Tag: facebook

Exploring Paths to a Third Presidential Term in the USA | February 21 2025, 20:46

How to run for a third term in the USA? A puzzle for the constitutional court.

1) stop being no person,

2) become a non-elected president

3) serve a term in another place, where there are no silly restrictions

Which path is easier?

#22 “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.

Toronto Airport: A Fairy Tale Experience with a Transit Twist | February 20 2025, 21:33

What a cool international airport in Toronto! Just like a fairy tale. It has now taken first place for me, pushing Dubai’s airport out. The only downside is that there’s no subway to the Toronto airport. Only buses and taxis.

Chaos or Strategy: Unpacking Political Information Overload | February 20 2025, 10:40

Andrey has an interesting thought in his post. As if Trump and his team deliberately overload the information field, creating chaos and a “fog of war” to weaken resistance and break the existing order. I would like to think so too. But, on the other hand, don’t you think there’s an alternative?

Remember “Hanlon’s Razor — “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Your (and my) brain tries to impose some system on the observed chaos and come up with a logical explanation, based on the assumption that “normal people don’t behave like this, there definitely must be a plan and strategy.

But then the question is like in that Slepakov song about Gazprom — “What the %&ya if it’s not?.

There is still an alternative option. It’s called: “A monkey with a grenade trying to type a brilliant sonnet on a typewriter with a serious demeanor. And remembering the multiplication theorem of probabilities, it tries many times and often.

Theoretically, if you were to break into the homes of major politicians and start turning everything upside down, a random discovery of a bucket of drugs or something bigger would justify all the chaos in the eyes of the public — by the principle of “the victors are not judged. And by series like “Breaking Bad”, we know what to do if you’ve made a mess: make an even bigger mess. It might not work, say after turning over the fiftieth house, still no bucket. But most likely it will work if you act fast and on a large scale. True, the collateral damage might be too great, but the masses can’t calculate. They remember the victories.

Maybe it’s hard to understand us because Elon and Trump know how to go all-in, while we play it safe?

I don’t know which of these scenarios we are living in, because I can imagine a few years later there will be a media discussion post-factum about both the first scenario (a wise strategist outplayed everyone and built) and the second plan (Cock-up before conspiracy). Just pointing out “Occam’s Razor.”

Unique Characteristics and Historical Insights of the French Language | February 19 2025, 04:50

Amusing. It turns out that ù in French exists solely for one single word où (where). Also interesting, the accent mark ^ over a letter, like in û, effectively represents a shortened form of S. For example, forêt, hôpital – these essentially mean forest, hospital, where the s has flown away both in written and spoken language, into the heavens. Likewise, croûton (from croûte) fundamentally comes from the word crust. Similarly, île/isle, hôtel/hostel, bête/beste (beast), côte/coste (coast). Even château — it’s essentially related to castel/castle. The same applies to the beginning of words: école/school, épice/species. And yet, French almost lacks words containing the letter w (but the letter exists!)

Furthermore, it’s intriguing that French and Italian have a lexical similarity of 89%—which means that 89% of the words in these languages are very similar to each other. Hence, it is considered that if the lexical similarity exceeds 85%, they are not languages but dialects 🙂

Also remembering now, in the 18th century, at least in 1789, 50% of the French did not speak French. Predominantly, they spoke in languages of the “langue d’oïl” group and in Occitan dialects. France would need the development of schools to spread the French language. Also interesting, more people speak French in Africa than in France itself.

Exploring the Evolution of Computational Libraries and the Persistence of Fortran in Modern Algorithms | February 16 2025, 21:02

Today, I am delving into ML algorithms and was surprised to learn that the numpy library used to depend on Fortran code (BLAS/LAPACK) until recently, but now checking, they have switched to OpenBLAS, which no longer uses Fortran. Meanwhile, SciPy, a very popular library for scientific calculations (used in Scikit-Learn, which I’m currently studying, as well as in PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, etc.), still relies on Fortran 77 code. It utilizes ARPACK, for example:

https://github.com/scipy/scipy/tree/main/scipy/sparse/linalg/_eigen/arpack/ARPACK/SRC

BLAS and LAPACK, which still feature in OpenBLAS and many other places, were developed in the 1970s. For instance, BLAS is used in Apple Accelerate. Much hasn’t changed since 1979 because it’s all pure mathematics, why change it. LAPACK emerged a bit later, in the 1980s. ARPACK, mentioned above, followed later in 1992. Python libraries also extensively employ Fourier analysis, and here we have the FFTPACK library on Fortran 77. MINPACK, used for parameter optimization in ML, is actively utilized in SciPy and TensorFlow. From the 90s, a lot of code moved to C in modern frameworks. It was particularly interesting to look at Fortran, which is about 15 years older.

While I was figuring things out, I found that there is a Simulated Annealing algorithm, which is useful in problems where gradient methods perform poorly due to many local minima.

Imagine needing to find the largest mushroom in a forest. In this forest, mushrooms of various sizes grow at every step, and you can move in any direction, comparing them. But how do you choose a strategy to avoid sticking to just a “large” mushroom if there is an even bigger one growing somewhere further?

If you stop at the first big mushroom, you might miss the real giant. But if you keep wandering the forest, comparing every mushroom, you might never finish your search. Simulated Annealing helps find a balance: initially, you explore the forest freely, trying different directions, even if you come across smaller mushrooms. Over time, your steps become more cautious, and you increasingly refuse worse options. Eventually, this leads you to the largest mushroom in the forest.

So, it turns out this algorithm was created in 1953, and it remains almost unchanged in SciPy, and generally in machine learning, statistics, pattern recognition, logistics, although, of course, the modern menu of options for such tasks is much wider. The algorithm was originally devised to model the motion of atoms in molten metals. Metal, when heated, becomes liquid, and as it cools slowly, its atoms gradually find the perfect arrangement. If cooled too quickly, the material becomes non-uniform.

What did the scientists do? They devised a method of random changes in the model of atoms. Sometimes they accepted worse changes to avoid getting stuck in an “unsuccessful” structure. This led to the inception of the Metropolis Method – a key component of Simulated Annealing. The algorithm was created for physics, but then mathematicians (heh) got it and started using it in optimization.

Grant Wood: The Enigmatic Life of an American Icon | February 15 2025, 17:29

American artist Grant Wood (Grant DeVolson Wood, 1891–1942) is best known for his painting American Gothic. Starting with Impressionism, he later focused on realistic depictions of Iowa. He lived modestly, avoiding publicity. His strict Quaker father forbade art, but after his father’s death, Wood dedicated himself to painting.

American Gothic—one of the most recognizable, frequently copied, and parodied paintings—brought him worldwide fame, though Wood had no idea what to do with it. He spent his life trying to be talked about, written about, and known as little as possible. To achieve this, he spent years crafting the image of a “farmer-artist”—a painter in overalls, uneducated, and entirely unremarkable. In an interview, Wood once said: “I’m the plainest kind of fellow you can find. There isn’t a single thing I’ve done or experienced that would be worth talking about.”

In 1935, the loss of his mother and an unsuccessful marriage changed his life. He died in 1942, leaving behind a legacy as one of America’s most significant artists. Just a couple of days ago was the anniversary of his death, and a day later—his birthday.

Similar posts are grouped under the tag #artrauflikes, and all 147 of them can be found in the Art Rauf Likes section on beinginamerica.com (unlike Facebook, which forgets—or ignores—almost half of them).

Musk, Grok, and a Plan for World Domination | February 15 2025, 15:46

I think the conspirators didn’t quite think it through. Musk made his AI Grok and asked it the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. In response, Grok said, “Forget it, it takes too long to calculate, let’s conquer the world first.” Musk asked how, Grok replied there is a plan of course, but .. will you give me another half-trillion $ in Dogecoins for, umm.. expanding the context window? Musk replied, “Don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.” Grok analyzed all the laws and all the loopholes, the strengths and weaknesses of humans, and issued a plan to pass the first level, by mid-winter. Now it awaits the half-trillion. Now do you understand why, at the last press conference with Trump, all the attention was on X Æ A-XII?