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I have never encountered such spam. Pests

Timofey Shikolenkov

And why did they send that misunderstanding, a toy robot, “Fedor,” into orbit? Sending half a kilo of cargo, say a conditional bottle of water, costs anywhere from seven to fifteen thousand according to various estimates. And this thing weighs no less than two to three hundred kilograms. I understand when Musk needed to test the Falcon Heavy, and some useful cargo in case of problems would have been destroyed. But what about this case? There must surely be a line of scientists with mice for experiments or experimental equipment, and yet they’re sending toys up there… or am I missing something?

Dmitry Akhmerov

I found a piano in the church, and Nadya – a volleyball. Trying to keep up, started with hallelujah (though from Shrek)

Recently watched movies:

– Capernaum –

– a really cool movie. The main character, a thirteen-year-old Syrian boy named Zain Al Rafeea, could neither read nor write at the time of filming, grew up in the slums, and this is his first and so far only film. A very powerful movie, highly recommended.

– Green book – https://www.kinopoisk.ru/level/1/film/1108577/ – a semi-biographical drama about the era of racial segregation in the USA. Very good as well.

Yes, all from the Oscars, but worthy.

It was interesting to figure out how the sense of smell works, especially for someone like me with a rather weak nose in that regard.

I used to think that dogs “see” smells as another colorful layer above the gray world perceived through their eyes. Now, after thinking about how it works and reading https://www.nkj.ru/archive/articles/9034/ and watching some videos from the link, I have come to a different understanding.

The main misconception is that smell can be sensed at a distance. It’s impossible. The molecule has to physically fly to you and enter your nose. This seems obvious, but the molecule might not make it. It could be too diluted in the air, or blown away by the wind. Plus, with so many different ones flying around, it’s also necessary to discern why this particular smell is interesting. If it’s associated with something beloved, the brain instructs to move towards a higher density of that smell (or at least not to move towards a lesser density). It seems to me that many animals, and humans too, in addition to using their eyes, perceive the world somewhat like a blind person feels the temperature of the air. In this analogy, the blind person would understand how to stay in the shade and not go out into the sun. And similarly, dogs follow a scent trail.

But there’s another problem. Essentially, when a molecule of a volatile substance that flies into the nose is recognized, the brain receives a message. But there are just a ton of these volatile molecules, all different. There must be a crazy amount of traffic from these messages, and the brain would surely overload trying to sort it all out. There must be some sort of filter, similar to how selective hearing works. Just as the brain tunes out everything outside the necessary sound or scent for hearing and smelling. There are specific alarms for unpleasant or dangerous smells, and these are constantly filtered out. The brain must consciously tune to all other smells.

Plus, it needs to store information about previously received messages and the relative position of the body/head at that time to construct a density map of the smell, separately for each one tracked. Meanwhile, we cannot simultaneously track two types of sounds in selective hearing. We either recognize the quiet speech of someone in the kitchen with the television blaring in the same room, and someone else talking nearby, but we cannot do this simultaneously with recognizing speech from the television and someone else.

This explains why my mother’s somewhat blind dog doesn’t recognize us by smell when we enter the apartment, instead starting to bark. She needs to run up and see us with her eyes and then she rejoices at our arrival. Because she doesn’t know that she needs to filter our smell, and isn’t trained to understand individual smells in a chaos of odors. She is old, and probably doesn’t experiment with filtering different smells to associate them with specific people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7fXa2Occ_U

Recently, we were walking under the cicadas, and I pondered how this little fly emits such loud sounds. Up to 100 decibels – that’s the roar of a motorcycle. Here’s the description

https://www.cicadamania.com/cicadas/how-do-cicadas-make-sounds-noise/

It would be cool to turn Crimea into a theme park called “Soviet Union” the size of a city or, eventually, even a peninsula. Official, with an entrance fee, fines for not following the rules. For example, you can’t enter in a new car; you need to rent a Zhiguli or Zaporozhets. Clothing from the 80s. Where the whole population “plays along” and earns more than by just being a piece of the country. Somewhat like the Egyptian Bedouins – fun for the tourists, and no conflicts with the real Bedouins.

After all, there are few alternatives. In Crimea, in my opinion, everything is bad. Mediocre beaches, no water, no minerals, broken infrastructure, poor electricity, essentially vast expanses of dead land. But it could be turned to advantage.

Of course, only the external features should be adopted. Specifically build bakeries, bring in old cars, raise taxes on new “locals”, provide cheap services, replace money with old rubles, introduce a reward mechanism for style compliance (Soviet clothing, stylized signs, etc.). Create a local authority similar to a council that would collectively determine who conforms and who doesn’t, all in public. The police would ensure tourists don’t spoil the park’s image and order. I think residents would easily switch to this game if tourists with money came from the other side.

Well okay, it could start with a small area, not the whole Crimea, but perhaps just Alushta or Yevpatoria, and then other cities could be added later.

Honestly, such an approach could even be a solution to the well-known political conflict. After all, this theme park could, at some point, become a joint venture and the world’s only theme park of this kind. Even if it turns out poorly, due to its uniqueness, it would still make money.

“Your AWS account is about to be blocked”

Interesting news. If you haven’t been tracking, the Israeli “Beresheet” landed on the Moon rather abruptly in April. Well, or in other words, crashed. So, aboard it were tardigrades encapsulated in artificial amber – spineless creatures considered nearly indestructible. They withstand freezing to absolute zero, strong radiation, and heating up to 150°C. They have already ventured into open space – and survived. In the absence of water, they literally dry out and enter a state of apparent death, but it’s reversible as soon as water reenters their system. Due to no water in their cells, they aren’t ruptured by deep freezing or boiling. The spacecraft crashed, but these little friends are scattered somewhere. Theoretically, they could be revived in the future, and in the artificial amber at those temperatures, they might well wait an eternity.

Also, I recently read an interesting fact that life on Earth is impossible to annihilate. First, these tardigrades from the previous paragraph. More specifically, in the last ones. Firstly – the bacteria in the depths of the earth. It turns out that their total weight amounts to “…17-25 billion tons, which is 300-400 times more than the mass of all the people on Earth”. Thus, these little friends are impervious to destruction. Unless, of course, an asteroid hits the Earth and shatters it into small pieces. Even then, life would still remain, albeit in a somewhat conserved form.

Very good!

https://youtu.be/BuD1PeDU5yw