May 10 2017, 09:28

Echo of Moscow remains unchanged: for about ten years they have been making their program announcements amateurishly with simplistic, flat humor based on wordplay that is supposed to appear witty but in reality is just childish. Despite this, they have a very good team of hosts and very appropriate programs. Why they don’t make an effort to create better announcements and audio jingles is beyond me.

For example, “We do not differentiate by gender, age, or reason. None of this matters… We will publish all your letters and suggestions on the website and announce them on the air.” How can one not differentiate between concepts from different categories? Age and gender?

Of course, among them, there are some excellent ones. “Listen to the radio, the rest is just an illusion.”

May 08 2017, 15:04

Lately, the word Russia is pronounced on CNN every couple of minutes, almost without exception from morning till evening. On the radio, they at least occasionally talk about the weather, but television is all in on this. The brand “Russia” is definitely growing in value because of these topics, the only question is that all this sounds not in the best connotation. Today, for example, in the context of some scandal involving Flynn.

May 08 2017, 10:43

Last Saturday in Washington there was an “open house” at embassies of Asian and African countries. I met representatives from Azerbaijan (I don’t know why), Colombia, Tibet, and several others. At the Barbados embassy, they offered rum and lively music, while sunny Azerbaijan served shish kebabs. I discovered the existence of the state of Benin (with a very decent embassy in Washington).

This is the only day of the year when you can enter many historical buildings, usually closed to the public, and also taste (usually for free) food and drinks from exotic countries. Next Saturday, the embassies of European countries will be open.

I kept thinking, what prevents such a tradition in Russia? The only thing that comes to mind is that after this one day, it would take a long time to restore the premises and count the losses from stolen ivory ashtrays and scratched antique furniture. Or not?.. What do you think, is it possible to ensure 100% security of embassy premises and private houses in Russia, if they were opened to the public?

May 06 2017, 19:15

I’m going to ask a ridiculously embarrassing question. I’ve forgotten math. Why isn’t the volume of a cone equal to the area of a triangle times the circumference of the base? Circle area — radius times circumference? I know it’s not so, but can’t explain to my daughter why:(

Update: Explained it like this:

You can’t spin a line segment 2π times because the density of points near the center and at the edge of the circle will be different. It’s correct to find the area of a circle by adding the lengths of concentric circles from 0 to R. If you represent this as a graph, you get a triangle with an area of 2πR*R. The same approach applies to the cone, but you need to sum the areas of cone slices from a base area of zero.

But unlike the circle area example, here the relationship isn’t linear, it’s parabolic, and you can’t find the area of a parabolic segment “on your fingers”; you need to explain what an integral is.

We relate the cone’s height and slice radius to a single variable of the integral, and find it, which gives us the volume of the cone. The integral is taken from the second power, hence the three in the denominator after calculating the integral. Explaining “on the fingers” why integrals are computed from functions x^n is a topic of its own, it’s better to just believe it for now)