By the way, what’s happening with the air in Moscow right now? Specifically, everything about pm2.5
compared to the “normal” index in Moscow, which is around 50 (in an industrial place like Houston, packed with oil refineries, it’s about 70, and in China over industrial cities – it’s like now in Moscow)
Houston. Last time I posted pictures from a film camera, now it’s time to dissect an iPhone. Digital ones always come later, they need to be analyzed, and that takes time. But the film photos were all good 😉
A very interesting presentation of the results of Elon Musk’s Neuralink project. Scientists are reporting, there are many cool slides. They are developing brain-machine neural interfaces: essentially an implanted Bluetooth-like I/O port for a small part of the brain, which a person can control after some training. The presentation is from July, but I only got around to it now. The link includes a translation too. The N1 chip was shown, which will be implanted in the brain. According to the company, Neuralink may begin clinical trials with humans in 2020.
Apple took 12 years to introduce a sharpen feature in their mobile photo editing app
Field trip
It turned out that Netflix started with renting DVDs. At that time, they were the online competitor of Blockbuster, which had about 10,000 stores in 2004. Now, Blockbuster is down to just one store in Oregon. Yet, the DVD rental market here in the states has not died. There’s a Redbox on every corner (about 40,000 in the country). Renting a movie costs from $1.75, which is cheaper than any streaming service. But they are dying out, of course.
Today, Typhoon Hagibis struck Japan. I became curious about the difference between a hurricane and a typhoon. It turns out, the difference is only that a typhoon is a hurricane in the Far East and East Asia. It is believed that a typhoon is a gradually developing hurricane, but there are significantly fewer destructive typhoons than destructive hurricanes, so this is kind of an exception. Meteorologists call them both tropical cyclones.
Lens calibration
A very interesting lecture by Vishnevsky about mushrooms. A large part of the lecture discusses the origin of life. Very insightful section, highly recommended. All of Vishnevsky’s lectures are interesting, but today’s is particularly so.
I wonder if there could exist a society where everyone would be required to allocate certain fixed taxes across a portfolio ranging from police maintenance, healthcare services to education, with the departments themselves convincing people to invest more in them than in other areas?
I wonder, what prevents the use of the three-ballot voting system? Its principle is as follows: each voter receives a ballot with a unique number that has three detachable stubs. To vote “FOR”, the voter marks the selected candidate on any two parts of the ballot, and to vote “AGAINST”, the candidate is marked only on one part of the ballot where they are listed. If there is not at least one mark for each candidate, the ballot is considered invalid. A validator checks that the following condition is met (the number of markings for each candidate is greater than or equal to one and does not exceed two). The voter receives a receipt with a number (but without an indication of whom they voted for). After the election ends and votes are counted, a list of voters and all parts of the ballots are published in a public ballot database, so that everyone can check if their vote was counted. According to the protocol, the number of ballots is three times the number of voters who participated in the voting and correctly filled out their ballots. The number of votes cast for each candidate is calculated as the difference between the number of marks for the candidate and the number of correctly filled ballots, divided by three. If desired, it is possible to reconcile the number of attendees with the number of different numbers. What are the drawbacks?
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 