Month: August 2025

Nostalgic Games of Paper Battles and Guesses | August 14 2025, 12:45

I remembered how many hours I spent in class playing various games on paper like “Battleship”. So much paper was used up in childhood for all that! Everyone knows Battleship, but can you recognize the games in the attached pictures? There were more games, but I think I only played these. There was also a game where you see who can make more words from the letters of one long word, but that’s really for introverts 🙂

The 55 mph Speed Limit: Energy Crisis and State Autonomy in the U.S. | August 13 2025, 01:32

It turned out that the 55 mph speed limit in the USA was the result of the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act, which was adopted in response to the OPEC oil embargo, causing sharp price increases and oil supply disruptions. It was believed that by limiting speed, fuel consumption would be reduced. It worked, but a reduction of 2.2% was predicted, though the actual savings were only about 0.5–1%.

If a state did not comply, it would lose federal funding for the repair and construction of roads. In 1987–1988, Congress allowed states to raise the speed limit to 65 mph on certain rural interstates, and in 1995, the federal “national maximum” was abolished altogether and authority was returned to the states.

Before the national speed limit was introduced, Montana had no set speed limit. Instead, the law stated that a person should drive at a “safe and reasonable speed,” which was essentially determined by a police officer. There is a tale about a NASCAR driver who was stopped for driving about 120 miles per hour on Highway 2 and was not fined because for him 120 mph was considered “safe and reasonable.”

After the imposition of the 55 mph speed limit, Montana resisted as much as it could. The speed limit was a national law, but the consequences for its violation were determined by the states. Montana lowered the speeding fine to $5 and made sure the violation did not go on the driver’s record. It became common practice to put $5 bills over the sun visor and drive at any speed you liked.

There’s even a song from those times, “I Can’t Drive 55” (Sammy Hagar).

By the way, slightly off topic. My Tesla Model Y costs more in taxes (annual registration) than a gasoline car does because there is a special charge, introduced in 2020, to compensate for state revenue lost from the fuel tax — since electric vehicles do not refill with gasoline, and the state under-collects. The amount of this charge is fixed and equals 85% of the equivalent fuel tax a gasoline car driver would have paid given the same average distance and fuel consumption. As a result, electric vehicle owners pay about $128.14 a year (data for 2024–2025). Gasoline car owners pay significantly less. The last time I was stopped by the police in Washington for having an expiration of one and a half years, I had to park the car and urgently arrange payment – it was a few dozen dollars. After paying, I continued on, but with a fine of a couple hundred dollars.

Exploring Muscadines: A Native Grape with a Rich History | August 12 2025, 20:40

At our supermarket, they sell muscadines – a type of grape that is twice the size of regular ones. The green variety of muscadines is called scuppernong. They have thick skin and seeds a few millimeters in size. Muscadines are a native grape variety, known since the 16th century. Typically, muscadines and scuppernongs are used for making wine, but they are also sold fresh.

I hadn’t seen them before, and probably neither have you.

Exploring Must-Have Russian Books for Science and Art Lovers | August 10 2025, 14:01

Can you recommend some interesting books to bring (or order) from Russia to the USA, considering my interests (popular science, primarily local non-translations from English, as I can read the originals in English, and perhaps drawing) and various other intriguing things (see part of my collection)?

The Art of Illusion in Pricing: Dishwasher Capsules and Subscription Models | August 09 2025, 13:06

An interesting marketing tactic: three different types of dishwasher capsules are sold at the same price: good Complete, premium, and premium plus. Identical packaging, identical prices, but of course, a different number of capsules. For example, platinum has 59 capsules, while the plus version has 47. It seems such odd numbers hardly register in the buyer’s mind, but not every buyer fundamentally thinks about whether it’s important for them to save money. However, if you compare the extreme versions, the platinum plus version is simply twice as expensive as the complete version.

Another interesting example – a subscription to LLM (Chatgpt, Gemini) for $200 a month. It would seem, what fool would pay a couple of hundred for something barely better than the basic for $20-30. But it’s a very sensible decision when you have a market of hundreds of millions of users: most of them are organizations. For an organization, $200 a month is not much different from $20 a month, both are negligible for the budget. Well, okay, even multiplying by hundreds and thousands of subscriptions, there are those who place themselves among slightly more premium clients at a small price for them.

Exploring the Intrigue of 657 New Words in the Russian Orthographic Dictionary | August 08 2025, 18:46

657 new words were added to the RAN orthographic dictionary — for instance, “smoothie,” “TikToker,” “powerbank,” and “SVO.” I decided to check out their complete list. Let’s head to the Akademos website and type “2025” in the search.

(Putin’s advisor wrote that “SVO” is correct, but anglicisms are unnecessary. In my opinion, anglicisms are perfectly fine, but with everything else — they truly break the Russian language. Check it out)

Noble-metallic, Bodrich-style and Radimich-style, Byzantinizing, suitable-for-vine-growing, humanizing, icy-frosty, two-strap, Dregovichanka, jacaranda, children-foreign-phoned, “Devo: Virgin Mary Devo” (that’s an entry in the dictionary), fear-of-women, back-of-the-chair, koin, literature-centricity, petty-little-thing (is it describing a woman or a coin?), over-door-woman, Nibelung-esque, nonillion (I guess needed for fining Google), deaeration, Palaiologos and Pantalone, varicolored, petrosphere, to preexist, family-preservation, strongly-fleeing and moderately-fleeing, scrambled.

Interestingly, there is an entry “firmly promised,” written with a space inside.

And there is Sloboda Ukraine there.

There’s offline-messenger! and proxy-list. And torrent-client.

In 2025 “FIFA (International Federation of Association Football)” and “Dictionary of Modern Russian Literary Language” were added to the orthographic dictionary. There’s separately, “Doomsday: Doomsday plane”

There’s taphophilia — a fascination with cemeteries.

And there is philosemitism. As I understand it, it’s the same as Judophilia — manifestations of interest, respect for the Jewish people, their historical significance, and a positive appraisal of the influence of Judaism in history. Where do they even get such words?

Added to the dictionary were west-northwest-er (apparently, a direction slightly west of northwest) and west-southwest-er.

There’s late-developing and later-developing.

If you go on a diet, know that there’s a word for de-fatting. And then there’s a chance that you’ll become an ectomorph — also a word in this dictionary.

There are also drone and pilot-borehole.

Yet among the new words of 2025 there’s “coup d’état”.

Unexpected Repair Success at a Premium Bike Shop | August 07 2025, 02:41

Today, I had a little odyssey trying to find a place to tune up my bike. It’s a few years old, tired, and in need of attention. I visited three shops, each told me it would take at least a week or two and would cost about 200 dollars. Everyone said there were thirty people ahead of me. Eventually, I took a chance and went to the last shop which I initially thought was too premium and expensive to consider at all: their main inventory includes triathlon Cervelo and Factor bikes with five-digit price tags. But here’s the surprise: they took the bike right away, told me to wait for a call today, and if anything serious—a decision from me would be required. In the evening, they called and told me it was all done, and the cost… just 32 dollars! I’m very glad that I did not have to overpay or wait for weeks.

This goes to show that sometimes, to achieve something, you just need to act contrary to standard patterns of behavior.