Tag: facebook

Musk’s Perspective on Trump’s Presidency and Climate Policy | February 22 2025, 23:07

…On Trump’s first day as president, Musk went to the White House to be part of a roundtable of top CEOs, and he returned two weeks later for a similar session. He concluded that Trump as president was no different than he was as a candidate. The buffoonery was not just an act. “Trump might be one of the world’s best bullshitters ever,” he says. “Like my dad. Bullshitting can sometimes baffle the brain. If you just think of Trump as sort of a con-man performance, then his behavior sort of makes sense.” When the president pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Accord, an international agreement to fight climate change, Musk resigned from the presidential councils.

Exploring Ojibwe: Language, Cultural Heritage, and Translation Challenges | February 22 2025, 20:55

Interestingly, in the Toronto art museum, all labels are available not only in English and French but also in Ojibwe, also known as Anishinaabemowin (ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᒧᐎᓐ); in the USA, the language is called Chippewa. The ethnonyms “Chippewa” and “Ojibwe” originate from the same word with different pronunciations, meaning “puckered”. It is the language of one of the largest Native American peoples in North America, roughly equal in number to the Cree, and second only to the Cherokee and Navajo. However, only about 10,000 people speak it in the USA and about 48,000 in Canada.

Chipmunk, wigwam, totem – these are borrowings from this language. And as for geographical names – there are loads. Illinois, Mississippi, Ottawa, Michigan.

Did you know that half (25) of the names of American states are named in honor of Native Americans? I found this very surprising at the time.

I inserted into the image another example of original, not adapted for the English alphabet, writing. These are the circles and stars, triangles. This is the Evans syllabic system. I don’t know how one can remember it: it consisted of only nine symbols, each of which could be written in four different orientations to represent different combinations of consonant and vowel. This allowed for a complete recording of the Ojibwe language. However, Evans’ superiors disapproved of his invention and prohibited its use. Later, he adapted his system for writing in Cree. Today, it is still found among some Ojibwe communities in Canada, but its use is limited. It is more common in Cree. In the USA, Ojibwe speakers mostly prefer Latin writing.

ChatGPT recognizes the language, but is unable to translate anything at all. There are also no online translators, and online dictionaries are very poor. Interestingly, the language has enough words to describe modern concepts.

I tried to translate Native expressions, which, according to the author’s intention, were supposed to mean “Europe” and “dilemma”, but nothing similar resulted. Then I compared how different LLMs translate a piece about the historical period of 1910–1930 when “Europe was shaken by war and its consequences”. Each system produces its own version of the text: some talk about the war on the Great Lakes, some about “the great bay” or spiritual practices, somewhere it’s even about protecting the Indian population (I fed them a text about artists). In the end, “war” is somewhat uniformly recognized (apparently, there are fifty words for war there), but the overall meaning varies significantly.

Travel Troubles and Unexpected Stays: A Tale of Two Airports | February 22 2025, 16:46

In the end, I managed a bingo of two airports where planes had recently crashed. One incident occurred just the day before my planned arrival in Toronto, which, of course, led to my flight being canceled. I found out at the airport. No problem, I worked from there, then returned home, luckily only a 20-minute drive away. I flew out the next day.

But the return trip was more interesting. First, the flight was rescheduled countless times, then they loaded us into the plane, then unloaded us again and told us to come back tomorrow for a second attempt. Amusingly, the border guard’s question about the purpose of your visit to Canada sounded quite ironic upon exiting. No one knows where to wait for the luggage, and what’s even supposed to be on the display board from where I flew? From Toronto to Toronto? But they say not to worry, they’ll collect unclaimed baggage overnight, and it will fly with me tomorrow. Midnight approaches, no Uber can be caught for all the money in the world, the hotel shuttle has been promised every ten minutes for the last hour but finally arrives, and the three of us, including a couple celebrating their 26th wedding anniversary, occupy the last two seats. On the bus, I joke that all that’s left is to find out that the hotel is fully booked. No way, my fellow travelers tell me, you reserved it in front of us (the airline gave a voucher). I pull out my phone, and instead of a ‘thank you for your reservation’, there’s a message saying no rooms are available at Comfort Inn. Well, the hotel was “better than any motel. I try to find the next hotel on the airline’s website in the hotel lobby; there are three options, of which two are about 70 km away, and one is listed but has no availability. While I was calling, another option popped up, Marriot Residence Inn, and that worked out. Nice rooms, two-bedroom suites with a full kitchen, but with a terrible breakfast in the morning. Luckily, the airline’s voucher covered a good lunch at a restaurant the next day.

The next day, the flight was at the same time, and here comes another delay message. Well, this time it was minor, and our Mitsubishi made it to Reagan Airport quite comfortably. They didn’t lose the luggage;)

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.