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Tag: science
Crabs in Love: Monogamous Parasites of Sea Turtles | April 15 2026, 21:56
WOW, it turns out that under the shell near the anus of sea turtles, the parasitic crabs Planes minutus make themselves at home, and there’s only enough space for a cozy duo, so they form a monogamous pair and live happily ever after inside the turtle’s butt (had no idea what to do with this information, so I brought it here). In relation to the turtle, this is commensalism. It’s when it’s good for one (or in our case, two), and the third doesn’t give a damn. I see a scientific paper claiming that they sometimes mistake the turtle for ocean debris, where there’s room for more than one wife, and then, goodbye monogamy. But, at least, no butts involved.
Navigating the Depths of High-Dimensional Spaces | April 13 2026, 23:17
I am now working a lot with high-dimensional vectors, and some things that I hadn’t fully realized before are really starting to tickle my brain. Our 3D intuition doesn’t just not work there—it lies.
It turns out that any two random vectors in high-dimensional space are almost certainly nearly perpendicular to each other. Almost all the space is one continuous “equator”.
Much of machine learning is built on exactly this. If your embeddings suddenly show high cosine similarity (for example, 0.8 — this is not a statistical error, but a powerful signal. It’s almost impossible to randomly converge like this in a 1000-dimensional world.
In such spaces, almost all the mass of data is concentrated in an extremely thin surface layer. The “insides” of objects are mathematically empty.
This can be easily verified with such an imaginary example. Take the “skin” of a multidimensional sphere with a thickness of just 1% of the radius. The volume of the sphere is proportional to the radius raised to the power of its dimensionality.
• In three-dimensional space, the pulp (0.99 of the radius) occupies 97% of the volume, you raise 0.99 to the third power.
• In 1000D, the pulp occupies just 0.000043%.
You can understand it differently. For a point to be closer to the origin, it requires that along all axes the coordinates need to be close to the origin. If one axis has a high value, that’s it, the point has gone. If you take points randomly, the mere probability that they all at once will be below any value decreases with the growth of dimensionality, and decreases quickly.
All the “meat” of the data always ends up in the skin. Any sample in High-D is essentially a set of boundary values.
For white noise in high dimensions, the distance between the closest and the farthest neighbor becomes almost the same. The concept of “closeness” simply degrades.
Nikolai Nosov’s Anticipated Instagram: Art Templates and Avatars | April 07 2026, 13:04
As early as 1954, Nosov predicted the emergence of Instagram
P.S. It’s just not very clear why there are different templates for different eye and hair colors.
Space Exploration: From Pioneering Days to the ISS as a Playground | April 06 2026, 19:59
essentially, a person in space is about these days and about the days 50 years ago. The International Space Station is already kindergarten: in terms of the Earth, it is only slightly higher than airplanes fly.
Precision in the Sky: Aerial Refueling of HH-60 Pave Hawks by a KC-130 Hercules | April 05 2026, 12:59
An interesting photo from Iran. An American Lockheed Martin KC-130 Hercules tanker and Sikorsky HH-60 Pave Hawk helicopters connected to it. If you think about it, it’s incredibly complex. Look, the plane has to fly at a super low speed for it – close to the stalling speed – while the helicopters, in contrast, must push to their limits to keep up. To avoid entering into a spin, the plane is forced to rapidly lose altitude, consequently, the helicopters must also purposely drop altitude. The helicopters are positioned lower than the plane, so if the pilot slows down even more (though how much more can he slow down?), and the helicopters don’t slow down, the hose could hit the rotor blades and that’s it. The helicopters also gain several tons during refueling, which adds to the complexity. Why refuel two at once? It’s more complicated. Actually, it’s both more complicated and simpler, because the load on the wings is distributed symmetrically, making it easier for the plane to maintain a stable course. It’s also interesting how the issue of static electricity is handled in the dry air.
A good addition from the comments (Sergey Snegirev):
1. It is noted that the Hercules stalls at 100-110 knots (depending on the air temperature and altitude, which is important in Iran), and the photo shows the flaps deployed, allowing it to stay up to even 90 knots. Meanwhile, the Pave Hawk can accelerate up to 190 knots (but obviously, nobody performs AAR at max speed), with a cruising speed of 150 knots, so there’s quite a sizable overlap. It’s assumed that AAR takes place around 120 knots on the video.
3. It is noted that AAR happens at exactly the same altitude, so there’s no need to lose altitude
4. It is noted that the tanker – like any other aircraft – can dissipate static electricity using an electrostatic discharger. The refueling hose has a contact that equalizes the potentials of the two aircraft before fuel delivery.
5. It is noted that the fuel used to refuel external aircraft is stored in tanks in the aircraft’s cargo section, separate from the tanker’s own fuel system. Even if the pumping were from the tanker’s own fuel tanks, it would come from the central tank, which is set up to transfer fuel from the side tanks.
It is noted that on the underside of the plane’s wings, several metal “antennas” are installed on the flaperons to discharge static electricity into the air. It is noted that when the hose is connected, a wire passes through and the potentials on the bodies are equalized.
Navigating the Lexical Complexity of Nabokov’s “Lolita” | April 02 2026, 15:56
I’ve finished the first version of a dictionary-style book on Nabokov’s “Lolita”. The chart shows how the complexity of vocabulary is distributed across the pages of the book. The lower chart averages 25 sentences, displaying the number of complex words on the vertical axis, with colors indicating their complexity/rarity (purple – the most complex, red – less complex, yellow – even less so). But I have already removed two levels, and overall, for a foreigner, all five levels are challenging. In the book, level 3 is marked with a dashed line, level 4 with a simple frame, and level 5 with a double frame. Currently, there are 5794 words, of which 541 are fifth level, 1070 are fourth, 1883 are third, 1393 are second, and 54 are first (the simplest ones). Considering that the first version ended up being 1148 pages, the dictionary will need to be significantly streamlined by removing what can be dispensed with. This mainly pertains to the first and second levels, and some from the third and fourth. The rarity of words is calculated in three ways: through LLM, and through two lists of word frequencies in the English language corpus (300K words).
Not all words are complex. For instance, in the sentence “With the ebb of lust, an ashen sense of awfulness, abetted by the realistic drabness of a gray neuralgic day, crept over me and hummed within my temples.” someone well-acquainted with English might not know the words ebb, abet, drabness, while everything else is familiar, but lower the requirements for the reader, and the dictionary might not be very useful for such cases.
Or consider the sentence:
Homo pollex of science, with all its many sub-species and forms; the modest soldier, spic and span, quietly waiting, quietly conscious of khaki’s viatric appeal; the schoolboy wishing to go two blocks; the killer wishing to go two thousand miles; the mysterious, nervous, elderly gent, with brand-new suitcase and clipped mustache; a trio of optimistic Mexicans; the college student displaying the grime of vacational outdoor work as proudly as the name of the famous college arching across the front of his sweatshirt; the desperate lady whose battery has just died on her; the clean-cut, glossy-haired, shifty-eyed, white-faced young beasts in loud shirts and coats, vigorously, almost priapically thrusting out tense thumbs to tempt lone women or sadsack salesmen with fancy cravings.
My browser even highlights four words here.
I have definitions of words in English, German, French, and Russian. I’ve encountered the issue that different words from the text are considered complex in different languages, yet they are unified for me. So, I’ll have to mark, for example, French words in the English text separately, so they are not included in the French version, since there, the reader knows, for instance, what quel mot means.
Overall, this weekend I’ll be manually removing about half, and then I can make the cover and list it on Amazon.
Celebrating a Milestone: Rauf Aliyev’s Programming Qualification from 1994 | March 21 2026, 13:54
Mom sent it. This was given to me when I graduated from school. The education was quite good back then, at least. Part of the science classes were conducted at the institute.
When the Night Lit Up: Unraveling the Mystery of a Superbolt Storm | March 21 2026, 12:55
We had a thunderstorm last night. The whole county is buzzing because everyone thinks that something exploded just before midnight. Several posts in a row on social media. In short, it was thunder. But a bit more rare than usual. Caused by a 401 kA lightning, dubbed the Wild House Shaker. A typical lightning strike is 30 kA. If the numbers are to be believed, 401 kA is really damn a lot. They will likely say we haven’t had such lightning here for decades.
Attaching an interesting map.
The points on the map show superbolts — lightning strikes with an energy of no less than 1M J. Red points — particularly powerful superbolts with an energy of more than 2M J. That is, superbolts mostly occur in the northeastern part of the Atlantic and in the Mediterranean Sea, and less frequently — in the Andes, off the coast of Japan, and near South Africa.
this is what the page from which I took the map says (translation):
“New work shows that superbolts most often occur over the Mediterranean Sea, the northeastern Atlantic, and over the Andes, as well as in smaller amounts to the east of Japan, in tropical oceans, and near the southern tip of Africa. Unlike regular lightning, superbolts often strike over water.
“Ninety percent of lightning occurs over land,” said Holzworth (that’s the main guy on lightning at the University of Washington).
“But superbolts mostly arise over water, right up to the coastline. For example, in the northeastern Atlantic, the distribution maps of superbolts clearly show the outlines of the coasts of Spain and England.”
“The average energy of a discharge over water is higher than over land—that we knew,” he said. “But we did not expect such a stark difference.”
The season for superbolts also does not match the usual patterns of lightning. Regular lightning most often occurs in the summer—the three main so-called “lightning chimneys” coincide with summer thunderstorms over America, Africa south of the Sahara, and Southeast Asia. However, superbolts, which are more common in the Northern Hemisphere, occur in both hemispheres from November to February.
The reason for such a distribution remains a mystery. In some years, there are significantly more superbolts than in others: the end of 2013 was record-breaking, and the end of 2014 was the second largest, while in other years such events were much less frequent.
“We speculate that this may be related to sunspots or cosmic rays, but we will leave that for future research,” said Holzworth.
“For now, we are just demonstrating that there is a previously unknown pattern.”
Evolution of Understanding: Brain as a Predictive Model | March 18 2026, 13:29
An interesting philosophical thought came to my mind. What if evolution doesn’t exist in us (not in biological life), but in our system of understanding the laws of the world 🙂 That is, the system of understanding the laws of the world adapts itself so that everything more or less matches up. That is, the brain constructs an internal hallucination and constantly suppresses it in order to minimize the error of prediction. And there’s a big question — does our understanding system strive for truth (absolute correspondence to the world) or just for comfort (so that the picture in the head does not fall apart)?
With this approach, there’s a problem that if you don’t look into the future, then at each iteration, the understanding system adjusts its model so that the prediction works, but simultaneously creates problems for the next iteration, because it has to account for them already. As a result, this layered pie accumulates contradictions and constraints to such an extent that each subsequent theory becomes more and more complex and accreted with a multitude of unexplainable gaps. Dark matter, black hole radiation, gravitational waves, and so forth appear to somehow stretch the owl to fit the globe.
But yes, this is related to the question of whether mathematics was discovered or invented.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 