Author: Rauf Aliev

Groundhog Day again today 😉

Please provide the text you’d like to have translated.

Walked through the forest at night, taking pictures of landscapes.

Today is my groundhog day. They appeared three times along the way.

By the way, people use Markov chains to generate meaningless texts. Modern smartphones use word pair statistics from others’ and your own sentences to suggest the next word. Try writing anything offensive – it will continue correctly;) so, a Markov chain is a sequence of such assumptions based on the statistics of combinations. In my almost childhood, they tried to deceive search engines by generating placeholder pages with supposedly real text and advertising links inside (they’ve long caught on to this trick). Also, I used this mechanism to create random words, which can be read effortlessly (filled the dictionary with them and obfuscated data from real logs for blog publication).

There’s another interesting application. You probably didn’t know that Markov chains underlie Google’s method of sorting search results. If we draw parallels with words, then here the pairs are often-used words – pairs of sites linked by hyperlinks. There is an interesting property of the Markov chain: if it is long enough, and there is enough data, then in the “long distance,” the probability of the outcome (words in case of suggestions) does not depend on the word you started writing with, assuming we’re talking about a long chain. So, the higher the probability, the higher the pagerank, the closer to the start the result will be. Well, it’s understood that Google has seriously modified the algorithm, but the principles of this stuff with links and Google’s Pagerank are very similar;)

https://meduza.io/shapito/2018/07/13/prochital-na-meduze-chto

Funny) how to hack an American service. I needed to make six 5×5 cm photos, which in the States are called “for passport”. I go to Walgreens. Price – 45 bucks (3×15), but the photos are taken by cashiers with a soapbox camera against a wall. I go to CVS – same money, but you can bring your own flash drive. Thanks to Konstantin Cherkasov for the idea, and to Vitalii Menshutin for the photo of me using my DSLR. I put six 2×2″ photos on a 4×6″ print and print it at a price 200 (!) times cheaper. I wasn’t lazy and found a promo code to reduce the price from 0.33 per photo to 0.22. And yet, someone pays 45!

Speaking of the incident in the cave, where meditation and a Buddhist coach helped the children survive (and ultimately, of course, the rescuers). I once read an interesting book by Alain Bombard, “Adrift by Choice”.

It starts with the fact that people who suffer shipwrecks die not from hunger or thirst, but from fear and loss of hope. 90%

of the victims die within the first three days, although a person can generally survive up to two weeks without water. So, this guy decided to row across the Atlantic in a lifeboat, and – he made it in 1952, in two months.

This is to say that being in a flooded cave is a problem of roughly the same magnitude. And the fact that the kids spent nine days there and survived is thanks largely to the coach. Though, the fact they ended up there at all is on them too.

“We had a thermonuclear warhead, tens of tons of missile fuel, and a wrench. Of all these, only the wrench was a concern. There is nothing more helpless, irresponsible, and depraved than servicing a strategic missile with a wrench from the wrong system. But we knew that soon we’d come to that too.”

https://warhead.su/2018/07/12/yadryona-mat-i-gaechnyy-klyuch-kak-ustroit-feyerverk-s-yadernoy-petardoy

Watching Big Bang Theory. And here’s something interesting – the show is already 11 years old, everyone knows it, but the main characters haven’t really made a mark elsewhere. Sure, they act, but it’s unclear in what. For instance, Kaley Cuoco, who plays Penny, is second in the ranking of the highest-paid TV actresses, yet she takes minor roles in mediocre TV shows. Look, in “Why Him?” (a fun little movie), she played the voice of a virtual assistant. Simon Helberg, who is Howard Wolowitz, also has something indescribable on his “resume”. The Indian guy got a voice role in Ice Age, and that’s the peak of his career. And Jim Parsons, who is, actually, Sheldon Cooper, hasn’t made his mark elsewhere either.

It’s interesting how things turn out – every dog on the street recognizes you, you seem to have money, people seem to love you, but major roles just don’t come your way.

Another bicycle invented. What do you think, will it take off?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9gQ1KRhesM&feature=youtu.be