I guess actually fixing the problems with the drainage that cause the roads in Bangalore to get flooded would have been too much work for BBMP, so instead of fixing the root issue they prohibit driving on the road during rainy season (which is half the year in Bangalore).
This sign is on the Wind Tunnel road, posted recently.
– Suramya
Watching movies or shows requires a certain amount of suspension of belief especially if it is a Sci-Fi or Fantasy movie. Most of the time this is fairly easy to do and makes for a fun watch or read. However, there are instances where no matter how much you try to suspend your belief it just doesn’t make sense and you are unable to watch the movie or show. Omni Loop is one such movie for me.
The movie sounded quite interesting as it is about time travel and I was looking forward to it, but once I started watching the movie within the first 5 mins I had to stop it as I couldn’t take it anymore. So, what happened in the first 5 mins that so annoyed me you might ask? The main character in the movie is a quantum physicist who is dying. The movie starts off with a doctor telling a lady that the the main character is dying because and I quote: she has a black hole growing in her chest. When I heard it I thought I must have been mistaken, because if there is a blackhole anywhere near a person they would be sucked inside it in micro-seconds.
A Black hole is a cosmic body of extremely intense gravity from which nothing, not even light, can escape. This means that they suck in any matter around them and incidentally that is how we can see them because of their enormous gravitational fields on nearby matter. We also have what are called mini-Black holes each with a mass that is only equal to or less than an asteroid. When the Large Hadron Collider went online folks were worried that it could create large numbers of mini black holes each of which could cause significant damage to earth before they dissipated.
If a black hole somehow managed to get lodged in someone’s chest (even a mini one), the gravitation forces would pull them apart and the weight would be so much that they wouldn’t be able to move even if they did manage to survive this somehow. The worst part was that this wasn’t shown as something that was unusual or rare. The doctor treated it the same way that they would have a tumor growing inside a person. If they had made it sound like a mystery that current science couldn’t explain maybe I would have continued to watch the movie but with the plot the way it was I just couldn’t continue to watch it.
– Suramya
I know at times folks at work don’t get along and that can become quite an issue for HR & Managers etc to solve. But I don’t think I can imagine this scenario happening in any of the companies that I have worked with in my 24 years of corporate experience. A group of 15 coworkers were on an office hiking retreat where they were scaling a 14,230-foot mountain. Which sounds like a fun team building exercise till it went horribly wrong.
14 of the 15 people managed to scale the peak successfully and then instead of waiting for the 15th person to complete as is required by common-sense, courtesy and team building they left the person near the peak to attempt the climb alone. One of the first rules that was drilled into our heads when I did my mountaineering course was that no one is left behind. Even if the last person is taking forever to finish the climb we had to wait till they completed before we could leave/start back. This is a basic safety rule so that people don’t have to go through what this guy did.
The lone employee made it to the summit at 11:30 a.m., but when he tried to descend, “he became disoriented,” according to rescue officials.
Making matters worse, his colleagues descending the mountain ahead of him inexplicably collected belongings left in a boulder field to mark the path down, officials said.“In his initial attempts to descend, he found himself in the steep boulder and scree field on the northeast slopes toward Shavano Lake,” according to officials.
The man, whose name and company were not released, used his cellphone to pin-drop his location to his co-workers, who informed him that he was on the wrong route and instructed him to hike back up to the summit to get to the correct trail down, officials said.
Just before 4 p.m. local time on Friday, he sent another location pin-drop to his colleagues that he was near the correct trail.
“Shortly after that message, a strong storm passed through the area with freezing rain and high winds, and he again became disoriented, losing his cell phone signal as well,” rescue officials said.
When his colleagues didn’t hear from him, they reported him missing to Chaffee County Search and Rescue at 9 p.m., some eight-and-a-half hours after he started his descent, officials said.
To make matters worse, they waited 8 1/2 hours before reporting him as missing. It was pure luck that he survived the trip and serious charges should be laid against each of the 14 folks who didn’t think twice before leaving him at the top of a mountain.
I really want to find out the company these folks are from so that I can ensure I never work there. This shows how bad or cutthroat/toxic the office environment is as they just left him up there.
– Suramya
Excel is both a blessing and a bane for companies. Because of its capabilities folks have created formulas/macros/scripts/functions etc in Excel that allows them to generate data that is used to take major financial decisions with real world impact. But that capability also makes it an ideal vector for infiltrating an organization using Macros or scripts in Excel files to compromise systems.
Back in Aug 2023, Microsoft first announced that they are going to support running Python inside an Excel file. After that there was no major talk about it so I had hoped this meant that they had abandoned the project, but sadly I was mistaken. Redmond announced the official release of Python in Excel for Windows users of Microsoft 365 Business and Enterprise in a blog post. The post has a lot of details on the new capabilities this gives to power users and frankly I can see why folks are excited about it. But from a security and version control point of view this is a disaster waiting to happen.
There is a new learning series available for free for 30 days on LinkedIn that incorporates numerous examples, tutorials, and tips on how to best leverage Python in Excel.
Included in the Excel for Python release is a large language model integration that will allow Excel users to ask the Copilot to build scripts for them with plain language commands.
Microsoft partnered with data science tool maker Anaconda to develop the Python-Excel integration. As we’ve previously reported, data can move effortlessly between the two platforms using a few custom-defined functions.
This two-way function sending is a key part of security – Microsoft states Python processes Excel data without revealing the user’s identity, and all Python code runs in a secure, isolated environment, only accessing libraries approved by Anaconda.
As with all the stuff MS has released recently, this also has LLM Integration but is on a very restricted list. The service is available to all Office 365 users with a valid Enterprise or Business Microsoft 365 subscription on the Current Channel.
Source: The Register: Python in Excel is here, but only for certain Windows users
– Suramya
You have to admire this person’s dedication and the effort they put in to ensure that the recipient regrets winning the $15 gift card from him.
It would have been even more fun if they shared the video of the persons reaction to getting this package, but… we will have to do with our imagination.
– Suramya
Saw this car parked in DD a few days ago. I have heard of offsetting your carbon emissions but this is a bit much… 🙂 The plant is literally growing in the mud-flap of the car.
– Suramya
The following screenshot of an email was shared over at Mastodon by @drahardja and I think the company dodged a bullet with this person. In my experience people who complain about pronouns are the ones who are most likely to be misogynistic and difficult to work with.
Hi After seeing that your signature includes pronouns, I’ve made the quick decision this company isn’t for me, as I don’t justify mental iliness or play the pronoun game, and I don’t want to be involved with a company that does. Please remove me from the potential candidate list.
I don’t have my pronouns in my mail signature but I do have it in the company directory and in Zoom. Having them there helps a lot because it removes ambiguity. My name has often been mistaken for being a girls name which has in the past led to some hilarious confusion and if others have their pronouns in the mail/directory I know the ‘Kris’ I am dealing with is a lady instead of a guy as I had assumed which ensures I don’t shoot myself in the foot when I meet them.
Also, calling this ‘mental illness’ is not cool. Being kind and inclusive is not an illness or weakness. If you watch or listen to these so called ‘alpha males’ who claim to be the peak of manliness you will soon realize that they are whiny scared little boys who are afraid of everything. Anything they don’t understand or like is unmanly or beta behavior. At one time I was thinking about doing a post making fun of them but then decided I have better things to do with my life.
In any case, long story short: Be kind, be inclusive and don’t be scared of the ‘other’.
– Suramya
I really want this Sky Alarm, although that being said since I am in Bangalore 90% of the time it will happen that I would step outside and find the sky completely covered by Clouds.
Thinking about it a little more, it might be a fun project to create. The data can be pulled from some of the astronomy sites that track predictable events (eclipses/meteor showers etc). The tricky part would be to get information for events that are last min, such as Aurora sightings etc.
Something to think about for when I get some free time.
– Suramya
Gender neutral language is difficult at first because we are not used to it, but as you start using gender neutral terms things over time it starts feeling natural. For me the most difficult word to stop using was ‘guys’ and it took me a while to stop using it. Even now I still end up using it every once in a while accidentally but it is something I work on. For those who keep telling everyone that it is a gender neutral term, the following screenshot that popped up in my feed says it best.
It is rude but it makes the point beautifully. ‘Guys’ is not a gender neutral term and it never was. Just that people are so used to using it and didn’t want to change that it became sort of accepted.
Language is powerful and important. It can build communities and connections or it can break connections. For example, if you have a mixed gender group and are calling everyone guys you are indirectly telling the non male population that they are not part of the team or not important enough to be recognized. This is not to show that you are ‘woke’ or whatever but just basic human courtesy.
You should always use the correct language when interacting with others and believe me it does get noticed.
– Suramya
I always thought the formula for Pi was simple, 22/7 but apparently that is not the case. There are multiple mathematicians who have spent a significant time coming up with a formula for calculating Pi precisely. For example, Madhava an Indian scholar, who lived from 1350 to 1425, found that pi equals 4 multiplied by a series that begins with 1 and then alternately subtracts or adds fractions in which 1 is placed over successively higher odd numbers (so 1/3, 1/5, and so on). One way to express this would be:
While the formula is quite simple to implement and calculate it takes a long time to get accurate results. There are other formulas as well to calculate Pi. The latest one was found when physicists Arnab Priya Saha and Aninda Sinha of the Indian Institute of Science were exploring the String Theory and instead found a completely new formula for calculating Pi. They published their findings in their Paper (Field Theory Expansions of String Theory Amplitudes)
Saha and Sinha discovered the following formula which shows that Madhava’s formula is only a special case of a much more general equation for calculating pi.
I tried understanding the math behind the formula but it didn’t really make much sense to me so I am just going to quote the explanation given by Scientific American here instead of trying to explain it myself. 🙂
This formula produces an infinitely long sum. What is striking is that it depends on the factor λ , a freely selectable parameter. No matter what value λ has, the formula will always result in pi. And because there are infinitely many numbers that can correspond to λ, Saha and Sinha have found an infinite number of pi formulas.
If λ is infinitely large, the equation corresponds to Madhava’s formula. That is, because λ only ever appears in the denominator of fractions, the corresponding fractions for λ = ∞ become zero (because fractions with large denominators are very small). For λ = ∞, the equation of Saha and Sinha therefore takes the following form:
Saha and Sinha’s formula can be adapted based on the assumption of an infinitely large parameter.The first part of the equation is already similar to Madhava’s formula: you sum fractions with odd denominators. The last part of the sum (–n)n – 1, however, is less familiar. The subscript n – 1 is the so-called Pochhammer symbol. In general, the expression (a)n corresponds to the product a x(a + 1) x (a + 2) x … x (a + n – 1). For example, (5)3 = 5 x 6 x 7 = 210. And the Pochhammer symbol in the above formula therefore results in: (–n)n – 1 = (–n) x (–n + 1) x (–n + 2) x … x (–n + n – 3) x (–n + n – 2).
..
..
As the two string theorists report, however, pi can be calculated much faster for smaller values of λ. While Madhava’s result requires 100 terms to get within 0.01 of pi, Saha and Sinha’s formula for λ = 3 only requires the first four summands. “While [Madhava’s] series takes 5 billion terms to converge to 10 decimal places, the new representation with λ between 10 [and] 100 takes 30 terms,” the authors write in their paper.
Source: Hacker News: String Theorists Accidentally Find a New Formula for Pi
– Suramya
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