Category: Education

Exploring the Odd and Ingenious with Engineer’s Zen | June 25 2026, 03:38

Just a reminder that I have the Engineering Zen group on Facebook and Telegram. Recently, these topics have been covered:

– The 1956 TV remote control that had no batteries, no electronics, and not a single LED — and it worked perfectly. How? With a small hammer.

– SQLite — a database that exists in a trillion copies literally everywhere (even on Mars). It was developed by three people, originated on a military destroyer, and instead of a Code of Conduct, the developers adhere to a 1500-year-old charter.

– Eel eggs haven’t been seen for 2000 years. Aristotle brooded over this, followed by a 19-year-old Sigmund Freud, who dissected hundreds of eels, found nothing, and frustratedly left biology.

– Obelisks — a new “form of life” discovered in 2024. Not a virus, not a cell, nothing like anything else. And it lives right in your mouth. About one in ten people have it.

– Midjourney — the very company that creates images in Discord — is suddenly building a body scanner that “is better than an MRI”. You have to be scanned underwater. No, it’s not a joke.

– Light from sound. Catch a bubble in ultrasound — and it flashes. Inside, it’s 10,000 degrees for a moment. It’s assembled on a kitchen table, and physicists are still debating exactly how it emits light.

– Why memories can’t be erased by sheer willpower — and why it’s so easy to rewrite them. It also explains why so many people want to go back to the USSR.

– Why you can’t bring water on a plane — an honest engineering breakdown.

– Cicadas that have learned prime numbers to avoid getting eaten. They emerge every 13 or 17 years — and it’s a mathematically verified survival strategy.

– A Japanese mathematician who proved a great hypothesis over 500 pages in his invented language with “Hodge theatres” and “frobenoids”. Half the world believes him, the other half found a flaw. A very beautiful and very sad story.

– And for dessert — the bigger brother of a flying manhole cover in Moscow: a cast iron plate that was launched upwards at a speed of 67 km/s by a nuclear explosion in 1957 — six times faster than escape velocity.

Join us to not miss out on a lot more interesting stuff.

Also on Telegram @engineersdzen

Engineering Zen: A Daily Dose of Science and Creativity | June 19 2026, 03:28

Due to numerous requests, I have created a Facebook group and a Telegram channel “Engineering Zen”, where I can write about all kinds of interesting things related to science and engineering every day, and guests can write too. I’ll find it interesting if we gather at least 50 people. Shall we gather? I have a ton of interesting content, enough for a year for sure.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/4344370099148010

I will also write on Telegram if we gather at least 50 members there. The channel is called @engineersdzen.

I will be happy for the shares and likes. If we don’t gather enough people, I will drop this activity with groups and channels, which I’ve been planning to do for ten years anyway 🙂

Global Epidemic of Myopia: A Comparative Analysis | June 10 2026, 13:38

Did you know that according to statistics up to 90% of Chinese urban adolescents are nearsighted by the time they finish school—while the global average was about 23% in 2000 and rose to approximately 34% by 2020? In other regions, only 1.2% of Nepalese village residents, 4% of South African children, and 12% of American teenagers are nearsighted. Imagine this, according to data from the article, in Seoul 96.5% of 19-year-old boys are nearsighted (though, this figure only covers conscripts from the capital; across all of Korea, the number among 19-year-olds is more modest—about 55–60%). But even so—almost everyone. The best explanation available is the “light and dopamine” hypothesis, which posits that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, inhibiting excessive elongation of the eyeball. Retinal dopamine is produced according to the diurnal cycle, signaling the eye to switch from night vision, based on rod cells, to daytime vision, based on cone cells. Let there be light! The image shows a test for nearsightedness.

Exploring the Dynamics of Russia’s Kyykka Sport Federation | June 06 2026, 13:49

DID YOU KNOW that in Russia there’s a Russian Skittles Sport Federation with a president, a first vice-president, and a regular vice-president. All in blazers. There’s a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There’s an entire apparatus for the president of skittles sport with three advisors and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. They have a skittles march, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky. There are 18 regional departments and 28 regional federations with their own hierarchy.

The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Interesting, doping in skittles sport… There’s a subsection called “methodological recommendations”. Also, their charter talks about online skittles competitions. Imagine that, online!

In 2024 there was a World Championship in Skittles Sport. Apparently, they are supposed to hold it every three years. And it had a Grand Closing. Apart from Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, in addition to Sergey, Vitaliy, and Konstantin, there was Eugen Schlein, or simply, Zhenya. From the development program for 2026-2029, it turns out that players from Congo, Ghana, Guinea, and Ecuador are actively training now. In the selection criteria for the national team, there is a requirement for “game thinking”. To be admitted, you need to come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of passing the anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.

At the world championship, the disciplines are “classical skittles” and “European skittles” (and separately Finnish ones). The goal in both is to knock the skittles out of the town. European ones appeared in Germany because the emigrants from the USSR were told that it’s not customary here to throw three-kilogram stones and were given lighter ones.

In short, it’s all serious.

Mastering Cross-Posting: From Facebook Frustrations to Dual Blogging Excellence | May 23 2026, 14:28

I have perfected the cross-posting from Facebook to my two blog sites [which almost no one visits] – beinginamerica.com and raufaliev.com. When a new post is published on Facebook, a mechanism is triggered to translate the post into English, process attached images, generate descriptions for them, create a title based on the text of the post and descriptions of the images, generate tags from the same basis, record the post in turso db – this is a cloud database, free up to certain limits, create embeddings via openai, record in qdrant cloud – this is also a cloud database, but vector-based, and finally, upload images to wordpress via API, and publish the post in English and Russian via API.

All would be well, but of all the APIs, the silliest one is Facebook’s. Firstly, for pages like mine, transitioned to New Experience, it’s almost impossible to use most of this API. Well, it’s possible, but you have to spend a long time proving to Facebook that you really need it, by showing startup documents, demonstrating the application, etc. Obviously, they are reluctant to deal with something that takes content out of their system. In addition, the token that gives access to the latest messages is relatively short-lived (possibly a few weeks), and it needs to be obtained anew through a browser only. So, any automation requires regular attention, otherwise it breaks.

If you mess up and don’t offload the latest posts through this Facebook Graph API in time, they just disappear from the list of recent ones and that’s it, no more API access to them. The only way is to request an archive download from Facebook. This download is also rather silly – it requires a lot of transformations and removing unnecessary stuff. For example, in the file containing posts, which I process, for some reason there are links that I sent in comments without accompanying text. And the comments are in a separate file!

To assign tags, I had to solve a separate challenge. Here’s the thing: there are about 10,000 posts over all time. That’s a big chunk, and you can’t build tags from it because it doesn’t fit into the contextual window of the LLM. But you need to. So, I did this: a script takes random posts from the 10,000 in such a volume that their total size is just below the specified limit in tokens, and at the end of this block, it adds the prompt “generate the most common tags for me, 30 pieces” (I simplify the prompt used). In the end, I ran this 10 times and got 10 sets of tags with 30 pieces each, generated for different slices of the database. That made 300 tags, some of which are complete duplicates, while others are synonyms and closely related in meaning. All this is fed into the LLM, and we get a list of tags and a hierarchy of tags. Now we have a limited set of tags that reflect the 10,000 posts as closely as possible. Turns out, that in almost 20 years on Facebook, my breakdown is as follows:

Tag Posts

==================================================

#Russia 3412

#Thoughts 3146

#Tech 3105

#Culture 2765

#Hobbies 2726

#AI 1603

#Science 1367

#Software 1358

#Travel 1298

#Learning 1138

#Society 1050

#Nature 958

#Education 915

#Business 902

#Art 894

#Programming 889

#Humor 840

#History 807

#Gadgets 750

#Moscow 713

#USA 614

#Cinema 567

#Webdev 493

#Music 476

#Sports 473

#Mindset 443

#Auto 400

#Books 386

…

and so on. This list includes both tags from the limited list and tags that the LLM appointed to content simply because it didn’t find anything suitable in the limited one.

Tags from the limited list became categories on the site. The rest of the tags + these just became regular wordpress tags.

As for image search. I had two ideas on how to do it. The first – OpenCLIP. It’s pretty straightforward but requires hosting the model somewhere. Easy on my machine, but inconvenient to start it each time, plus I planned to move the migrator to a cheap server on Amazon. It’s also okay to calculate in cloud models, but you have to pay a bit, which is yet another dependency. But the main thing – it works quite well without it. I generate descriptions for images using OpenAI, which is used for translating into English anyway, and then create embeddings using a large model. So far, all search tests are a great success. Especially when there’s text on the image, and it’s a big question whether OpenCLIP would have interpreted it successfully.

In the end:

1) wordpress raufaliev.com – free

2) wordpress beinginamerica.com – free

3) turso db where all posts are stored – free

4) qdrant cloud where embeddings are stored – free

5) openai for translation and image descriptions – not free, but inexpensive (cost $30 for post processing over a year).

I attach two screenshots – how the search by images works, and by texts, as well as the migrator dashboard.

Celebrating a Milestone: Rauf Aliyev’s Programming Qualification from 1994 | March 21 2026, 13:54

Mom sent it. This was given to me when I graduated from school. The education was quite good back then, at least. Part of the science classes were conducted at the institute.

When Cosines Defy Reality: Humor in the Trenches of Science and War | March 11 2026, 22:00

“Comrades cadets, in wartime the value of cosine can reach 2, and in exceptional cases, when the situation on the fronts demands it, even 3!”

My Ambitious 2026 Plan: From Galapagos Travel to Academic Achievements and Creative Pursuits | January 20 2026, 04:44

My plan for 2026:

– Travel to the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador for a week (summer)

– Finish and release a book on Information Retrieval (also summer, progressing slowly, first couple of chapters are already written. Already spent about 50-100 hours on this, the easy part)

– Release at least one scientific paper, probably on Data Mining (spring). Ideally, submit it somewhere to a journal (challenging). Already spent about 30 hours on this topic, a lot left to do.

– Make a step towards a PhD. Find professors, visit universities, understand the cost and assess my capabilities and resources.

– Continue studying fundamental mathematics and not die (linear algebra, calculus, probability theory, statistics, classical ML). In 2025, I spent about 200-400 hours on this topic.

– Continue studying Deep Learning and reach the “can teach” level. In 2025, I spent about 100-200 hours on this topic.

– Continue studying Data Mining/NLP.

– Update my book on RecSys, releasing version 2.0 with updates and corrections (autumn 2026)

– Make noticeable progress in painting and playing the piano. Specifically, learn Schubert’s serenade (Ständchen, D 889) completely and create at least one canvas that I wouldn’t be ashamed to give as a gift.

Unveiling Scientific Misnomers: A Cross-Cultural Exploration | January 14 2026, 04:46

Today I was surprised to learn that the Coriolis force is pronounced as CoriolIs force, not coriOlis force as we were taught in school. I started to investigate what else was wrong, and discovered something amazing.

It turns out what we called Gay-Lussac’s law is known as Charles’s Law in the rest of the world, and what we called Charles’s Law is known throughout the world as Gay-Lussac’s Law.

The Cartesian coordinate system here is Carthesian. Cartesius is just the Latinized name of René Descartes.

In our textbooks, the law of conservation of mass is called the Lomonosov-Lavoisier Law (what enters the chemical reaction = mass of the substances formed). In the rest of the world, it is exclusively the Law of Lavoisier (Lavoisier’s Law). Lomonosov got included here only because “whatever is taken from one body is added to another”.

Also, it turns out that if you have to explain Pythagoras’ theorem to someone in English, without a hint, it’s absolutely impossible to guess that it’s Pythagoras. Greek names are generally a mess. Thales here is pronounced as Teelis.

For some reason, in physics Roentgen is called RentgEnom, although it’s Röntgen with the emphasis on ö.

In Russia, a trapezoid is a quadrilateral with two sides parallel and two not. In the USA, our trapezoid is known as Trapezoid, and the word Trapezium here refers to a quadrilateral with no parallel sides at all. In the UK, it’s the opposite. Our trapezoid is Trapezium, and the “skewed” quadrilateral is Trapezoid.

Comparing US and Russian Higher Education Systems through Credit Hours | December 10 2025, 17:35

Regarding education in the USA and the USSR/Russia. My degree in the USA is evaluated as a Master of Science degree in Computer Science. My younger colleagues say that a Russian university degree is rarely recognized as a Master’s these days, and often hardly qualifies even for a Bachelor’s. I decided to look at the numbers and was very surprised.

To earn a bachelor’s degree in the USA, you need to spend about 2000 hours in classrooms/laboratories. In terms of credits, this equals 120 credit hours. One credit usually equals 1 hour (50 minutes) of lectures per week for a semester (15 weeks). Laboratory work has a different coefficient (often 2–3 hours in the lab count as 1 credit), so the actual number of classroom hours is slightly higher (closer to 2000+).

So, my diploma states that I spent 7908 hours in classes over five years. That’s four times more than the typical student in the USA. Based on the numbers, it turns out that I spent about 2000 hours on math, physics, and English alone over five years, with a total of 42 subjects.

A colleague shared that in his Russian bachelor’s diploma there are 3140 academic hours, which is twice as less. And can you share how many hours are in your diploma?

Year of graduation, university, specialty, and the number of hours? I’m curious about the range of variation.