Category: History

Arbitrage Adventures: A Glimpse into Venezuela’s Currency Chaos | January 04 2026, 17:10

I first looked at a map of Venezuela around 15 years ago when you could fly there from Russia for a couple hundred dollars. I studied the map but never used it (though perhaps I should have).

At that time, it was the era of wild currency arbitrage, where the difference between the official bolivar rate “from the TV” and the real price on the black market reached astronomical proportions.

The scheme was simply brilliant: within the country, all airlines were required to sell tickets for local currency at the government rate. If an international flight cost a thousand dollars, it was converted into bolivars at the “pretty” official rate. But if you came off the street with a stack of real dollars and exchanged them at a money changer, the sum in bolivars needed to purchase the same ticket cost just a real hundred dollars, and sometimes even fifty.

The real fun began when intermediaries or acquaintances within the country got involved. You could book a ticket online through a local office, pay for it in bolivars through someone in Caracas, and then simply give them cash dollars when meeting, or transfer to a foreign account. The savings were so absurd that people flew business class simply because it was cheaper than lunch at Miami airport.

But cheap tickets were just the tip of the iceberg, because there was also something known as “raspao”. The state gave every traveler the right to buy a couple of thousand dollars at the cheap official rate on a credit card for spending abroad. Eventually, people bought cheap tickets, flew to the nearest islands, cashed in their currency quota, and returned home virtually rich, having sold these dollars on the black market for many times more.

Of course, this bonanza could not last forever and very quickly ended with a loud crash. Airlines quickly realized that their accounts were filled with millions of worthless-bolivars, which the government flatly refused to exchange for real currency. Planes flew half-empty, although all seats were officially bought out for currency quotas, and the government’s debts to carriers grew to billions of dollars, after which global giants simply began to massively leave the market.

But it worked for a while. I don’t remember exactly, somewhere between 2011 and 2014.

How such a breakdown between the official and unofficial rates lasted so long is beyond comprehension. The government could not quickly abolish the official rate because it supported imports of food and medicine. As soon as they acknowledged the real dollar rate, prices in stores would have skyrocketed immediately (which later happened). Flight tickets merely became a “collateral hole” in the system that everyone used while it was possible.

Celebrating a Quarter Millennium: America’s Semiquincentennial | January 02 2026, 04:19

We pass the marker announcing the start of the sestercentennial, also known as the semiquincentennial. The first term contains sester, which means something on the way from 2 to 3. The second term essentially means half of 5 hundreds. Centennial in both words, of course, refers to hundreds of years.

Rediscovering Gorodki: A Glimpse into a Traditional Russian Sport | December 20 2025, 05:29

Suddenly today, the word “gorodki” popped into my head. When I was a little boy, in Baku, Azerbaijan, we used to play two games in the courtyard – gorodki and knives.

I Google it. The internet tells me that in Russia there is a Russian Federation of Gorodki Sport. It has a president, a first vice-president, and a vice-president. All in blazers. There is a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There is a whole apparatus for the president of gorodki sport with three advisers and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. There is a march of gorodki players, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky.

The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Can you imagine doping in gorodki sport? It has a subsection “methodological recommendations”.

In 2024, there was a World Championship of Gorodki Sport. And it had a Grand Closing. Besides Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, besides Sergey, Vitaly, and Konstantin, there was Schlein Eugen, or rather, Zhenya.

Masters of sport. To be admitted to international competitions, one must come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of having undergone anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.

In general, it’s all very serious.

But I did not find a federation for the game of knives.

Preserving the Essence of Soviet Animation | December 13 2025, 15:05

In Soviet times, there was a great school of animation that led the world for many decades. If you search on YouTube for “Vovka in the Land of Far Far Away”, it almost exclusively shows restorations 🤮, and at the same time, it shows the same disgusting restorations of heaps of other cartoons, all made in the same style (vectorization, black outlines). If you go to Wikipedia, it will display a screenshot from the restoration, not from the original 1965 cartoon. The original can be found, for example, by searching “vovka in the land of far far away madina gazieva”, but searching “vovka in the land of far far away soyuzmultfilm 1965” shows nothing at all.

They really broke the internet.

P.S. By the way, “two of a kind, fulfilling wishes,” and “good enough” resonate very much with today’s ChatGPT 😉

Nostalgia and Innovation: The Story of Starchat.ru | December 09 2025, 23:41

2003. We had a chat, my creation, Starchat.ru, where people constantly hung out and communicated with each other. It had a Java applet! Nobody even remembers what that is nowadays, probably. Initially, some programmer I found on the internet wrote this thing, who then disappeared, and I took over the support.

Just for laughs, I made a bot that you could chat with by simply sending it a private message. It was always online, and not everyone realized that it was a bot. When the robot received a message, it searched through massive chat logs for messages that contained the most words from the query and had some response. A response is the next message directed at the user by someone (like “Vasya: oh just go you know where!” is a response to Vasya’s message). In the chat interface, you had to click on a message and then reply to it. In the presence of several options (and there were always several options, given the traffic of chatters), a random one was chosen.

It turned out to be a robot that very amusingly answers questions. If you ask it what its name is, it always replies with different names but appropriately, with emojis and suffixes, often swearing. Also, the bot always gave adequate responses to standard questions like “where do you live” or “how old are you.” Since there was a huge history, and they talked about everything in general, it was hard to find a question to which the system did not give an interesting/correct/funny answer.

So, the bot had an interesting side effect. If you start swearing at it offensively, it begins to swear back even more offensively. And generally, it often reacts inadequately to attacks and reproaches. Simply because in real conversations, a polite question is answered politely, and a rude one — of course, rudely. The audience had a lot of fun with this bot.

It was especially interesting to read the bot’s logs afterward. People there didn’t understand that it was a robot. They asked it questions, quarreled and made up with it. It was fun)

The Inner Mechanics of Old Rotary Phones | November 25 2025, 00:59

When I was little, I used to take apart old telephones many times, and only now, in my grey years, I realized that I never wondered how they worked. And they worked in a very interesting way.

Let’s start with the dial. The phone is connected to the network by two wires. The dial is a rotary one. When you wind up the disk, the contacts are blocked, and when you release it, the disk returns backward and delivers a series of interruptions/pulses to the line. But how was it made to return at a constant speed (which is 10 pulses per second)?

It operated based on a centrifugal friction governor. The mechanics (gearbox) accelerated the governor’s axle to thousands of revolutions per minute. Two weights with friction pads (consider them brakes) were seated on the axle. The centrifugal force pressed them against the stationary drum, creating a braking effort. This is a direct heir to Watt’s centrifugal governor, allowing the mechanism to work stably regardless of how sharply you released the disk.

Next. The Central Office connected you with a friend. You both speak at the same time, and sound is transmitted there and back through two wires—why two wires and not four, you understand? Well, okay, but why don’t you hear yourself too loudly, since the microphone sends the sound there, from where the “speaker” hears it?

I couldn’t answer quickly. Went googling. So, it turns out that a special differential transformer was responsible for this. There, the current from the microphone branches off: part goes into the line to the friend, and part goes into the “balance circuit” (a chain of a resistor and capacitor inside the phone), mimicking the line resistance. The transformer coils are wound in opposition: the magnetic flows from the current in the line and the current in the balance circuit mutually annihilate themselves in the coil that goes to the speaker. Engineers purposely adjusted the balance not perfectly, leaving a “local effect” – a quiet sound of one’s own voice, so the phone wouldn’t seem “dead.” But the incoming signal from the friend has nothing to unbalance it (silence on your side), so it freely passes to the speaker.

Now about the microphone. At that time there were no transistors in phones, but the signal was loud. The secret is in the design of the microphone, it’s carbon. Essentially, it is a box with carbon powder and a movable diaphragm. The sound from your mouth compresses and decompresses the powder, changing its resistance. The microphone does not generate current but modulates the powerful current coming from the Central Office. Essentially, it worked as an amplifier. Over time, the charcoal compacted, and the audibility dropped—hence the habit of tapping the handset to “shake up” the powder.

The speaker was normal, electromagnetic. Although not quite. If there were only an electromagnet inside (without a permanent magnet), the phone would horribly distort the voice. An electromagnet attracts iron regardless of the polarity of the current. If you supply a sine wave (voice), the diaphragm would be attracted during both the positive and the negative half-waves. Result: the frequency of the sound would have doubled, and you would hear not the voice of a friend, but an unintelligible high-frequency buzzing. The permanent magnet solves this problem: It creates “preload.” The diaphragm is always attracted to the magnet with medium force. When the “plus” of the signal arrives, the magnetic field strengthens and the diaphragm flexes more. When the “minus” arrives, the field weakens and the diaphragm springs back.

In modern speakers, the force strictly depends on the direction of the current. Plus pushes, minus pulls. Therefore, the frequency doubling, which old phone engineers feared, physically cannot occur here. The diaphragm doesn’t need “preload” by a magnet, it just needs to hang in peace.

Interestingly, the principle of old electromagnetic capsules (metal diaphragm + “anchor”) is used now in the most expensive in-ear headphones—google “balanced armature headphones” (prices around $500).

The voltage in the telephone network was negative – minus 48/60 volts. Plus was grounded, and the “live” wire was the minus. Why? It turns out, this is protection against electrochemical corrosion. The cables lie in moist earth. If there were a “plus” (anode) on the wire, upon insulation damage, copper would dissolve (electrolysis) and the cable would rot. With “minus” (cathode), metal ions, on the contrary, tend to settle on the conductor from the soil, which prolonged the cable’s life by decades.

Exploring the Fascinating Properties of Glass | November 21 2025, 23:58

I got carried away with the topic of glass and learned so many interesting things, so I’m sharing. It all started when I read about the supercritical state of matter – it turns out that the line separating liquid and gaseous states on a pressure and temperature graph at some point breaks off, and beyond that lies a state of matter that is neither here nor there. I started reading about states (phases) of matter and stumbled upon the fact that glass is essentially a state between liquid and solid. It flows, just very slowly. This myth is popular thanks to observations of medieval windows, where the glass is often thicker at the bottom, which was attributed to “flowing” under the influence of gravity, and it was even mentioned in school textbooks. In reality, glass is an amorphous solid with extremely high viscosity at room temperature, and it does not flow noticeably even over billions of years; the uneven thickness of old glass panes is explained by production technologies, when the thicker edge was installed at the bottom for stability.

I delved into the topic of glass further. It turned out that the reason why glass can be transparent is rooted in quantum mechanics, specifically in the electronic structure of the material, not because of the density of particles. The essence is that for an electron to absorb a photon, it must transition from one energy level to another, but in silicon dioxide, the width of the band gap is so large that the energy of visible light photons is physically insufficient to make this “jump.” As a result, light simply cannot interact with the electrons and goes straight through the material, while higher-energy ultraviolet radiation can overcome this barrier and is thus absorbed by glass.

It also turned out that melted glass conducts electricity. Moreover, the mechanism of conductivity fundamentally differs from how metals conduct electricity. In a copper wire, current is a flow of free electrons. In cold glass (an insulator), electrons are tightly bound, and ions are locked in the solid lattice. But when you heat glass to the molten state (usually above 1000 degrees for silicates), thermal energy breaks the rigid bonds of the lattice, and glass becomes a liquid, with ions gaining freedom of movement. The current in molten glass is the physical movement of charged atoms (ionic conductivity), not just “flowing” electrons.

The green tint you see on the edge of regular glass (as seen in the attached picture) turns out to be caused by iron ions, present as impurities (~0.1%). Sand is a natural material, and removing all the iron from it is difficult and costly. Low-iron glass, which has tens of times fewer iron ions, is used in solar panels, not just because it is more transparent. Iron greedily absorbs the infrared spectrum (thermal energy), reducing the efficiency of the panel. By removing iron, we allow maximum energy to reach the silicon cells.

And finally, the most “mind-blowing” (literally). There are these things called “Prince Rupert’s drops.” If you drop molten glass into icy water, the outer shell of the drop cools and hardens instantly, while the inner part remains liquid. As it cools, the core tries to contract, but the hardened shell doesn’t allow it. As a result, the inside of the drop preserves colossal mechanical stress (up to 700 MPa).

The physics of this process creates a paradox: the “head” of such a drop can withstand being struck by a hammer because the compression of the surface makes it incredibly strong (the same principle is used in tempered glass for smartphones). But just nick the thin tail, and the balance of forces is disrupted, and a wave of destruction moves through the drop at the speed of a bullet (about 1.5 km/s), turning it into glass dust right in your hands.

There’s also something in physics called “metallic glasses” (amorphous metals). If you cool the molten metal at a rate of a million degrees per second, atoms do not have time to arrange into a crystalline lattice and freeze in chaos. Such “glassy metal” possesses unique magnetic permeability and is stronger than titanium, because it lacks crystal lattice defects, which are usually the points of destruction. So glass is a much broader concept than just transparent substance in our windows 🙂

The only example of an object made from this material, amorphous metal, that I’ve encountered is, believe it or not, the iPhone clip.

By the way, that same amorphous structure of glass, which I mentioned earlier, gives it an unexpected advantage — supernatural sharpness. If you take a scalpel made of the best surgical steel and look at it under an electron microscope, its edge will look like a jagged saw. This is inevitable: steel is made up of crystalline grains, and it’s impossible to sharpen it any smoother than the grain size allows.

But obsidian (volcanic glass) when fractured provides an edge only about 3 nanometers thick (about 1/30000 the thickness of a human hair). There’s no magic here, just that glass lacks a crystalline lattice, which would otherwise prevent achieving a perfectly smooth fracture down to the molecular level. That’s why obsidian scalpels are still used in the most complex eye surgeries — the cut is so clean that tissue cells are minimally traumatized, and healing occurs faster.

And one more powerful engineering case — vitrification (glassification). Mankind has chosen glass as the most reliable “safe” for nuclear waste. Liquid radioactive waste is mixed with special additives, melted, and cooled into blocks. The trick is that dangerous isotopes are not just poured inside, they are chemically embedded into the atomic grid of the glass. Glass is chemically inert, it doesn’t rust like metal or decompose for thousands of years. This is perhaps the only material that engineers trust to store hazardous substances on a geological time scale. Yes, it takes about a million years for a discarded bottle to decompose.

And finally. Digging into history, it turns out that the Romans were engaged in nanotechnology 1600 years before we even invented the word. In the British Museum stands the “Lycurgus Cup” (4th century AD). If you look at it under normal lighting, it’s greenish and opaque. But if you place a light source inside the cup, the glass flashes bright rubin red.

Until the 1990s, scientists could not understand how this was achieved. An electron microscope showed: Roman craftsmen added gold and silver, ground to nanoparticles about 50 nanometers in size (about 1000-1800 times thinner than a hair). This size of particles triggers a quantum effect known as surface plasmon resonance: electrons in the metal begin to oscillate such that they absorb some wavelengths of light and let others pass depending on the angle of incidence. The funniest thing is that the Romans did this empirically, “by eye,” and we’ve only just learned to replicate this consciously in photonics. It’s crazy to think you could handle 50 nm gold dust by eye. This moment required additional googling.

It’s unlikely the Romans mechanically crushed the metal to 50 nanometers — they had no such mills.

More likely, they added gold and silver in the form of salts or foil to the molten glass mass. The nanoparticles formed not by crushing, but by crystallization and sedimentation from the melt under very precise temperature conditions (“glass prescription”). This is even more complex chemistry than simple grinding.

The most astonishing thing is not that they did it, but that the ratio of gold to silver was maintained perfectly. Changing the concentration of gold by just 1% would alter the color to something other than pure ruby red. This indicates that the craftsmen mastered the technology incredibly accurately, although they likely did not understand the mechanism. And that they had a heck of a lot of time for all kinds of nonsense;) probably many generations dedicated their lives to experimenting. Because it’s hard to see why all this was necessary.

There’s a beautiful hypothesis (unproven, but popular) that the cup could have been used as a detector. If you pour a different liquid into it (for example, alcohol with impurities or poison), the refractive index changes, and the color of the “flash” might vary.

Metchnikoff: Beyond Science and Survival | November 13 2025, 04:53

I was reading Metchnikoff’s biography (don’t ask why I ended up there) and thought about how much can fit into one life. He wasn’t just a scientist, but rather like a saga:

His elder brother Ivan was the prototype for Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” Another brother, Lev, was a prominent anarchist, sociologist and fought in Italy alongside Garibaldi. Metchnikoff himself tried to end his life twice: the first time after the death of his first wife (who, sick with tuberculosis, was carried to the church on a chair). He took morphine but survived. The second time was when his second wife Olga fell critically ill with typhus. He deliberately inoculated himself with relapsing fever. Fortunately, both survived. However, the Grim Reaper with his scythe only came after his third consecutive heart attack.

The dude graduated from university at 19 as an external student. I.M. Sechenov himself recommended him for a professorship. But Metchnikoff was “blackballed” (rejected) by one vote. In protest, Sechenov resigned along with him.

He founded the first bacteriological station in the country at that time in Odessa. But due to an employee mistake (they spoiled the anthrax vaccine) an entire flock of sheep died. After this scandal, he left Russia. The station — on Leo Tolstoy Street.

In Paris, he was immediately taken under the wing of Louis Pasteur (the father of pasteurized milk), who supported his theory and gave him a lab in his institute. There, Metchnikoff worked for 28 years, becoming the deputy director.

While studying cholera at the Pasteur Institute, Metchnikoff proposed a theory that not everyone who comes into contact with the pathogen gets sick. He suggested that it’s all about… (of course) the gut flora. To prove it, he deliberately drank a culture with cholera vibrios. Nothing happened (it would have surely happened to you, Metchnikoff thought)

In the end, he received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of phagocytosis (cellular immunity). He is also “the father of gerontology” — Metchnikoff was the one who proposed the theory that to achieve longevity, one must combat bad bacteria in the gut with probiotics. Now, they say, gerontologists around the world drink sour milk on May 15th remembering Metchnikoff.

He died in Paris, and his ashes are kept in the library of the Pasteur Institute.

Also, in the English Wikipedia he’s Élie Metchnikoff. Not easy to guess.

In the photo, Metchnikoff and Leo Tolstoy are discussing immunology.

Samuel Morse: From Painter to Telegraph Pioneer | October 28 2025, 15:00

At the “Rzhipopisi” exhibition, a painting titled “Paris through the Eyes of Samuel Morse” was showcased. Essentially, dots and dashes—it sparked the idea for this post. Few know that Samuel Morse was actually an artist, and quite a decent one—check out a couple of his paintings attached to this post. But he was only “decent” by our standards—surrounded by many equally skilled artists, he considered himself a failure in this realm and devoted the second half of his life, 35 years, solely to the telegraph. (By the way, Hitler was also an artist, amateurishly decent, but more mediocre compared to Morse amidst his contemporaries, yet he ventured into politics). In the attached photos, there’s a painting with paintings. Its actual size is about two meters and among the paintings hanging there is even the Mona Lisa (La Joconde) by Leonardo da Vinci, which wasn’t valued back then as it is now. It mainly became famous after it was stolen from the Louvre, and then fervently searched for and found by the entire world.

By the way, Morse Code was not invented by Morse, but by Alfred Vail, his colleague—a fact Morse later repeatedly denied (while also attributing the invention of the telegraph itself to himself). In 1848, the Vail/Morse code was refined by the German Friedrich Gerke. The code, improved by Gerke, was used until new technologies came along.

(By the way, I don’t understand why it’s Morse and not Morz. He was American, and nobody ever called him Morse.)

Indeed, among people who were artists, about whom everyone has forgotten that they were artists because they remembered something else, it is worth mentioning besides Hitler, also Winston Churchill and George W. Bush Jr.