Tag: Thoughts

Surreal Daydreams: Cooking Up a Fantastical Adventure | February 08 2026, 15:36

Just a normal day

So I decided to fry some eggs. I grab the frying pan, and it asks me, “Which floor?”. Unfazed, I pull a piano out of my pocket and press the brake pedal. Suddenly, a flight attendant pops out of the oven and politely asks: “Tea, coffee, or hold a brick?”. I chose the brick, because it was checkered blue and smelled of spring.

I step out onto the balcony and see — instead of a courtyard, there’s an ocean of kefir. I get into a submarine, start the chainsaw, and then a traffic cop on a dolphin stops me. He whistles into a cucumber and says:

— Why are you without a panama hat in a public place?

I show him my passport, but instead of a photo, there’s a dressed herring. He bursts into tears of joy, gifts me a cactus, and flies away on an umbrella towards Syzran.

I go back inside, wanting to put the cactus in a vase, but the vase has married a vacuum cleaner and left on a honeymoon to the mezzanine. Well, I spit, wiped the sweat away with a towel, but it turned out to be the neighbor’s cat. The cat meowed, turned into 18 rubles in a single coin, and rolled under the sofa.

I approach it, get in the elevator, sit down on a bicycle, start a motorcycle, then bang, a conductor comes up to me and says, “Sir, give up your seat”. And I say I don’t smoke. Then this kid starts crying! But I didn’t lose my cool, and hit him on the face, and he grabs his knee and screams: “My back! My back!”

I exit this electric train,

and see, there’s a minibus standing there. Well, I approach and say: “Winston Blue and 0.5 vodka”. But it gives me Bond and beer. I take this prima and moonshine, and run away from those cops! Then these firefighters caught up with me in an ambulance! Caught up and say: “You forgot your change!”. So, I take a kilogram of apples and head to the market to trade.

I bring them, haven’t even set out these bananas, right then an old lady runs up and buys all the peaches, and tells me to put them in a small bag! And I think, she’s totally insane, how am I supposed to put 20 watermelons into her bag?! I took the money and went home! Never went to the forest again… didn’t touch mushrooms… even quit smoking.

A Decade Later: Snow, Survival Shopping, and American Winter Woes | January 23 2026, 15:56

Exactly ten years ago, on this day, my family tried to enter the USA, but it started snowing. The day after a plus 12°C

snowfall came and blocked all the roads.

And now it’s all happening again. Waiting for snow. Nadia just sent a message that there are three times more people in the grocery store than usual. Americans, when a possible zombie apocalypse approaches, stock up on food and ammunition. Ten years ago, the roads were cleared the next day, but schools, universities, and almost all offices remained closed for another week. Grocery stores opened fairly quickly (but not immediately)

To me, it’s just a typical winter

My Ambitious 2026 Plan: From Galapagos Travel to Academic Achievements and Creative Pursuits | January 20 2026, 04:44

My plan for 2026:

– Travel to the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador for a week (summer)

– Finish and release a book on Information Retrieval (also summer, progressing slowly, first couple of chapters are already written. Already spent about 50-100 hours on this, the easy part)

– Release at least one scientific paper, probably on Data Mining (spring). Ideally, submit it somewhere to a journal (challenging). Already spent about 30 hours on this topic, a lot left to do.

– Make a step towards a PhD. Find professors, visit universities, understand the cost and assess my capabilities and resources.

– Continue studying fundamental mathematics and not die (linear algebra, calculus, probability theory, statistics, classical ML). In 2025, I spent about 200-400 hours on this topic.

– Continue studying Deep Learning and reach the “can teach” level. In 2025, I spent about 100-200 hours on this topic.

– Continue studying Data Mining/NLP.

– Update my book on RecSys, releasing version 2.0 with updates and corrections (autumn 2026)

– Make noticeable progress in painting and playing the piano. Specifically, learn Schubert’s serenade (Ständchen, D 889) completely and create at least one canvas that I wouldn’t be ashamed to give as a gift.

Exploring Identity and Survival in “Avatar 3: A Journey of Relocation” | January 06 2026, 17:34

After watching Avatar 3, we decided to rewatch the first and second movies. Watched it like it was the first time, but here’s what I thought.

For the family, relocation was an urgent rescue from physical annihilation or forced participation in a war. Moving, they encountered the necessity to “learn to swim” in a new legal, linguistic, and social environment, starting from scratch and losing their former social weight. The feeling of “we are strangers here” is the central emotion. Severance of ties with friends and colleagues, only the “nuclear family” remains as the sole island of identity. Essentially, Jake’s decision to flee to save his children is the fundamental dilemma of any parent in a conflict zone: fight to the end on their own land or leave to preserve the life of the next generation.

Upon arrival, they hardly receive a visa, and permanent residency isn’t promised. But eventually, it becomes clear that it’s impossible to hide from a global conflict geographically. Sooner or later one has to participate in protecting their new “reef.”

Jake’s children and he himself have five fingers, whereas purebred Na’vi have four. Plus, the accent. This is a constant visual reminder of their origin. Even if you are fully integrated, there is always a detail that marks you as an outsider. Your children may become “one of them” faster, but they still carry the mark of “hybridity.”

By the way, in the third part, all the blues already speak English. The Na’vi language was completely displaced by them.

P. S. By the way, it’s interesting that Jake didn’t bring any of humanity’s achievements to the new culture of Pandora at all. I don’t know, the wheel, fire, medicine, some mechanical stuff. Nothing.

The Unintended Consequences of Misguided Incentives | January 04 2026, 13:30

About KPIs. In English, there’s a concept called perverse incentive, “a harmful stimulus.” It occurs when you try to quash evil, but the methods become the perfect fertilizer for it. There’s a saying, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” (Marilyn Strathern based on Goodhart’s Law).

A classic example is the “Cobra Effect.” In colonial India, the British decided to reduce the snake population and offered a reward for every head. The plan seemed as reliable as a Swiss watch until Indians began breeding cobras on farms for the “harvest.” When the authorities realized they were being duped and cancelled the payments, the farmers simply released the now-useless snakes into the wild. As a result, there were many more cobras than before the program started 🙂

In a similar way, the French in Hanoi battled rats by paying money for severed tails. The city became overrun with lively yet tailless rats: the Vietnamese cut off the “currency” and released the creatures to breed further, to not lose a stable income.

In the 19th century, archaeologists searching for dinosaur bones and ancient fossils paid locals for every piece found. As a result, resourceful diggers intentionally shattered whole, priceless skeletons into small pieces to earn more by submitting them separately. Science wept, but the KPI for “number of finds” soared. A similar tragedy occurred with the Dead Sea Scrolls: Bedouins cut the found scrolls into small pieces to sell each fragment separately.

In the USA, this malady struck infrastructure. When building the Transcontinental Railroad, the government paid Union Pacific subsidies for every mile laid. In Nebraska, engineers, in a single corrupt impulse, drew a huge loop—the Oxbow Route. The extra 9 miles of detour made no sense for logistics but brought the builders hundreds of thousands of dollars “out of thin air.”

But if the “loop” in Nebraska was just theft, then the mistakes of U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were a tragedy. An aficionado of numbers and mathematical models, he tried to manage the Vietnam War like a Ford assembly line.

When General Edward Lansdale timidly noted that McNamara’s formulas lacked the variable “the spirit and will of the Vietnamese people,” the secretary noted it in pencil in his notebook. And then erased it. He said that if something cannot be measured, it’s unimportant. The main metric became the body count. Officers onsite, eager to curry favor, began labeling everyone indiscriminately as “enemies,” painting an illusion of imminent victory in Washington, while the actual situation spiraled into the abyss.

In science, there’s a radical principle similar to Occam’s Razor— “Newton’s Flaming Laser Sword” (also known as “Alder’s Razor”). Its essence: if something cannot be tested by experiment (or measurement), it’s not even worthy of discussion.

It sounds reasonable for physics, but in life, it’s a direct path to what sociologist Daniel Yankelovich called the degradation of perception. He described this as a descent through four steps:

1. First, we measure only what is easy to measure.

2. Then we ignore what is difficult to measure or requires qualitative assessment.

3. The third step—we decide that what cannot be measured is not so important.

4. And the final step—we declare that what cannot be measured actually does not exist.

And at that moment, we become blind. We view the world through the keyhole of metrics, while in the room behind the door, cobras are bred, dinosaur bones are broken, and wars are lost.

Dreams of Power: Cocaine, Rare Earth Metals, and Unexpected Diplomacy | January 03 2026, 13:40

I slept through everything. What are you betting on 1) all the cocaine is ours now? 2) they’ll release them in exchange for a deal on rare earth metals and oil? 3) Maduro turns up in Saratov?

Exploring Nature’s Design: How Insect Bites Transform into Palm Leaf Patterns | January 03 2026, 02:15

This is a palm leaf in the jungle about 60-70 centimeters wide. I stopped and wondered how it is that beetles chew through to create such a pattern.

I mean, when you think about it, the answer is obvious. They make one hole in a folded leaf, and then the leaf unfolds, creating many holes – like a paper snowflake. Upon contemplating this, I realized that palm leaves grow as a “cigar,” a rolled-up tube. I didn’t know this, but the very regular holes leave no other explanation.

But there is another thing – the holes are a bit large for a beetle or an ant. Obviously, if they were to eat a leaf that’s rolled up into a tube, they would end up biting through several layers at once, because if they ate the layers separately, the structure wouldn’t appear as regularly. But their mouths aren’t huge enough, of course, to eat such multi-layered leaves.

Apparently, an ant or beetle was eating the leaf while it was still small. Afterwards, the leaf grows evenly throughout and, obviously, the hole increases along with the leaf. The holes don’t heal; the leaf is alive and grows. A hole made by a beetle could initially be only a couple of millimeters in size, but then it grows to the size of a finger.