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Today I studied the biography of Woodrow Wilson and was surprised to find that his image appears on a banknote – note this – worth 100,000 dollars. It turns out that it’s not the only one of its kind – there is a 10,000 dollar note with Salmon Chase’s portrait, banknotes of 500 (McKinley, Marshall), 1,000 dollars (Hamilton, Cleveland), and 5,000 dollars (Madison). The 100,000 dollar banknote was used only for internal transactions by the Federal Reserve. A total of 42,000 copies were printed. They were never circulated publicly; moreover, possessing such a banknote is illegal. Some time after their production was stopped, most of them were destroyed.

The 10,000 dollar note is currently for sale on eBay, priced at half a million.

Really interesting, amongst all these feet, pounds, ounces, and yards, money is still in the usual decimal system.

Aeroflot canceled my flight to Russia on November 9th today. They asked me to call the call center to arrange a refund or reschedule. I looked on their site, and there are no flights from Washington starting October 31st at all (I scrolled through to March 2022 and then gave up) – neither direct nor via New York. Does Aeroflot know something or is this usual for them?

P.S. I was just told on the call that Aeroflot has canceled almost all international flights to/from the USA for November and for the following months. Maybe they’ll resume someday, but that’s the situation for now. They offered to refund my money or rebook for October. I chose the refund. I wonder what the reason for the cancellation is?

P.S. Bought Lufthansa + United. Turned out to be one and a half times cheaper. Turns out, Aeroflot stealthily (well, okay, I didn’t notice) adds a $249 fuel surcharge to the ticket price of $415 (I fell for it). The new tickets via Europe cost $459 with no fuel surcharges. Either way, I had one layover.

P.p.s. with a layover in Europe, the airlines did not confirm, now I have two pending refunds. Looks like Europe is not an option. Will look for options via Turkey.

In front of our house. A spider web about one and a half meters in size

Printed a bottle holder on a 3D printer. Its usual place is taken by a bike lock, and such a position is much more convenient: easy to take and easy to put back. And in the place where the bottle is usually attached, I plan to install a triangular bike bag. Engineering happiness is when you invent something, and there it is, working. The first 30 km have already been covered.

It’s nice to live next to a bike trail. Went out for a 10 km ride in 20 minutes.

Photographed a wasp on a passion fruit near one of the farms nearby. The passion fruit has such an unusual, complex flower. Probably for very smart and correct bees, who are not lured by daisies and poems. I’ll attach another photo (from wiki) of the passion fruit itself. Passion fruit is tasty, but if you use your imagination, you wouldn’t even want to try it. It seems that nature was inspired by the wasp eggs in figs from my previous post.

In the wild, fig wasps climb in through this hole at the bottom of the fig to lay their eggs inside. Along the way, the wasp loses its wings because the hole is too small. Subsequently, the wasp dies inside the fig. The eggs wait for their time. Inside, a new generation of wasps begins to grow. Males fertilize the females and also die inside the fig, as they are born wingless, while the females emerge to find a new fig. By the way, a fig is essentially an inside-out flower. Wasps thereby pollinate it. We eat self-pollinating figs and only the female fruits, but you can’t explain that to the fig wasps. 🙂

Enjoy your meal, I’m going to eat this fig now

Some people get flies in their kitchen, but we had a bat. Time to sleep. Rescued, released. Pretty one

The deer was stunned for about five minutes. This video is a small “montage”. Probably his parents told him that if he doesn’t move, no one will notice him. Seems like they told our Yuki the same thing.

By the way, Yuki is very accurate at distinguishing between natural sounds and artificial sounds (no matter how similar they might seem to us), and reacts very differently to them. He instantly picks up on birds – no wonder, given his hunting breed. And deer fascinate him.

I always believed that behavior programming comes not from genes, but from upbringing. You know, the young ones observe how their mom and dad react. It seems like some stuff might actually be passed down through DNA. At least the most basic things.

Interesting video about mathematical topology. How to turn a sphere inside out without bending the surface? Excellent visualization and explanation