Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev.

I was amused by the vigesimal system in French until I started wondering about our system

«

— Ok, what’s 20?

— twenty

— 20 is twenty, 30 is thirty, 40 is fourty

— No, forty

— What’s with forty? Why?

— I myself dunno, just “forty”

— Ok, next, 50 is fifty

— No, starting from five we add “dy” at the end, fifty

— Strange, but ok, 60 is sixty, 70 is seventy, 80 is eighty, 90 is ninety

— No, ninety

— What’s with? Why is there some sort of “hundred” in there?

— And hundred is 100

— Hold on, ninetY comes before a hundred? How is that even? 100 is a hundred, what’s 200?

— two hundred

— two transformed into two and “hundred” was added, well ok, this is Russian, three doesn’t turn into some sort of “three”? 300 is three hundred

— No, three hundred

— Damn you, 300 is three hundred, 400 is four hundred, 500 is five hundred

— No, five hundred

— Go to… forty!

©JuiceRU

Celebrated Halloween on Devil’s nose trail in West Virginia. Because of such weekend hikes, I can’t “mature” into taking a proper vacation for already five years 😉 I’ve accumulated a month of vacation days. Anyway, I picked the “right” time for this topic, sorry

Good idea

Also good

Very cool. The video’s been out for two years, but it’s still kicking 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zot-Tu9IqHE

In all modern messengers, I am missing:

– an inbox tab, where all incoming messages from everyone would be gathered, sorted by time. A click would lead to the dialogue

– an outbox tab, where all outgoing messages would be gathered, sorted by time. A click would lead to the dialogue

– a “remind me later” button next to a message. This is available only in Slack

– organizing contacts into groups, ideally hierarchical, and viewing messages from all subgroups of a group. Clicking on a message opens the dialogue.

– assigning tags/metadata to a contact such as “conference guy” or “work” or “” and then navigating by these tags.

– smart auto-replies – as done in Linkedin. A completely neglected topic, but it could be really cool.

It would be great if they invented a plugin system for messengers, so that third-party developers could add functionality like Chrome extensions.

Now I am Chief Software Engineer Level 2. A small step sideways and upwards from schemes and documents to engineering and Java. From a spacious group of solution architects, where there were several hundred of us, to a relatively new area where there are still just a few people, some new opportunities. Now there is a correspondence between what I do and what I call myself. Solution architecture hasn’t gone anywhere; it is still part of the new position. There are more internal themes, and that’s really great. An internal “Exam” (assessment) was taken by several dozen people for two and a half hours, and it was interesting 🙂

P.S. Come join EPAM, it’s cool here 🙂 It will be five years in January since I started working here.

At Costco, they’ve stopped stocking Thai coconut milk because monkeys are forcibly involved in harvesting the produce (without their informed consent, I suppose, and for inadequate compensation)

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/10/28/21538899/costco-drops-chaokoh-coconut-milk-allegations-forced-monkey-labor-harvesting

Listening to a lecture on poisons by Vodovozov. He mentioned jellyfish stinging cells. Searched for papers about them.

Found an interesting fact. The article linked from the post claims that high-speed photography showed that the acceleration of the stinging thread is up to 5410000g – meaning it accelerates to 100 km/h within the diameter of a human hair.

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(06)01422-9

As Professor Makarov mentioned in his lecture about Leonardo da Vinci, “a happy childhood is when your parents do not bother you too much”. Here’s a link to an excellent interview on why children want nothing. A must-read for all parents 🙂

“… Imagine a typical fifth-grader during the USSR era. He describes himself as follows: ‘I’m Vovka. I’m the neighborhood champion in knife throwing. I have one friend, Serezha, and one enemy, Petka from the adjacent yard. Sometimes, Serezha and I gang up on Petka. They say it’s wrong—two against one. But he’s in seventh grade, and we’re in fifth. When he catches us alone, he beats us. So sometimes we have to beat him together. I want to become a pilot. They told me to do gymnastics in the morning and douse myself with cold water. But I can’t keep it up: I start doing all these things and then I quit. I’ve figured out why it happens—my willpower is weak. I’m working on it. I’ve jumped off the garage onto a pile of sand twice. It’s very scary, but I overcame myself. My willpower didn’t grow. But I’m not stopping.”

You see? What can we say about the intellect and education of this boy? They are not excellent, but this kid understands his place in the space assigned to him. Note that, in his space, there are ethical issues, issues related to his personality. Issues like what he perceives as weak willpower. He has his achievements and shortcomings, friends and foes, and some sort of goal gradient he is striving towards. This is a child, frankly speaking, not very actively looked after by anyone. We don’t know about his extracurricular activities (most likely, he doesn’t attend any). Yet, I repeat, he is entirely situated in the space assigned to him by fate. And many modern children lack this sense.”

https://newprospect.ru/news/interview/katerina-murashova-beda-sovremennykh-detey-v-tom-chto-oni-zazhralis/