Month: July 2025

Lost in Translation: A Midnight Encounter at Ashburn Station | July 06 2025, 17:28

Yesterday late, around 10-11pm, I was returning from Washington by metro. At the exit of Ashburn station, a relatively well-dressed guy approaches me and asks how to get to Route 7 from the station by bike. I start to answer, then he asks me if I happen to speak Russian. My accent gave me away (damn, how did he know exactly?)

I open the map on my phone, start explaining it to him, go right here, then left, then right, a 45-minute ride. It’s night outside. The dude’s on a bike. He doesn’t have a phone — something is broken or dead. But the most interesting thing, he doesn’t know the address where he needs to go. And Route 7, by the way, is 497 km long, but he obviously meant a segment about 30 km near the metro, but it was still not clear where he needed to go in that section.

In the conversation, it turned out that he knows how to get to the place where he stopped (friends?), from the local Russian-speaking Protestant church, called New Life. I feel I’m explaining to him, he’s overall ready to go alone in the dark without navigation, but from his feedback, I understand he didn’t get it, and at the first turn, he’d go wrong. And at that time, there was absolutely no one on the streets, it’s a neighborhood and data center area (the largest in the world, by the way), very safe, but absolutely deserted. I tell him — my car is parked at the metro, let me give you a lift if that’s the case, it’s no trouble for me.

His name is Edik. He wrecked his car a week ago because he liked to drive “with a breeze”. He regrets it because now he doesn’t understand what to buy a new one with. Lives in Baltimore, came to our area because there’s some Mongolian holiday tomorrow. What? I ask, what the hell is a Mongolian holiday. Turns out he’s from Mongolia, lived there before moving to the USA. Russian family, school at the Russian embassy. Speaks Russian without an accent, and fluent in Mongolian. Illegal. Apparently, he came to the USA on a tourist visa and stayed. Works in a store somewhere near Baltimore. Deep in debt. Apparently, a few adventures weren’t enough and he went to Virginia by bike mixed with metro and buses.

I hope he made it home from the church.

Advancing Full-Text Search: Testing and Refining with Multi-User Platforms | July 06 2025, 04:35

I have developed expertise in full-text search testing. Essentially, it’s a turnkey multi-user platform that, given roughly 1000 queries and several search engine configurations, can produce reports with graphs, metrics, and conclusions by morning, showing why configuration A performs better than B, and here’s why. It calculates all those NDCG@k, MAP, precision, recall, and about a dozen other metrics. It uses LLM, but only at the final stage, after all the math is done.

So, here’s my question. I’m looking for someone who has faced the same issue in their project, to understand the demand and the ask.

The problem the system solves is defined as follows: there is a functional search for goods, documents – Solr, Coveo, Elasticsearch, Algolia – it doesn’t matter, and there are hypotheses on how to improve it, but there is also the fear that improving one aspect might break another. Well, my thing helps to see this in numbers and graphs, providing a conclusion with justification, including statistical significance and other metrics.

It also acts as a virtual search assessor. For each search result, it can give a rating, assessing how well each document matches the query. This is a very non-trivial task (especially for large documents), involving chunking, embeddings, LLM evaluation of relevant chunks, etc. Non-trivial, but it works.

It also can analyze search queries and break them into groups based on similarity. For instance, such segmentation might show that users sometimes separate the words forming a brand name with a space, and sometimes not. These different variants would be grouped together.

I would like to discuss this with someone who knows more about this topic than I do, someone who has/had such problems and has somehow solved them.

I currently feel like my product is unique in the market. Actually, it’s not even on the market yet. But I really don’t see anything similar out there. Maybe nobody needs it?

I won’t publically post screenshots yet. The picture is merely for attracting attention.

Please share if there might be relevant people in your network.

Exploring the Luminescent Life of Fireflies | July 05 2025, 05:02

While walking with Yuka, suddenly the owner falls on his knees and digs around in the grass for a while. That’s when I found a firefly and wanted to capture it lighting up. The firefly Photinus pyralis is quite common here, but I never got around to studying it closely.

Interestingly, the females of another genus of fireflies, Photuris, use the flashes of Photinus males to locate and eat them. It has been discovered that the females acquire special steroids called lucibufagins from their prey, which repel spiders.

(While figuring this out, I learned something new. Luciferase, an enzyme responsible for the glow, is extracted from these fireflies. It’s named after the word Lucifer, Latin for “light-bearer.” Interestingly, Greece also had its Lucifer, “light-bearer,” known as the god Phosphorus. Incidentally, the element Phosphorus was discovered by alchemist Hennig Brand through the evaporation of urine. He named the discovered element phosphorus mirabilis, from Latin meaning “miraculous light-bearer.” This just shows how many things in the world are connected.)

Unveiling the Mystery of the Original Declaration of Independence | July 04 2025, 02:36

Tomorrow is July 4th – Independence Day.

I’m currently reading about it. It turns out that the authentic Declaration of Independence is lost to history, and the document labeled “Original Declaration of Independence” in the National Archives is actually a copy.

By the way, about 80% of the text of the declaration lists why the king is bad. Literally. He doesn’t do this, he doesn’t do that, he forgot about us here, he didn’t remember there. It’s just a straight protest of no kings. The last paragraph of the long text essentially says, in sum, forget him. We want to handle it ourselves.

Jefferson prepared the draft of the Declaration of Independence with all the usual revisions—crossed out words, inserts in the gaps, etc., all written in his poor handwriting. This document exists and is very interesting.

The rest of the committee approved the text, and Jefferson then created a fair copy (still in his bad handwriting and just the size of a regular sheet), which was presented to Congress, voted on, adopted, and received its first signatures. This “fair copy” was the real original Declaration of Independence—and it is precisely this one that is lost.

Later, Congress decided that a version suitable for publication was needed—bigger and, of course, not written in Jefferson’s terrible handwriting. For this, they hired a professional copyist. When he made his copy, Congress held a re-signing. This version by the copyist has the label “Original Declaration of Independence” on the back and is the one currently displayed in the National Archives. It was “original” only in the sense that it served as the master copy for printing.

So what happened to Jefferson’s “fair copy,” the genuine original Declaration of Independence? No one knows. It might still be somewhere in the archives, lost among other documents. Or perhaps someone took it home and preserved it, or maybe it was destroyed by time and circumstances, such as when the British burned Washington.

In 1989, a man named Michael Sparks bought an old painting at a flea market in Pennsylvania for $2.48. When he removed the frame, he discovered a rolled-up piece of paper behind it. This turned out to be one of the rare “Dunlap Broadsides”—the first 200 printed copies of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, printed on the night of July 4 to 5, 1776, by John Dunlap.

This find was in excellent condition and was sold at a Sotheby’s auction in 1991 for 2.42 million dollars (and later resold for even more). This isn’t Bitcoin!

A bit about the dates. On July 2, Congress voted for independence. Not the 4th. On July 4, it was formally ratified by Congress, they spent two days making minor formal amendments, having already decided on the substance. No signatures yet. The date on the document, of course, is the 4th. Copies were printed and sent out the next day. Eventually, the ones sent out were signed by the delegates only on August 2.

Three of the first five American presidents died on this day. Jefferson, Adams, Monroe. Jefferson was in fact the father of this declaration, with Adams, they found the time. So maybe July 2nd would be a more appropriate day to celebrate.

Yes, also—technically—America did not gain independence in 1776. It happened only after the signing of the Treaty of Paris (September 3, 1783), when Britain said: “Alright,” and recognized America as a separate state.

If the War of Independence hadn’t turned in favor of America, Washington (like most of the founding fathers) would likely have been executed for treason. But since it turned out otherwise, they picked that day.

Understanding Lens Distortion in Oil Painting from IKEA Photo References | July 02 2025, 21:55

Before painting it with oil, I study the perspective in a specific photo from IKEA. And here it is very noticeable why photo references should be used cautiously for drawing: camera lenses introduce significant distortions (this was already known and visible, the question is which ones and how to fix them when transferring onto a canvas). Look at this, the ellipses in pink and green were added by me, as well as the vanishing point and lines to it. Everything on the edge is distorted. Pay attention, for instance, to the neck of the bottle on the left.

A good exercise to prepare everything in advance on the canvas.

A Costly Trip to the National Cryptologic Museum: Enigmas and Espionage | July 02 2025, 14:56

I went to the National Cryptologic Museum yesterday. Indeed, this trip will cost me $1000 because a rock hit the windshield of the new Tesla on the way. Anyway, let’s talk about the museum.

It’s very small. Located on the premises of the National Security Agency. The museum basically consists of three small rooms. One is dedicated to German Enigmas and there exhibits Alan Turing’s Bombe decryption machine, — a device as big as a kitchen in Lobnya, used for systematic decryption of messages encrypted by the Germans using “Enigma.” After the war, Churchill, for reasons of secrecy, ordered all physical traces of the program, including the Bombe machines, to be destroyed, so it’s quite a rare thing. Moreover, there’s only one working Bombe machine in the entire world, somewhere in England, and even that was barely restored. The Enigmas themselves were produced in large numbers, and the museum has two working ones; you can press the buttons and encrypt something.

In the room with computer equipment stands an old Cray, as well as a decommissioned nuclear deterrence hardware server rack taken out of service 15 years ago. It’s not very clear what’s remarkable about this – well yes, old computers, that’s all. The Cray is actually exhibited many places.

Unfortunately, there are no longer exhibits from the Star Gate project — like the blue box shown in the attached photos. The Star Gate project was used by the US government during the Cold War. Many of the psychic spies were based at Fort Meade, tasked with gathering intelligence, detecting enemy agents, and identifying vulnerabilities in the US using “remote viewing.”

Never heard of “remote viewing”? It’s the mental observation of a distant place where a person has never been, in order to gather information about an individual, an object, or specific data. As absurd as it may sound, it’s claimed that the program was quite successful and used until 1995 🙂

Specifically, this little blue machine, PSIFI, is part of that program. For example, it was used to study the impact of consciousness on random processes — like altering the behavior of random number generators through thought, collecting statistics on attempts at psychokinesis — with “hits”, “trials”, “gated hits”, “gated trials” etc., suggesting successful impacts compared to an expected random distribution, biofeedback — the lower part of the panel contains controls and inputs, apparently for electromyography and other biosignals. Overall, a good addition to the UFO research program.

How Frequent Tick Bites May Reduce Lyme Disease Risk | July 01 2025, 04:38

#science Today I found another tick on me; it didn’t have time to latch on, but did manage to bite. And like before, I suffer from these tick bites being very itchy and taking a long time to heal. A couple of times because of similar symptoms I ended up in Emergency, where I was diagnosed with Lyme based on symptoms and put on doxycycline, but later tests did not confirm Lyme, though I already took the doxycycline. And if there was anything, it’s long dead. Question is, why do ticks love me so much.

I just found an interesting scientific article about this. “Hypersensitivity to Ticks

and Lyme Disease Risk” (link in comments)

The authors say that many people living in areas with a high prevalence of tick-borne diseases such as Lyme develop a more acute reaction to tick bites—redness and severe itching, a dermatological-hypersensitivity reaction—that’s exactly my case. They analyzed 1,500 cases and concluded that the more frequent a person’s itching after a bite (more than 3 times a year), the lower their chance of contracting Lyme disease—the risk was reduced by about 7 times (odds ratio ~ 0.14, p=0.01).

They write that this is linked to the fact that the itching helps to notice the tick sooner, consequently – remove it faster and prevent the infectious agent from entering the body (borrelia is not transmitted immediately, but after 1–2 days). There may also be immune mechanisms that interfere with the tick’s feeding and transmission of borrelia.

Conclusion: Recurring reactions to tick bites (itching + redness) create a kind of “anti-tick” immunity. This reduces the risk of contracting Lyme disease, and likely, could be the basis for developing a vaccine against tick pathogens. Quite intriguing, because such medications exist for dogs (full protection against ticks), but haven’t been invented for humans yet.