It’s intriguing how different people’s destinies unfold. Gates’ blog has published the source code for the original Altair Basic. Besides the well-known Gates (worth >$100 billion) and Allen (he passed away, but was around $20 billion), there appears the name Monte Davidoff, about whom very little is known.
Monte wrote all the “mathematics” with floating point for Microsoft Basic. It only lasted until version 4.0, after which, about a decade later, the IEEE 754 standard came along, and things changed slightly.
Since 2000, he has owned his consulting company, and its website (built in PHP) seems not to have changed since 2000 (though he did update the year to 2025 in the footer).
There are no photos of him online, almost no information about what he does, but there are two interviews, one in text, and another on Floppy days as a podcast. Apparently, he just quietly “tends to his own stove”.
Among the employees of the first Microsoft team—remember, the iconic photo?—there is Bob O’Rear, who held the position of chief mathematician. He played a key role in developing MS-DOS for the IBM PC. O’Rear left the company in 1993 and returned to Texas, where he took up cattle ranching on his own farm.
To my surprise, I discovered that our “Dog Waltz” is widely referred to here as “Shave and a haircut,” although in reality, Shave and a haircut is very well known as “knock! knockity-knock-knock… KNOCK-KNOCK!”.
I started digging. In Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Norway, it’s known as the “Flea Waltz” (Flohwalzer). In Bulgaria, it’s called “Cat March” (Bulg. Котешки марш), in Finland — “Cat Polka” (Fin. Kissanpolkka), in Korea — “Cat Dance” (Kor. 고양이 춤 Koyangi Chum), in Japan — “I Stepped on a Cat” (Jpn. 猫踏んじゃった Neko-funjatta), in Mexico — “Little Monkeys” (Spa. Los Changuitos), in Hungary — “Donkey March” (Hun. Szamárinduló), in Majorca — “Polka of Fools” (Spa. Polca de los Tontos), in China — “March of Thieves” (Chi. simpl. 小偷进行曲, pinyin. Xiǎotōu jìnxíngqǔ), in Spain — “The Chocolate Pot” (Spa. La Chocolatera), in France and Poland — “Cutlets (Chops)” (Fr. Côtelettes, Pol. Kotlety), in Switzerland — “Cutlet Waltz” (Ger. Kotelett-Walzer), in Denmark — “Meatballs Escape Over the Fence” (Dan. Frikadellens flugt over plankeværket), in Sweden — “Kalle Johansson” (Swe. Kalle Johansson), and so forth.
The piece is in 4/4 time, by the way. So it is something like a polka or galop. However, in the movie “Gentlemen of Fortune,” it is just the triple meter version found here and here.
We finished watching a fresh series yesterday, The Residence. Quite amusing. The plot unfolds in the “White House,” the residence of the gay U.S. president and his First Gentleman. Amid a government dinner with Australian representatives, where guests are entertained by Kylie Minogue, the corpse of the head butler is discovered. The best detective in her field — the very colorful Cordelia Kapp — arrives to investigate. Naturally, there are nods to Sherlock Holmes throughout. What’s interesting is that the plot is almost unpredictable. For instance, at the end of the second episode (out of eight), it feels like the murder is solved, but then a series of complications ensues, keeping the suspense until the end of the series.
Admittedly, I slept through quite large chunks of individual episodes because we watched them after midnight, when my brain pretty much shut down, but overall, the series is quite lively, funny at times, and generally insightful.
Everyone knows about the crocodiles in Florida, but not everyone is aware of the pythons that eat these crocodiles in Florida. I certainly didn’t know. There’s a national park here—Everglades. It’s vast, covering a quarter of the Florida peninsula. To the south, it’s covered with swamps teeming with alligators, its shores hide mangrove thickets, and to the north, tropical forests rise.
In the early nineties, keeping Burmese pythons as pets became fashionable. The juveniles seem completely harmless, plus they are calmer than other large reptiles, and they are not that hard to feed. Pet traders imported thousands of pythons into Miami and sold them for a pittance. At one point, baby snakes could be purchased for $20-30.
Buyers rarely considered what would become of their pets later on. And then they start to grow. A typical length for a dark Burmese python is 3.7 meters, and that’s not the limit. 5-meter individuals are not uncommon, and the largest recorded specimen of this species reached up to 5.7 meters. It’s possible that longer pythons lurk somewhere in the tropical swamps, but there’s no documentary proof of this.
A grown python can hardly be called harmless. Its jaws are lined with several rows of sharp, curved teeth. The reptile sinks its teeth into its prey with a deathly grip, wraps its entire body around it, and begins to constrict. Even a small Burmese python can inflict dangerous wounds, and adult individuals are capable of swallowing a leopard or an alligator whole. They are rather dim-witted, tending to snatch at anything within reach. However, they then digest it for months.
From captured pythons, remnants of mice, rats, rabbits, muskrats, raccoons, squirrels, bobcats, opossums, otters, deer, ducks, herons, and cormorants have been retrieved, and—in one particularly tragic case—a house cat named Francis. These exotic reptiles have almost completely exterminated the raccoons, opossums, and bobcats. Other mammals are visibly declining in numbers, particularly in areas with a high concentration of these snakes.
The population has long since crossed the threshold of 100,000 individuals. In other words, they are simply irradicable now.
Python meat is inedible, so hunting them is more a sport and for their skin. The mercury level in their meat is very high—up to 3.5 ppm. According to Florida standards, fish with mercury levels above 1.5 ppm are considered dangerous.
Quite remarkable. Living here all this time, I didn’t know that relatively nearby, we have these multi-meter, toothy pythons crawling around.
I just found out that bread becomes stale not so much because it loses moisture, but because of a process called starch retrogradation. During the baking of bread, the starch in the flour gelatinizes — its granules absorb water, swell, and the structure becomes softer and more pliable. After cooling down and over time, the starch begins to reorganize into a more crystalline structure — this is retrogradation. Moisture indeed escapes, but not all of it and not necessarily to the outside. In the fridge, staling occurs faster precisely because of the accelerated retrogradation of starch at temperatures around 0–5°C.
Therefore, if you reheat stale bread (for example, in a toaster or an oven), the starch partially gelatinizes again, and the bread briefly regains its freshness. However, this effect is temporary. It doesn’t work the same way with French fries, where moisture is expelled more effectively, and the starch is slightly different. Hence, reheating does not break down the crystals without water, and the moisture has already left. The result is a rubbery, “styrofoam-like” texture, especially in fries that were fried in oil.
I’m going to fry some potatoes and eat them with bread
I’ve devised a new device that might become part of a future phone, or before that, a niche industrial and scientific tool. It works like this: you place it on any surface, say a paper with text, move it like a mouse, and end up with a 3D scan of the surface displayed on your screen. If there’s text, for example, it can be recognized, even if it’s inside an envelope. However, there probably are better industrial applications for such a device.
Technically: it uses a high-frequency ultrasonic sensor array (100–300 MHz) capable of distinguishing paper microreliefs and ink with up to 20-micron resolution—similar to what’s currently done in fingerprint scanners. A typical Qualcomm 3D Sonic Gen 2 piezo scanner measures 8×8 mm. The sensors have a resolution of up to 500 dpi. Motion data is collected from an IMU and an optical encoder (like in a mouse), to accurately stitch scan fragments into a unified image. It will work in darkness, with poor contrast, on semi-transparent paper, with zero dependence on lighting. It can detect hidden writings, fingerprints, or cleaned areas. Essentially, it will perform an in-depth analysis, down to detecting traces of pencil pressure.
A very meaningful, diverse, and captivatingly interesting episode—with Vishnevsky about mushrooms.
Three stories to whet your appetite. The first one is about the house fungus (Serpula lacrymans). It usually starts with a shed, a bathhouse, bridges, or a foundation, especially if it’s partially over water. The house fungus releases tough black mycelial cords (1-2 mm), which spread throughout the house within just a few days. Across the floors, walls, and floors—it’s like something out of sinister sci-fi movies. These cords reach any source of wood. The fungus begins to break down lignin and other components of the wood, and one of the by-products of this process is water. That is, the fungus only needs water at the beginning, and then, once it finds wood, it extracts water on its own, feeding and hydrating itself. Therefore, it is practically impossible to get rid of it. It is tenacious, fast-growing, and extremely destructive. It is capable of turning up to 50% of the wood volume it settles on to dust within a year. That’s why sleepers and footbridges at stations are made not from wood, but from concrete, even where wood is cheaper and despite the fact that wooden sleepers are superior in other properties to concrete ones.
The second story is about “witch’s circles.” Surely you’ve noticed that mushrooms often grow in rings on lawns or at the edges of forests, sometimes tens of meters in diameter. It turns out that the mycelium from the point where it originated transforms into a “donut,” which grows because the inner parts of this donut die off since it has already consumed everything there, while the outer parts continue to expand because there’s still something there. And thus, the mushrooms—the fruiting bodies—grow along this donut. Since the rate of spread is more or less the same, it appears as a perfect circle. Of course, unless it runs into something along the way.
The third is about cordyceps, which infects simple crawling organisms and controls them. Apart from being an interesting fungus on its own, the most expensive mushroom in the world is also a cordyceps (the Chinese variety). But now, about the one that parasitizes ants—you’ve probably heard of it.
It all starts with the fungus penetrating an ant’s body and gradually taking control over its nervous system. When the time comes, cordyceps “tells the ant that it is time to leave its native anthill. If it resists, the fungus employs chemistry: it not only biochemically influences the behavior, but literally “owns the ant. Moreover, it does so not bluntly, but very intricately—with precision to the details.
It entwines the muscles and nerve nodes, blocking any alternate movement. The ant begins to move along a specific trajectory—it climbs a plant, selects a suitable leaf, often one that hangs right above the anthill. It climbs to the underside of the leaf to prevent the sun from drying out its body and the future fungus. Then it moves strictly along the central vein of the leaf—as if along a highway.
When it reaches the middle of this vein, the fungus gives two last commands: 1) Clench the veins with its limbs as tightly as possible and 2) Bite through the vein with its jaws, securing itself definitively.
After this—rapid mycelial growth, the ant dies. From its head, now hanging downwards, begins to sprout the fruiting body of the fungus—a thin “needle, directed straight down over the anthill. When it matures, spores start to pour out of it, like from a shower, directly onto the ants passing below. Everything is calculated perfectly.
Scientists have spent decades trying to understand the “combat chemistry of Cordyceps. It seemed something incredibly complex must be at work. But as it turns out—on the contrary. Everything is simple: relatively primitive hydrocarbons are acting, structurally very similar to… gasoline.
If you take, for example, a bucket of gasoline, come to a forest anthill (especially a large one of red forest ants), stir it up a bit—you will see how the ants start to massively leave the dwelling, climb up the tree, cling to the bark, freezing in strange poses. Then they are released. But with Cordyceps, it’s the same, just with an additive: its hydrocarbons are slightly more complex, and “releasing” is no longer possible.
This is the bug in the ant’s firmware. It’s not some kind of remote control, not a command center. Just a chemical, and the ant “knows what to do. These aren’t random actions, but strictly defined, programmed within it reactions. Under certain substances, it behaves in a strictly defined way.
I recommend listening to it, Vishnevsky is very cool in this topic and it seems inexhaustible.
