Tag: science

Tracking Yuki’s Recurring “Uuuu” Mode and Behavioral Shifts | October 16 2024, 16:58

Yuki has switched into “uuuu” mode again. The previous instances were –

* March 15, 2022,

* October 27, 2022,

* February 2, 2023,

* April 1, 2024, lasting four days.

Behavioral changes during this period include:

1) Suddenly, he likes to walk. Usually, he doesn’t. Despite having constant access to the yard, he specifically requests a walk. He might approach the door and knock on it with his paw. Normally, at the word “walk,” he scurries to the third floor.

Now, he watches your mouth when you speak to him. He constantly waits, anticipating it might be an invitation to go for a walk. He pounds on the window with his paw (see video in the comments).

2) On walks, he sticks his nose into the grass every five minutes, and it’s quite a task to pull him away. Usually, this seldom happens, but now it’s all the time.

3) He might sit and watch the sunset for half an hour. What goes on in his little head, who knows. Oh, and yes, he howls.

4) Unstable appetite. If you put meat on top of his food, he doesn’t even look at it. However, if somehow a small piece of meat is swallowed, he will likely finish the rest. But this change isn’t pronounced, as he’s usually not very greedy for food. He’s eaten just the bare minimum all his life.

The Boy and the Heron | October 14 2024, 18:15

We watched “The Boy and the Heron” by Hayao Miyazaki yesterday (original Japanese title: “How Do You Live?”). After viewing it, of course, I scoured the internet searching for answers to my questions.

Here I am, considering myself educated and well-rounded, yet some films and sometimes cartoons trigger an “I must be the dumbest person alive” complex.

It all started with Mulholland Drive. According to the reviews, everyone who watched it seemed to grasp the depth of the director’s vision, except maybe for some details, but I remember watching it and barely understanding anything. Then, of course, after reading various reviews and discussions on the subject, I watched it a second, and then a third and a fourth time. Now, indeed, a lot of it makes sense, but it feels like cheating. I couldn’t figure it out on my own. Well, that’s Lynch for you; his works are always like that.

Sometimes it seems that a director just shoots whatever, and then someone in the reviews starts connecting the plot dots, which picks up, deepens, and becomes rationalized, and suddenly there’s meaning even where there was none by design. This is partly why directors dislike discussing the “what did the author want to say” topic. What I wanted to say, I’ve said; the rest is up to you.

Or take something like “Barbie.” I watched it and saw nothing noteworthy, but then you start reading, and it turns out it’s a work of art where everything is interconnected. Or “Asteroid City” by Wes Anderson. If I’m honest, I didn’t even finish watching it.

And now there’s “The Boy and the Heron.” It’s brilliantly made from every perspective. But the depth and complexity of the meanings really raise the bar high for viewers who want to fully understand the film.

I categorize such works as “stop thinking and just watch how awesomely it’s made; maybe you’ll get it later.” With Mulholland Drive, it worked, and it did with Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” as well. This approach even worked for me with the recent “Deadpool and Wolverine,” where I clearly lacked the context to grasp the director’s vision, but in the moment, everything was beautiful and captivating, boom boom bam. But, damn, a bunch of people around me see much more than I did. And it’s comics! A product for the masses. Am I dumbing down?

It’s great, of course, that films are made in such a way that each audience finds something commensurate with their education, exposure, understanding of the context, etc. When a film’s structure is nonlinear, full of visual metaphors, where symbolism is more important than the plot and can be interpreted in different ways, when a film rather provokes the viewer to feel and interpret what’s seen than to follow a clear narrative — this all requires from the viewer a rather high level, I don’t know, of IQ or thoughtfulness. How such films collect big box office and ratings when most people going to cinemas are somewhat obtuse, and I often classify myself in this category when I leave another “complex” movie.

You know what it’s like? It’s like someone who grew up on rock, bards, and chanson goes to a Wagner opera, something from “The Ring of the Nibelung” or “The Master-Singers of Nuremberg,” and then finds everyone around is amazed, while despite trying hard, he understood little.

So, if I am not the only one, give a thumbs up 🙂

The Surprising Origins of the Word “Crap” | October 12 2024, 13:41

Here is the translated text with the style and HTML markup preserved:

Interestingly, the first properly functioning toilet flush device was invented by a dude named Crapper. Moreover, the meaning of the word crap is actually due to the fact that every tank was branded T. Crapper & Co. Sanitary Engineers. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Rudolf Diesel, Étienne de Silhouette, Louis Pasteur, Pierre de Coubertin, and others are quietly envious.

Sewing Struggles: A DIY Armrest Cover Saga | October 11 2024, 17:47

ME AND THE SEWING MACHINE. Yuki owns an Ikea sofa. I occasionally read on it too, but essentially, the sofa is truly his. He’s very meticulous with it (as with everything, really); we wash the covers, but over time, they began to look less presentable, and I decided instead of buying a new set for $99, I’d at least sew some armrest covers. So, it’s going to be two-tone.

Yesterday, I hopped on my scooter and zipped over to Hobby Lobby. Picked up 2 yards of fabric for 20 bucks.

Look, this isn’t my first rodeo, but I hate it every single time. How do seamstresses manage to love this kind of work? It took me 4 hours just to make one armrest cover. I’m definitely not continuing and am now switching back to the original and ordering a set.

This whole endeavor is an engineering feat, no simpler than programming, I swear. First, you have to reverse-engineer the reference item. That’s a major challenge, especially if you don’t want to cut up the item. In this case, it’s just a cover, which is simpler than, say, shorts. So, it became clear that I needed three pieces of fabric, 45×88 cm, 178×23 cm, and 30×88 cm, plus each piece must have at least 2 cm allowance on each side.

The first challenge is just drafting all of this on the fabric in order to cut it later. Especially if the fabric has a pattern. Overall, millimeter precision isn’t necessary, but what’s needed is a) straightness of the lines b) the same angle with the fabric fibers throughout the straight lines, ideally at a strict 0 or 90 degrees. This is all quite complicated to achieve, especially if you need to cut a piece 188 cm long. You spread it out on the floor, and if any section of the fabric shifts by a couple of millimeters, then there you have it, the line will be crooked. So ideally, you need to secure/stretch the fabric and then draw along it.

Then there’s the separate issue with the fabric itself. First, if you follow the fibers with your eyes, you realize the fabric, or the pattern, does indeed break up periodically, or zigzags, and you can’t see past ten centimeters. Second, the fabric might stretch. Besides that, when you try to smooth something out, it slightly increases or decreases in different places, so that straight lines aren’t straight anymore. After washing, everything will probably return, but it’s bothersome nonetheless.

Separately, what you draw with. Whatever draws on the fabric needs to be erasable afterward and thin enough so that the blade doesn’t wander. A marker might not work. Okay, if you’re drawing on the inner part, it might be okay, but it won’t work with transparent and semi-transparent fabrics.

Next, what to cut with. Scissors obviously don’t work, unless you use them as a knife, not as scissors. There is a special knife. Pretty convenient, I must say.

So, we cut it. That’s half the job, but it takes a lot of time. The rest is technically simple – sewing these pieces together. But that’s if it’s just simple sewing. Any cheapest Chinese product is five times more complex than this “simple sewing.” At least, you need an overlocker (I have one). Plus, you need perfectly straight seams, and for that, you need more skill, as at slow speeds they don’t come out right (my skill is so-so, but if not rushed, generally what’s needed is achieved).

In general, the hassle with this is such that it’s easier to give up. Ultimately, I’ll be ordering a new set. If I ever think of sitting down at the sewing machine again, please remind me that there are far more interesting things in the world, and I definitely underestimated something.

But on the plus side – I can now say that, overall, superficially, I understand how it all works. Now I’d be interested in seeing how this is automated. How they manage to produce shirts for a dollar — it’s definitely not just because the Vietnamese in the factory are working for food. Surely there’s a lot of automation involved, where problems mentioned above were solved ages ago.

Exploring Milk as an Alternative to Water in Espresso Making | October 08 2024, 20:33

I wonder, what if instead of water we used milk to make espresso?

(From the image it seems unclear to many – there is no heating, no way for it to burn. Plus, there are different kinds of milk – like oat milk, for example)

Unveiling the Soviet Rock Scene | October 07 2024, 16:54

This picture is often mentioned in the same breath as “Who does Kiss harmonize with?”, “victims of pseudo-music”, and “Liverpool ‘idols’ shearing sheep”. The text is of terrible quality, unreadable, but if you manage to decipher it, it actually turns out to be an advertisement for the upcoming Soviet-Polish festival “Thrash Epidemic” at the Gorbunov House of Culture, featuring “Master”, “Hellraiser”, “Black Obelisk”, “Abaddon”, “Mass” and other hard rock bands. So, the freedom of the nineties was still something to behold.

Text from the picture below

* * *

A familiar journalist named John, originally from foggy Ireland, with an astonished lift of his eyebrows watched the trash-metal-sex-show “Corrosion of Metal” and asked Spider (real name Sergey Troitsky) about the age restriction for attending his performances. This time, it was Spider’s eyebrows that flew up in surprise, and in righteous anger he made a historic speech about how his show is primarily meant for Soviet teenagers.

It should be noted that all of Spider’s speeches hold historical value, and if there’s a biographer who decides to follow his every step, that biographer might make a killing on the memoirs. Because history has not yet witnessed anything similar.

Spider said that children are shielded from the truth about sex, hence “Corrosion of Metal” had to take up the heavy burden of enlightenment.

WHEN all this was just beginning, Spider openly stated that Soviet education only increases the risk of naive teenagers contracting syphilis, gonorrhea, and AIDS. “Prevent this,” Spider called out and brought onto the stage a group of desperate girls tasked not only with showing an orgasm but actually achieving it on stage.

“The truth and nothing but the truth,” says Spider and adds, “the truth cannot be vulgar…”. To him, thrash appears to be the most natural musical form capable of conveying the full extent of hypersexual teenagers’ feelings.

With all this, they will take the stage the day after tomorrow at the Gorbunov House of Culture during the Soviet-Polish festival “Thrash Epidemic” (thank God it’s only – thrash!). Also there, as “ZD” already reported, will be “Master”, “Hellraiser”, “Black Obelisk”, “Abaddon”, “Mass”, and Polish peers “Vader”, “Bloodlust”, and “Slashing Death”. Starts at 15:00 and 19:30.

MEANWHILE, with the help of our photojournalist Alexander Astafyev, “ZD” offers a look not only at the stage but also behind the scenes of such a cool team as “Cor-r-rrosion of Metal”…

Photos by Alexander ASTAFYEV.

“Moskovsky Komsomolets” 29.11.1990

Sosumi: The Playful Sound of Apple’s Legal Battles with The Beatles | October 06 2024, 17:59

1) It turns out the MacOS notification sound had a name, and it was Sosumi. It was used from 1991 to 2020, after which it was replaced with Sonumi. There’s a funny story behind the name.

2) These sounds have a creator. It’s Jim Reekes—Apple’s sound designer, and there’s a secret that wasn’t disclosed for about 10 years after his departure from the company.

3) The Beatles are partly the authors of the MacOS startup sound.

Now for the full story. There was a company called Apple Corps, organized by the Beatles. Its logo was also an apple (of course), hence there was a legal dispute with Apple, which ended, as the joke goes, with the agreement “I don’t give loans, and the bank doesn’t sell seeds.” Apple Inc. could use its name but was not allowed to venture into the music industry and use music-related names in its products.

Accordingly, any Apple ventures into music immediately alarmed lawyers from both sides. When it came to creating system sounds, the lawyers tensed up and asked Reekes to first, not use the name “Chime,” and second, please no melodies in the sounds. As a result, operating system sounds like Frog, Funk, Glass, and Hero appeared.

Eventually, Reekes worked hard on the startup sound and created a C major chord.

Reekes assures that while creating the C major chord, he was inspired by The Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life. I don’t know why I’m laughing here.

Returning to notifications. After much deliberation and attempts to find a neutral name, Reekes proposed the playful name “Let it Beep” in the style of The Beatles’ song “Let it Be”, but his colleagues thought it would be hard to accept. When someone suggested such a name would lead to legal disputes, Reekes jokingly replied: “So sue me,” and suddenly realized that this phrase would be perfect for the sound name. Eventually, they decided to rename the sound to “Sosumi. He told his bosses it was a Japanese word having nothing to do with music.

In macOS Big Sur, the original chime was replaced with another, which was named Sonumi. The original name was retained in the first public version of the OS, but later changed to “Sonumi. The sound file itself /System/Library/Sounds/ is still named Sosumi.aiff.

Now, the OS startup sound is completely removed. It seems you can enable it in the settings.

Invasive Spotted Lanternflies and the Battle to Control Them | October 04 2024, 19:41

We currently have about a dozen Spotted Lanternflies on our porch — Spotted Lanternfly. Here’s a photo of one I’m holding. It’s an insect from the cicada family, about the size of a thumb phalanx. Generally harmless, although, of course, it depends on how you look at it, since at home, it periodically annoys the dog, and it also drains vineyards, not disdaining apples, peaches, cherries, maple, oak, and birch.

This creature is actually an immigrant from China. And it brought its whole ecosystem from China with it. So, listen up.

Until 2013, we didn’t have Lanternflies in the U.S. They arrived from China. But generally, animals always have some environmental dependencies, which is why they don’t just colonize the entire world, but stick to familiar habitats. The Lanternfly’s preferred tree is beautifully called the “Tree of Heaven” because of its ability to grow 20-30 meters tall. The botanical name of this tree is also telling — Ailanthus altissima. And this tree is native to China, where they used it to breed silkworms. Actually, it grows in many places, including Russia and Ukraine. And these Lanternflies really love this tree.

It was introduced to the U.S., where it has become a weed. And for the Lanternflies — it’s a feast. They lay their eggs on it, and each year there are more than the last. How to deal with this, it’s unclear, as the typical recommendation of “scrape the eggs off the trees, putting them in two bags with alcohol” obviously won’t be applied.

One option is to bring in the combat wasp, Anastatus orientalis, from China, which greedily devours Lanternfly eggs. Quite an amusing method. They lay their eggs inside the egg masses of the lanternfly. The larvae of the wasp develop inside the eggs of the lanternfly, consuming them from within, which prevents the hatching of the lanternflies.

However, scientists suspect that if the combat wasps proliferate and start eating more than just Lanternflies, we might have to bring in yet someone else from China who eats the wasps themselves.

Exploring Forgotten Sci-Fi: From Obruchev to Efremov and Beyond | October 04 2024, 14:30

I wonder, has anyone under 25 read Obruchev and Efremov? I’m curious how these would read in the year 2024. As a child, I remember being utterly engrossed. The Sannikov Land, Plutonia, Andromeda Nebula — it all seems far from mothballed, and could even be turned into a decent Hollywood movie script, but then again this is just my nostalgic impression. Generally, Belyaev, the Strugatsky brothers, and many others have been undeservedly forgotten.

Decoding Keystrokes: High Accuracy Typing Inference from Sound | October 03 2024, 14:22

11 years ago, I wondered if it was possible to tell by the sound of keystrokes whether someone was messaging in a messenger or not. In 2023, a scientific article is published with a prototype that can determine with 95% accuracy what a person is typing just by recording the keystrokes on a smartphone, and 93% accuracy when recorded through Zoom. The code in the article is declared to be available to other researchers. And they admit that they have not yet used language models, but with them, it should be really good. Link in the comments.