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When the Night Lit Up: Unraveling the Mystery of a Superbolt Storm | March 21 2026, 12:55

We had a thunderstorm last night. The whole county is buzzing because everyone thinks that something exploded just before midnight. Several posts in a row on social media. In short, it was thunder. But a bit more rare than usual. Caused by a 401 kA lightning, dubbed the Wild House Shaker. A typical lightning strike is 30 kA. If the numbers are to be believed, 401 kA is really damn a lot. They will likely say we haven’t had such lightning here for decades.

Attaching an interesting map.

The points on the map show superbolts — lightning strikes with an energy of no less than 1M J. Red points — particularly powerful superbolts with an energy of more than 2M J. That is, superbolts mostly occur in the northeastern part of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean Sea, and less frequently — in the Andes, off the coast of Japan, and near South Africa.

this is what the page from which I took the map says (translation):

“New work shows that superbolts most often occur over the Mediterranean Sea, the northeastern Atlantic, and over the Andes, as well as in smaller amounts to the east of Japan, in tropical oceans, and near the southern tip of Africa. Unlike regular lightning, superbolts often strike over water.

“Ninety percent of lightning occurs over land,” said Holzworth (that’s the main guy on lightning at the University of Washington).

“But superbolts mostly arise over water, right up to the coastline. For example, in the northeastern Atlantic, the distribution maps of superbolts clearly show the outlines of the coasts of Spain and England.”

“The average energy of a discharge over water is higher than over land—that we knew,” he said. “But we did not expect such a stark difference.”

The season for superbolts also does not match the usual patterns of lightning. Regular lightning most often occurs in the summer—the three main so-called “lightning chimneys” coincide with summer thunderstorms over America, Africa south of the Sahara, and Southeast Asia. However, superbolts, which are more common in the Northern Hemisphere, occur in both hemispheres from November to February.

The reason for such a distribution remains a mystery. In some years, there are significantly more superbolts than in others: the end of 2013 was record-breaking, and the end of 2014 was the second largest, while in other years such events were much less frequent.

“We speculate that this may be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but we will leave that for future research,” said Holzworth.

“For now, we are just demonstrating that there is a previously unknown pattern.”

Smartfolio.me: Revolutionizing Knowledge Organization with Advanced Features | March 19 2026, 04:01

My creation – the knowledge organization tool Smartfolio.me – has gained new features. I’m attaching a five-minute video overview.

It’s like Google Docs, but you can embed documents within each other, creating a network of connected knowledge, and these documents can be PDFs and regular texts.

Upload a PDF, the program converts it into images, and you can highlight any sections right on the pages to leave a comment or ask a question.

If something in the text is unclear, you highlight the area and press “elaborate” — the LLM will detail everything thoroughly, taking into account the context of the entire document, and the explanation will stay linked to the highlighted fragment.

You can simply cut out a piece from a PDF, and the LLM extracts clean text or a ready-made formula from it.

In the PDF window, there is now a small panel — all comments and explanations are immediately visible there, so you can quickly jump to the necessary parts.

You can cut out a diagram or graph from a PDF, copy it as a picture, and paste it into your text. It will automatically crop “on the fly” and save in the database, not as a copy but as a link to the page with crop parameters.

If you delete the page link in the text, it won’t disappear completely but will go into a special list, from where you can reattach it somewhere else or delete it finally. The same document can be inserted in several places. If you add a comment to it, it updates everywhere where this document is linked.

Mathematics is fully supported — LaTeX formulas can be not only viewed but also clicked to adjust them in the editor.

You can generate formulas by description. Just write in words what formula you need (for example, “binomial distribution”), and the system itself outputs the ready formula code.

Now there is a system of plugins – essentially isolated experimental functions separate from the main program. For instance, there is a plugin that recursively collects all subpages into one long document — convenient if you need to read or print everything at once.

Or consider the “YouTube Transcript Cleaning” plugin. If there is a dirty lecture text from YouTube, the plugin will punctuate, paragraph, and create neat headers.

If you insert a link to a website, it opens in a column next to it — you can read the source and simultaneously take your notes. However, some websites do not allow embedding on foreign pages. The system recognizes such sites, and they open in a new tab.

The left panel with the list of pages can be hidden or resized with the mouse, so it doesn’t take up space on the screen.

You can simply copy and paste an image or screenshot, and it will not just insert, but also upload to the database.

It supports working from a mobile phone. On the phone, the interface switches to a single-column mode for convenient reading and commenting on the go.

Multiple databases are supported – you can switch between them. You can connect different databases and different LLMs and switch between them.

Evolution of Understanding: Brain as a Predictive Model | March 18 2026, 13:29

An interesting philosophical thought came to my mind. What if evolution doesn’t exist in us (not in biological life), but in our system of understanding the laws of the world 🙂 That is, the system of understanding the laws of the world adapts itself so that everything more or less matches up. That is, the brain constructs an internal hallucination and constantly suppresses it in order to minimize the error of prediction. And there’s a big question — does our understanding system strive for truth (absolute correspondence to the world) or just for comfort (so that the picture in the head does not fall apart)?

With this approach, there’s a problem that if you don’t look into the future, then at each iteration, the understanding system adjusts its model so that the prediction works, but simultaneously creates problems for the next iteration, because it has to account for them already. As a result, this layered pie accumulates contradictions and constraints to such an extent that each subsequent theory becomes more and more complex and accreted with a multitude of unexplainable gaps. Dark matter, black hole radiation, gravitational waves, and so forth appear to somehow stretch the owl to fit the globe.

But yes, this is related to the question of whether mathematics was discovered or invented.

Exploring the Multifaceted Uses of “Oblong” in English and Russian | March 17 2026, 13:50

Sometimes in English, there are very unusual words that are very difficult to translate into Russian. Here, for example, is the word oblong. As an adjective, it translates as “elongated, oblong,” but in the book, both uses are nouns. Often oblong refers to a face – that is, close to an oval, but oblong is a broader concept that describes any figure having an elongated appearance. My mom bought an oblong tablecloth for her new table.

As a noun, it is also used, and quite frequently (though less so than as an adjective). As a noun, oblong means “a rectangular object or flat figure with unequal adjacent sides.” Rulers are considered elongated items (oblongs). Laptops, tablets, and flat-screen TVs are oblongs of different sizes. A rectangle can be defined as oblong; however, not all elongated figures are rectangles. The same face, for example. Additionally, in mathematics, an oblong number is what in Russian is called a rectangular number (the product of two consecutive numbers. For example, 12). In general, it’s utterly baffling.

The word has been alive since the 15th century, by the way. So, in my book, it appears twice, and both times as nouns. In the first case, Nabokov translated it as “corner,” and in the second – “a small oblong of smooth silver” as “a little piece.”

Navigating Tornado Warnings: Safety Over Probability in the US | March 16 2026, 17:59

Today a tornado warning was issued. A warning is issued if radar detects conditions favorable for the formation of a tornado. In the end, there was a little rain at the exact predicted time (within about 10 minutes). It came, poured down, and moved on. Everything was canceled everywhere. A bunch of people are still on edge. The principle in the USA: safety is more important than anything, even if the probability is nearly zero, if the consequences threaten life, a small probability is weighed against high seriousness and ultimately maximum protocols are activated. When assessing risk, the most pessimistic option is chosen because if you’re wrong – you remain responsible. People head down to basements, children are locked in gyms, etc.

Everything seems fine, but such a reaction to bad weather and similar troubles instills a behavior of excessive caution for life, and people simply choose comfort and are scared to death of thunderstorms and snowfalls. Not sure if this is right or wrong.

Check out the weekly temperature swing from 21 to 0 and back to 23.

Exploring Multilingual Vocabulary in Nabokov’s Works with Apple Books | March 15 2026, 23:20

Man, it’s really convenient. Just sitting here reading.

The usage pattern is as follows: I hold the phone in my hands. There, in apple books, this and that book. You see an unfamiliar word – it will likely be in the word list of the chapter. The definition takes into account the translation by Nabokov himself. Then you look a couple words ahead, put the phone down, continue reading. You encounter those words, and they are still in your short-term memory, and hooray, you understand. During a break, you load the next couple of words into your brain. You have to hold the phone and flip through, each page contains 4-5 definitions.

Now, every word has definitions in English (interpretation), French, and German. Consequently, I can publish four books.

Overall, my level of English matches what my app predicts about which words will be challenging. But someday I’ll need the same for French, and it will require an assessment of the difficulty level for each word because even some basic words will be unclear to me. I’m not sure that a book with basic words will be handy. With rare ones – definitely handy.

Crafting Nabokov’s Dictionary: A Multilingual Lexical Journey | March 15 2026, 18:30

I’m reading Nabokov and decided to take a break to create a convenient app “Nabokov’s Dictionary” and am considering selling it on Amazon as a book. Essentially, it looks like this (see screenshot) – definitions of complex words in English, Russian, German, and French, in the same order they appear in the original book.

Would you buy such a book?

To accurately make their definitions, I also wrote an aligner – a program that matches sentences and paragraphs in English with their translations (Nabokovian) into Russian. And when a word’s definition is created, it uses not only the knowledge of LLM but also the Russian translation by the author. It’s worth separately discussing how the algorithm works (I invented it myself because everything I found online did not work as I needed). It first finds long sentences and matches the longest sentences with their pair through cosine similarity of embedding vectors created through the multilingual e5 model. These sentences become anchors. Then, assuming that for long sentences the error is almost excluded, the longest sentence between anchors is found, and everything repeats recursively. There are many situations where a sentence in Russian has no equivalent in English and vice versa, where a sentence is split into two, or conversely two are merged into one. The algorithm handles this as best as it can. The result is quite a good quality of alignment. To such an extent, that errors in alignment can hardly be found (but they are likely still there). Either way, it is only needed for the context for translating words, even if there are rare errors, it’s not a big deal.

Would you buy such a book?

NFC Smart Lock Review: Battery Woes and Unexpected Vendor Response | March 13 2026, 18:49

At the beginning of the year, I bought an NFC smart lock for the front door for 170 bucks. Recently, I wrote a review on Amazon stating that the batteries lasted only a month and a half, and if it continues like this, I will end up paying almost the same amount annually. The manufacturer has responded saying they will refund the money. They didn’t ask to remove the review, and I don’t even know if that’s possible.

Navigating Without GPS: Understanding Cardinal Directions in Moscow | March 13 2026, 18:41

The spokesperson for the Phystech press service explains how to determine cardinal directions in Moscow when navigation systems are down. Find the North Star or use the sun: it rises in the east and sets in the west. Also reminds us how to determine directions using trees. Ziya, do you know how to find cardinal directions using trees? — What’s there to know? Fir tree points north, palm tree points south!

Overall, it seems the Phystech press service is not aware that in Moscow, the annual amplitude of sunrise point movement is almost 90 degrees. That means, it only sometimes (like now, in March) actually coincides with the east. But they do know the word “asterism”. I think most readers will place it somewhere near the word “flatulence”

Nadezhda’s Firsts: Oil Painting and Piano | March 12 2026, 18:55

Last week, Nadezhda Shulga painted an oil painting for the first time in her life and played the piano with one hand for the first time in her life! Nadya, well done!!! She asked me so many times to paint nature, that she eventually went ahead and painted it herself.