Category: facebook

June 24 2018, 23:00

We watched “Center Stage” yesterday. The movie is about the life of ballet, the dancers, and their journey to success. The film is already 17 years old, but it’s definitely worth watching. Although it has elements of cheap teenage series from the last century. The final dance is simply a masterpiece. It takes up almost a third of the film, but it seems that it was the reason the other two-thirds were filmed.

The film features the young Ilia Kulik – an Olympic champion in figure skating. He plays a student at a ballet academy, one of the main roles. It was a surprise and quite astonishing for me to see him in a movie – three and a half years ago, our Masha was training with him (and Katia Gordeeva) in Los Angeles. This added even more interest to the movie.

https://www.kinopoisk.ru/film/631/

June 24 2018, 17:58

I was driving on a highway with a speed limit of 110 km/h when a bear suddenly appeared on the road, on my lane. It quickly realized something was wrong and scurried back into the forest.

On a smaller road today, I encountered a rabbit that ran alongside the car for a few seconds.

We went to the mountains today.

(Thanks to Oksana Menshutina and Vitalii Menshutin for the wonderful company)

June 23 2018, 18:01

I can’t tear myself away from the lectures by 3Blue1Brown. They have an excellent introduction to neural networks (which is what I watched) and a lot of other stuff I haven’t checked out yet, but you can tell it’s made beautifully and skillfully. They animate their lectures very coolly and can explain complex things simply.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

June 21 2018, 20:24

In my free time after work, I’m gradually delving into OpenCV. A really cool tool, wonder why I didn’t notice it earlier. It’s a library for working with video and images, and it includes a toolkit which allows you to extract various useful insights from webcams or videos. For instance, detecting moving objects, recognizing text, gestures, faces, etc.

June 19 2018, 11:21

Interestingly, so far not a single voice assistant or just a voice recognizer can properly process speech containing words from different languages. They also all have trouble recognizing words that are not in the English dictionary but are present in some limited list (like a phone directory). I still haven’t been able to teach Siri or Google to recognize Russian names spelled in Latin script through transliteration. It seems like a basic function of the phone, yet no, it doesn’t work.