Month: May 2026

Understanding the Tingling Sensation from a Charging Laptop | May 31 2026, 15:27

Today I learned why there’s a tingling sensation from the metallic body of, say, a MacBook when it’s charging. The effect is called electrovibration, and it arises due to parasitic capacitive coupling and the absence of grounding in the standard power supply. This seemed kind of obvious, but exactly how it works was not.

Inside the charger, there is a capacitor, which allows a safe but noticeable potential of AC current to seep into the aluminum laptop case. When you touch the cover, your body and the laptop become a sort of living capacitor, with a thin layer of aluminum and skin acting as an insulator that separates the charges.

The pulsation of current in the socket – 50-60 Hz. The electric field between the finger and the body sometimes strengthens, sometimes weakens. According to Coulomb’s Law, this causes the skin to be attracted to the metal and then released. If you simply rest your hand on the laptop, the force of this attraction is too small to notice.

It results in sensory deception – nerve endings in the finger pads, which in nature are responsible for recognizing textures, go haywire from such microscopic friction chaos. The brain is completely unable to directly recognize electrostatic microcurrents, so it chooses the most logical interpretation for itself and convinces you that it’s the metal itself that is vibrating.

Freeports: Tax Havens for the Wealthy’s Art and Wine | May 30 2026, 14:15

Freeports are tax-free storage facilities that wealthy people use to store their investments in art, wine, and artifacts. The Geneva Freeport stores more artworks (both in quantity and value) than the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. In 2013, the freeport contained about 1.2 million artworks. In addition to paintings and gold bars, it stores about three million bottles of wine. Freeports are closed to the general public and have been repeatedly used to store stolen paintings and cultural valuables.

They are not exactly free, or rather, not free at all. The only “free” thing you get is the right to store, buy, and sell anything within a certain territory without paying taxes… the goods, while within its territory, are considered “in transit,” that’s all. But this only lasts until you export the goods from there. At that point, you will have to pay taxes to the treasury of the country into which you are importing the item or money.

I learned about such a model from a recent video by Varlamov-Chichvarkin about wines, googled it, and it turns out that while wine is a minor thing, it’s much more significant with art.

Rediscovering Réaumur: The Forgotten Temperature Scale | May 28 2026, 21:48

LOL, it turns out that besides Fahrenheit and Celsius scales, there was another scale, and relatively recently. The attached photo is mine, taken in 2009 in Baku at a friend’s house.

So where did this Réaumur come from? In 1730, he proposed a temperature scale, one degree of which equals 1/80 of the difference between the boiling point of water and the melting point of ice. Why 80? Because it’s easier to remember, although in fact Réaumur took only one reference point – the melting point of ice. Hence, the “zeros” of the Celsius and Réaumur scales coincide. And one degree of Réaumur corresponds to a temperature change during which the volume of alcohol increases or decreases by 1/1000.

In Réaumur’s days, there were already several different scales, including the widely known Fahrenheit scale, which is still used in some countries, including the States (and which I have never gotten used to). In France, the use of this scale was abolished on April 1, 1794, in connection with the transition to the metric system. The Réaumur scale was used in Tsarist Russia until the 1917 revolution. But in general, the 18th century was a mess with this, and few people know that besides these Kelvin, Celsius, and Fahrenheit, their scales were also invented by Rankine, Rømer, Newton, Delisle, and Réaumur.

Navigating Price Adjustment Policies at Major Retailers | May 27 2026, 21:53

I found out that if you bought a jacket or a TV (for instance, at Target, Best Buy, or Costco), and a week later that item went on sale, you can come back with your receipt within 14–30 days. This is an official policy of almost all major Western retailers, it’s a standard of customer service and is called Price Adjustment. However, a receipt is often necessary. Most stores suspend this policy during the Black Friday season, Cyber Monday, and special holiday promotions.

Script Evolution: Creating Multi-Dimensional Word Art | May 27 2026, 21:12

I created a script that generates inscriptions readable as three different words from the left, right, and top. Overall, this is a development of what I had in my previous post – there it was only left-right. One script generates triplets of words from a dictionary, which technically can be done. Another creates a 3D model that can be thrown onto a printer (might do that today), and the third does a visualization of this model – see video

Scripting Letter-Matched Phrase Translations | May 27 2026, 18:28

Made a script that creates stuff like this. You can translate different phrases into each other, as long as the number of letters matches. Now thinking about printing it on a 3D printer, it’s all ready

Vodka and Revelations: Notes from “Project Hail Mary” Unseen in Film | May 25 2026, 04:15

I’m almost finished with Project Hail Mary. I’ll write separately about my impressions. Today – some notes along the way that somehow didn’t make it into the movie.

Russian engineer Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka from a frighteningly large glass at a meeting, and during the rocket launch, she joyfully screams and downs one shot after another. In her personal baggage for the space flight, 5 liters of vodka in bags are found. Grace directly asks the Russian scientist Dmitry: “Are all Russians crazy?”, to which he smiles and replies: “Yes. It’s the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.” Ilyukhina, planning her own death, asks to be provided with heroin. She wants to die from an overdose to experience “maximum pleasure” before death (while the Chinese Yao pragmatically chooses a gun). During the launch of the ship’s modules (cabin, laboratory, and sleeping compartment), broadcasted from the Flight Control Center in Moscow, Russian cosmonaut Olesya Ilyukhina drinks vodka and yells at the TV: “Don’t screw up my home, bastards from Roscosmos!” But overall, Russian space technologies are occasionally even praised – for instance, it is claimed that experts from around the world have recognized the Russian “Orlan” spacesuit as the safest and most reliable, so it is used in the mission.

When the main character (Grace) sees the Black American scientist Martin Dubois, he turns to the project director Stratton: “Dubois turns out to be Black! Surprising that you allowed that! Aren’t you afraid he’ll ruin the mission with talk about rap music and basketball?”

When they decide to send Grace to space forcibly, they lock him in a special room at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. This room resembles a college dormitory but has a steel door and bars on the windows. The hero quips about this: “Why is there a prison cell at the Baikonur launch complex? I don’t know. Ask the Russians.”

Grace complains about how the work with malfunction reports is organized during the spaceship’s preparation. Instead of sending an email, they bring him stacks of paper documents. Grace: “Because Russians do things a certain way, and it’s easier to work with them than to complain about it.”

Out of scientific curiosity, Grace decides to observe how his alien friend Rocky eats. It turns out, Rocky is a “monostome”, meaning he both eats and excretes through the same opening in his body. Grace watches as a gray lump falls out of the alien’s stomach with a moist sound, after which Rocky tosses pieces of fresh meat into the same opening. Grace concludes: “The subject defecates from the mouth… Yep, that was pretty disgusting.”

The caricature nature of the characters, stereotypes, fantastic coincidences, and “plot contrivances” like deus ex machina are somewhat annoying.