tech companies adhere to formalized multi-stage processes and assess a broad spectrum of technical and soft skills. Each type of company has its unique demands and offers different opportunities, so it’s crucial to tailor preparation to the specific format.

Expected timelines:

The process can take from several weeks to several months, with possible delays during holidays or peak hiring seasons. Offers often require a quick response—usually within 7 days—requiring the ability to make swift decisions or negotiate a delay. It’s important to strategically plan overlapping processes and manage multiple timelines simultaneously.