Author: Rauf Aliev

A really cool video about what happens when you let a prototype into “prod.”

Here’s the original video about “the worst e-bike in history”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB7pBrudFbg

Essentially, the developers tackled a problem that didn’t exist. They decided to create the first bicycle with a futuristic hubless wheel. However, they didn’t think to alter the laws of physics. Which is a pity, because it would have really helped them. Besides that, they were just assuming it would be “good enough.”

In the video attached to the post, the guys disassemble this bike and show the engineering solutions inside. Essentially, it’s reverse engineering.

I fully understand that this is exactly how IT startups are done. But the bike example shows how poorly this approach translates to hardware.

Right now, such a bike is on sale about half an hour’s drive away for 120 bucks on Facebook Marketplace. Probably in the hope that some museum might buy it.

The video should be especially interesting to cyclists and engineers.

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

Today, I walked through the corridors of the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington. It is the second-largest office building in the world, built in the shape of a pentagon.

There will be no photos because they asked to leave phones and even Apple Watches at the entrance. But honestly, there’s not much to capture. It’s not that the spectacle is utterly dreary, but overall, 90% of the corridors (and there are 28 kilometers of them) look almost the same as 90% of the corridors in any American university. That is, everything is clean, bright, tidy, and that’s it. The only difference is that at a university, you find bulletin boards with interesting things on the walls, but in the Pentagon, there are no boards in the corridors, everything is hidden. Everything else is the same. Endless doors of heightened dreariness with numbers and code locks, some corridors adorned with patriotic installations. I’m sure there’s a lot of interesting stuff behind many of these doors, but to enter many of them, you need to leave your phone out in the corridor (and I remind you, I left mine at the entrance).

About 26,000 people work in the building. About a third of them are civilians, the rest are military. Although the Pentagon is located in Arlington, Virginia, it has a Washington address — 1400 Defense Pentagon, Washington, DC 20301-1400. It’s said that the Pentagon has six Washington ZIP codes, and that the US Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and each of the four branches of the armed forces have their own ZIP code (like 20301, 20318, 20310, 20330, 20350, and 20380).

The building was constructed in 1943, so at that time they built separate restrooms for blacks and whites due to segregation. Of course, it’s not like this anymore.

Since 26,000 people work in the building — that’s essentially the population of a small town, and parking there is quite limited (large, but still insufficient), there’s a metro station serving the Pentagon that’s practically unnecessary for anything else. Inside the perimeter, there’s everything needed to last until the end of the workday — Subway, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Panda Express, Starbucks, Sbarro, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, pharmacies, even a Best Buy.

From an architectural perspective, it’s a very interesting project. Look, with such a number of people and such expanses, you can get from any point to any point in no more than 10 minutes. No elevators, just wide corridors and stairs. Even in some emergency evacuations, rescuing people would be much easier. Although, of course, there was a sad experience in 2001 — remember, the plane hijacked by terrorists crashed into the building. Then, a hundred and fifty Pentagon employees died, and of course, everyone on board that plane.

Around the Pentagon is Crystal City — a typical city with shopping centers and multi-story residential complexes of varying degrees of luxury, and on the other side is Arlington National Cemetery, where 400,000 people are buried.

Well, now I’ve finally gotten around to sous vide. As a result, the kitchen’s electrical gadgetry involved in cooking now includes the Power Quick Pot electric pressure cooker, the Ninja air fryer, the Crock-Pot slow cooker, and now the Anova sous vide. Made my first steaks, they turned out awesome, but next time instead of 150 F (65C) I’ll set it to 140F (60 C).

I have a life hack for recalling a forgotten word that works quite reliably in my case. Maybe, it will work for yours too.

It involves listing the letters of the alphabet, trying to recall that specific word by asking myself “does it start with A? B? C?”. And on the letter that the word actually starts with, I remember it entirely.

For instance, today I needed to recall a band from the 90s. I remembered nothing. No song titles, nothing I could quickly find by Googling. But I had a certain “picture” in my head. Probably, if I had struggled a bit more, I would have come up with search queries that would lead me where I needed, but I pulled out this technique and started going through the letters.

And as I was going through A, B, C, … at the letter K I remember — “Karmen”!

Sometimes, rarely, a “second pass” is necessary. Of course, it doesn’t always work, but on the other hand, if there’s absolutely no system, it’s unclear how to recall anything at all. This system exists, it’s a starting point, and it quite often works.

And as for remembering short numbers, to later recall them more easily, I mentally draw a zigzag line navigating the keypad of a button phone. This results in a visual squiggle, which serves as an additional mnemonic to the numbers. True, unlike the first approach, I use this one rarely, because in life, there’s rarely a need to remember and then recall numbers.