Author: Rauf Aliev

The Miss America contest has been held under new rules for the second year. Now, instead of demonstrating their ability to walk in swimsuits and evening gowns, participants must compete by showcasing other talents. Miss Virginia, Camille Schrier, has a background in biochemistry. Camille won Miss America 2020 with a spectacular science demonstration from a children’s science program, illustrating the catalytic decomposition of hydrogen peroxide. Fizz, boom! The jury was moved, no doubt about it.

Moscow metro and the jellyfish

(no longer relevant, fixed) Friends, I am currently in Moscow, if anyone has a multimeter, soldering iron & stuff, alcohol, and ideally an oscilloscope at home or in the office, and can let me use it for a bit, please let me know 😉

Sheremetyevo greeted me with Wi-Fi, which doesn’t work without a local SIM card. There, one can upload their passport and their mug, and an “AI” will tell you that at my age of 42, I don’t look like the photo in the passport, which some people have from twenty-four years ago. Ultimately, I was not allowed on the internet. I had to beg Nadya

Interesting, why does no one work on converting direct speech into indirect?

Such a development would have a large market – the same cars could read texts received more naturally.

Not “can you come by my office” from the boss, but “Rauf, your boss is asking you to come by his office”. Or “your wife is asking you to buy some milk”.

How Margulan Seisembayev sold his business, interesting

Could you provide proper links to read about – for what offenses were sanctions imposed against Russia regarding Nord Stream 2? I can’t figure out where there’s anything beyond money and commercial interests of several countries, including the sanctioner. Previous sanctions were all about other issues.

The President of Turkmenistan won the national programming championship and created a modern neural network in HTML language, predicting prosperity and technological leadership for Turkmenistan. Impressive indeed! 🤦🏽

Recently, I decided to reread “Eugene Onegin”. During the process, the idea of an online book was born, in which each line that could theoretically raise questions is clickable, providing a short explanation at first click, and a detailed one upon the second.

After all, even now, about thirty percent of it is genuinely incomprehensible. It reminds me of the (joking?) experiment where children were asked to draw a picture based on “Plowing the fluffy grooves, / A daring carriage flies. / The coachman sits on the arc / In a sheepskin coat, in a red sash.”

The grooves then turned out to be little animals, because who else can be fluffy. A mix between a beaver and a thrush. Not to mention, children totally missed on carriage and sash.

I thought it would be interesting to explain such things in context. You read, you click if it’s unclear, you learn something new, then you go back to continue reading.

And here I googled it, and found a very similar service – genius. And someone has even started annotating Eugene Onegin there.

But it would be much more interesting to make a separate domain book, in such a way to make it convenient for reading on mobile and screen, a bit every day, where every confusing segment includes stories and explanations, quotes from books and academic works, with links to originals and additional materials.

If this interests someone else and a small team assembles, I would be delighted to participate. Theoretically, such a thing could even be released in epub, since it supports internal hyperlinks.

I’m sure if there were tools and APIs for creating such books, other topics and volunteers would emerge too.

Here is the link to genius, where it is very close to what I imagined, but hosting Pushkin on this platform doesn’t seem like a great idea. Nevertheless, the implementation is close to what I had in mind.

In the 18th century, the Earth’s population was only 10% of what it is now, totaling 700 million people, with ~87 percent of them being illiterate. From the remaining 91 million, we received thousands of artists and musicians, whose level no one can reach now in the 21st century, with five billion educated people, the internet, 3D printers, AutoCAD, and ubiquitous art schools, are we getting something entirely different?

The illustration accompanying the post is “Liberation from Spells”, 1757, by Francesco Quirolo. Files, chisels, drills, saw, scraper, a large block of marble, and no room for error. The Russian internet claims it’s made of pumice, but oddly, reliable sources everywhere mention marble. In any case, it looks very impressive.

Interestingly, why with a tenfold increase in population, talents in a certain area, present both “here and there”, not only did not grow proportionally, but even seemed to have vanished. Perhaps I am mistaken and there are many? Other than Bruno Walpot, I can’t recall anyone, but then again, I’m not particularly knowledgeable in the subject.