Tag: Learning

Exploring the Luminescent Life of Fireflies | July 05 2025, 05:02

While walking with Yuka, suddenly the owner falls on his knees and digs around in the grass for a while. That’s when I found a firefly and wanted to capture it lighting up. The firefly Photinus pyralis is quite common here, but I never got around to studying it closely.

Interestingly, the females of another genus of fireflies, Photuris, use the flashes of Photinus males to locate and eat them. It has been discovered that the females acquire special steroids called lucibufagins from their prey, which repel spiders.

(While figuring this out, I learned something new. Luciferase, an enzyme responsible for the glow, is extracted from these fireflies. It’s named after the word Lucifer, Latin for “light-bearer.” Interestingly, Greece also had its Lucifer, “light-bearer,” known as the god Phosphorus. Incidentally, the element Phosphorus was discovered by alchemist Hennig Brand through the evaporation of urine. He named the discovered element phosphorus mirabilis, from Latin meaning “miraculous light-bearer.” This just shows how many things in the world are connected.)

Understanding Lens Distortion in Oil Painting from IKEA Photo References | July 02 2025, 21:55

Before painting it with oil, I study the perspective in a specific photo from IKEA. And here it is very noticeable why photo references should be used cautiously for drawing: camera lenses introduce significant distortions (this was already known and visible, the question is which ones and how to fix them when transferring onto a canvas). Look at this, the ellipses in pink and green were added by me, as well as the vanishing point and lines to it. Everything on the edge is distorted. Pay attention, for instance, to the neck of the bottle on the left.

A good exercise to prepare everything in advance on the canvas.

Understanding Road Grade: The Math Behind the 10% Incline Sign | June 30 2025, 19:48

It turns out that the incline (incline, or grade) – the steepness of a road or slope – has quite an obvious definition, but I never really thought about it. It means the ratio of the projection of a line on the terrain to the vertical plane to the projection of the same line on the horizontal. In other words, the magnitude of the incline equals the tangent of the angle between the rise of the slope and the horizontal (the tangent of the angle of inclination).

Thus, a “steep climb” sign of 10% indicates just about 5.71 degrees of inclination. This is arctan(0.1).

It also turned out that formally among specialists when reading the notation, the “%” sign is pronounced as “hundredths.”

Galactic Etymology: Tracing the Milky Origins in the Night Sky | June 29 2025, 12:57

I am looking at photos and reading material about the Milky Way and noticed that the word galaxy (any) essentially means “milky” from Greek. Κύκλος Γαλαξίας. Essentially, lac from lactose, and gala from galaxy essentially come from the same Proto-Indo-European ģlákts. Unexpected.

Exploring Xplor Park: An Engineer’s Marvel in Riviera Maya | June 29 2025, 05:41

I returned from Mexico — visited Xplor Park by Xcaret in Riviera Maya. The park is already 18 years old, but damn, it’s an engineering feat, not just a park. As an engineer, I was walking around with my mouth open.

The park is the size of Moscow’s “Neskuchny Garden”. A significant part consists of kilometers of natural karst caves, formed millions of years ago at the site of the Chicxulub impact crater (the very one that ended the era of dinosaurs). Above the caves are dense jungles. High above the jungles — kilometers of zip lines. The water in the caves is from a natural underground stream, which is filtered through limestone plus some technical structures. Bats fly around, but obviously, they are not wild and are working for food. No wildlife (other than tourists and bats) is present, so it’s pretty well isolated from the outside world. In these kilometer-long caves, completely covered with stalactites and stalagmites, we swam, rafted, and even drove through in amphibious vehicles with gasoline engines (meaning, the ventilation is well-thought-out).

In front of us, three Mexican women failed to control their vehicle and crashed into a tree. Literally — the front wheels of the buggy were above my head. We picked them up walking along the track, sat them back, and about 5-10 minutes down the road, park workers took them away. The girls have something to remember.

The ticket includes a very, very good buffet restaurant. But pictures are essentially a must-buy — a very thoughtful system designed to extract about 100 dollars from a visiting family. Helmets are embedded with a chip, the system classifies the pics on the fly, and at the exit, you can see all your photos and buy them right there. And on the way back to the hotel, you can post on Facebook or Instagram.

Well, we’re back home now, back to work from Monday.

Switching to Pencil: Mastering the Art of Drawing with Three and a Half Rules | June 20 2025, 12:53

In the studio, we decided to switch from oil to pencil, which I hadn’t touched for years (and, frankly, never really knew how to use properly). But with practice, I understood just three and a half rules of good drawing.

1. Draw what you see, not what you think you should see if you look at the reference. This is the most difficult part because it involves fighting your own brain, which is convinced it knows what things look like.

2. Judgment of proportions. If something occupies a fifth on the reference, you need to distinguish it from a sixth or a fourth, and of course, see exact halves and thirds clearly. It’s like having a musical ear. If an imaginary line ends at a point on the ear, you need to see this imaginary line. It’s not hard, but requires practice, and it seems you need to practice it all your life. Interestingly, you are initially surprised at how wrong you are about proportions. There are many small optical illusions that one must get used to.

2.5. Angles. A continuation of judging proportions. You need to see the difference between, say, 45 and 40 degrees at least. And see where to turn the wrong line and by how much.

3. Ability to simplify. Any complex shape needs to be simplified in the mind to straight lines and shapes and draw those first, and also to reduce reality to spots of a maximum of a few shades (with white and black at the edges).

That’s all. If you master just these three and a half points, you won’t need anything else for a long time. No knowledge of anatomy, understanding of materials, or laws of perspective (all this is important, but comes later).

Exploring Faust and the Zoologist: The Dual Life of Translator Khodkovsky | June 18 2025, 04:06

I’m listening to the second part of Faust and simultaneously googling translator Holodkovsky. It turns out that translating Faust was something of a hobby for the scholar-zoologist Holodkovsky, spanning 60 years. Holodkovsky has hardly any original writings—only translations, and from the translations, everything else, as they say, is minor details.

That is, Goethe wrote Faust for 60 years, and the entomologist-translator translated it for 40 years and spent another 20 catching bugs, imagine? What a scale of projects.

In fact, apart from being the author of probably the best translation of Faust, Holodkovsky is almost absent in literature. But as a zoologist, he left much more of a mark. True, it’s hard for non-entomologists to read without a smile, but here are his main works: “Male Genitalia of Diptera,” “Atlas of Human Helminths,” “On the Oral Organs of Some Insects Parasitizing Humans,” “Coexistence and Societies of Animals,” and others.

Discovering Goethe’s Faust at 47 | June 08 2025, 01:57

At 47, I finally got around to Goethe’s “Faust.” Ordered the book on Ozon, but it will only reach me in a month. So, I decided to start with the audiobook. And what a fabulous production it is! I’ve listened to eight out of sixteen hours, covering all of the first part and a bit of the second. Probably will spend another week chewing through the second part. And when the book arrives – I’ll read it all over again after the audio, which should go really well.

Trukhan’s performance is a masterpiece! The cello, the choice of voice actors, the intonations. I could not imagine a better “Faust” than the one voiced by Chonishvili. Highly recommend. Only occasionally there’s a bit too much with the musical numbers, but I need to check the text, maybe you can’t remove words from a song. The end of the first part in the prison is just fire.

https://youtu.be/MrWl7sORtwc?si=BJH8se2p45iIze22

https://youtu.be/MrWl7sORtwc?si=BJH8se2p45iIze22