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
NASA satellites take a lot of photos of earth and they are available online to view but that doesn’t make it fun to look at them. So they have a site that spells out your name using landsat imagery. Which is a pretty cool way to showcase the images. You can try it out at the You Name in Landsat site.
Here’s how my name looks:
Hovering the cursor on each image gives you the name and location of the geological/geographical image used.
Source: Mastodon.world: @davidho
– Suramya
Grace Hopper is one of the founders of Programming languages and was the first person to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages which she then used to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL. She had a phenomenal impact on the field of Computer Science/Engineering and her lectures are extremely interesting to watch as even after 40 years the concepts she talks about are still relevant. The NSA has finally released the video recording of a 1982 lecture by Adm. Grace Hopper titled “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People.”
Initially they refused to do so because “With digital obsolescence threatening many early technological formats, the dilemma surrounding Admiral Hopper’s lecture underscores the critical need for and challenge of digital preservation. This challenge transcends the confines of NSA’s operational scope. It is our shared obligation to safeguard such pivotal elements of our nation’s history, ensuring they remain within reach of future generations. While the stewardship of these recordings may extend beyond the NSA’s typical purview, they are undeniably a part of America’s national heritage.”.
Thankfully after a massive push from the all over the world to get NSA to release the video saner minds prevailed and the entirety of the lecture has been released in two parts. You can watch them below:
Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (Part Two, 1982)
Since I don’t trust online systems to keep information available indefinitely, I have also archived the lectures on my system so if they disappear in the future I will have copies I can publish.
– Suramya
AI (or rather what is call AI right now), is not really intelligent but it does have a lot of risks associated with using it. We all know about the Deep Fakes and the hallucinations etc but those are not the only risks of using generative AI. The researchers at MIT have cataloged the over 700 risks of using generative AI.
The risks posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are of considerable concern to academics, auditors, policymakers, AI companies, and the public. However, a lack of shared understanding of AI risks can impede our ability to comprehensively discuss, research, and react to them. This paper addresses this gap by creating an AI Risk Repository to serve as a common frame of reference.
This comprises a living database of 777 risks extracted from 43 taxonomies, which can be filtered based on two overarching taxonomies and easily accessed, modified, and updated via our website and online spreadsheets. We construct our Repository with a systematic review of taxonomies and other structured classifications of AI risk followed by an expert consultation. We develop our taxonomies of AI risk using a best-fit framework synthesis. Our high-level Causal Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies each risk by its causal factors (1) Entity: Human, AI; (2) Intentionality: Intentional, Unintentional; and (3) Timing: Pre-deployment; Post-deployment. Our mid-level Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental, and (7) AI system safety, failures, & limitations. These are further divided into 23 subdomains. The AI Risk Repository is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to rigorously curate, analyze, and extract AI risk frameworks into a publicly accessible, comprehensive, extensible, and categorized risk database. This creates a foundation for a more coordinated, coherent, and complete approach to defining, auditing, and managing the risks posed by AI systems.
They have published a paper on it: The AI Risk Repository: A Comprehensive Meta-Review, Database, and Taxonomy of Risks From Artificial Intelligence that you should check out. They have also made their entire database available to copy for free as well.
Check it out if you have some free time.
Source: Boingboing.net: MIT’s AI risk database exposes 700+ ways AI could ruin your life.
– Suramya
Kensyouen_Y has created a video using Blender depicting an Anime character model who becomes sentient and starts playing around with Blender’s UI, messing around with different tools and functionalities, changing her own hair color via Shader Nodes, and eventually crashing the software with her boisterous high jinks.
This is a phenomenally creative video, something that I couldn’t create in a 100 years. 🙂 Check it out below.
Source: Boingboing.net: Anime character breaks free: Watch her hijack 3D software in video
– Suramya
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