October 05 2018, 12:02

Any pool players here? Today, I entered the office in our building where there’s a small room with a pool table, and decided to test how theoretical calculations stack up against practice. And somehow, nothing aligns for me. In theory, I calculated where to hit the ball so that after two bounces it would fall into the pocket. In practice, “the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection” only applies to the first bounce, the second bounce behaves oddly. The ball almost flies backwards.

In red – what I expected, in blue – what actually happens. I understand that the ball might be spinning, but I really tried to hit it in the center, and with one bounce I even sometimes pocket the ball on the first try, with two I am still not skilled, and also the theory doesn’t hold up. But overall, I’m still “green” in pool. Why is that?

October 04 2018, 16:12

Can you guess the language?

P.S. First guessed by George Aristov and Fyodor Saveliev!

This is Glagolitic script. It’s late, 20th century. It is a distant relative of Cyrillic. Glagolitic was developed by Cyril and Methodius. All these “az buki vedi” – it comes from here. For example, the last word here is “PRISHESTVIYA”. Here’s the alphabet:

Update: Svetlana Beregulina and Roman Moguchiy helped figure it out again. The language is Old Church Slavonic or Croatian, hard to tell (Croatian originated from Old Church Slavonic, like Russian, but it is closer to that ancient language). And the script is Glagolitic. Actually, the question was about the script, but I called it a language.

October 02 2018, 21:46

An interesting article on Habr about how text editors are structured. Back in my school and university days, I myself tried to write such editors, and there were no such analyses then:) I learned a lot of new things for myself.

October 02 2018, 20:31

A very interesting lecture on the anatomy of the brain. Not a single slide, just three hours of a talking head. But it’s captivating. Indeed, after the first hour, new information begins to overwhelm the brain.

October 02 2018, 20:05

(website visitor agreement management service, 3rd party)

I give away this idea. Someone should invent a service that supports Terms & Conditions, which are present on virtually every major website and for which there likely are neither proper tools nor people for support.

The service should be able to:

1. Display the document text in a format that is both convenient and easy to read, with navigation.

2. Track changes in the text and display them separately, in a convenient and readable format, with a version for printing, highlighting important sections (if the client deems it necessary) while also allowing access to older versions of the document.

3. Obtain and store user consent.

4. Not ask the user again if they have already consented.

5. Ask again if there are changes, store this status, and not ask again.

6. Notify by email when the rules change. Do not allow access to the service until the user accepts the changes.

7. Deliver the rules by mail, if the client thinks it’s necessary.

8. Support different terms&conditions on the same site. For different categories of users, for different services, for different languages, etc. Ideally – using common fragments to ease administration.

9. In the future, it is not out of the question that services will offer multiple agreements depending on how the user agrees to use the service. With new regulations in the EU, this is very realistic. Then, managing these agreements will be a real headache.