Reading “What happened”

What Happened is a 2017 book by Hillary Rodham Clinton about her experiences as the Democratic Party’s nominee and general election candidate for President of the United States in the 2016 election. I can’t bear reading the whole book, but some passages are quite interesting.  For instance:

 “To make sure we built the most diverse team ever assembled by a presidential campaign, I brought in Bernard Coleman as the first-ever chief diversity officer, made sure women were half the staff, and hired hundreds of people of color, including for senior leadership roles”


That one made me cry and laugh at the very same time.  They are crying that she lost after choosing “the most diverse” instead of “the most effective” or even “somewhat effective” team members. “L” is for Logic.  But it’s a real trend in some societies.  I still vividly remember some companies that chose engineers according to their ability to be politically correct in their messages.
– Do you know how to build a bridge?
– No, but I understand the importance of equality for transgenders.
– You are hired!

It’s very funny to me that some people don’t see the relation between
- “We started the first presidential company in the world with positive discrimination for the team”
and
- “We lost badly.”

What do we need? It's obvious:  more positive discrimination. We just didn't have it enough.

Do you think it’s possible to have success if you form your team not by their qualification but by other factors?

The cost of your mistake

I got a new project recently that related to money transaction and conversions. And of course during the first week of working, I have already made a lot mistakes.  What is bad about those mistakes for me is that because we don’t have a “staging” environment, and I have to work with real “production” cases, every mistake I make is a financial loss to the company – how much will they cost the company?

It sounds like a very broken design, doesn’t it? I went to the boss to clarify that and got the answer that it’s better for the company to have some losses now in order to deliver new features faster.  This is a new mindset for me.  I am going this way now, but I can’t shake a feeling of remorse when I make a mistake.  After I made a new one last week that caused more loss than the salary they’re paying me, I felt uncomfortable again and still it seems that nobody cared.  I did a little bit research about “the price of mistakes”.

I understand that in surgery the cost of a mistake can be much different that in my humble vocation, so I limited my research to “program code mistakes”, and this is what I found:


1.     4 June 1996 $370 000 000 caused by an integer overflow error
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_(spacecraft)

2.    3 December 1999, Mars Polar Lander. $328 000 000 caused by an uninitialized variable

3.    There are a lot of such stories in the aerospace and flight industry (50+ cases), so I tried to find other areas, and it was easy.

4.    Pensions and welfare: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3235394.stm
5.    American electricity blackout in 2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
6.    Medicine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25

The last one is especially terrible in my opinion. Patients received more radiation then prescribed due to bad software.  I don’t know why, but this is more intimidating to me than the rocket crash.

The idea that something can slowly kill you because of an obtuse programmer is especially scary because everything nowadays is controlled by computer programs.

I wanted to comfort myself about my mistakes with this research, but it looks like I made things even worse. Now I am glad that I don’t write code for hospitals and that all my mistakes are only about money.  However, now I’ve trust in anyone’s else code.

Have you run into bugs that influenced your life?

Strange and posh type of coffee: kopi luwak

When I was in Vietnam once in a restaurant I saw ridiculously high price for  a cup of coffee. I was surprised, and asked a waiter why this is so. She answered me  it’s “Kopi Luwak”. At that moment this explanation didn’t help me much, but it did a few days after I had a chance to visit a local farm that produces this kind of coffee.
It was fun indeed.

So the reason is that they have a lot of  special animals, called

“palm civets” or something like that. They feed them coffee beans, and then after a cycle, they collect these partially digested beans for future coffee production. There is a special cult about this process. It costs almost as much as gold, but I was warned that there are a lot of counterfeit products.

Frankly, I was not too eager to taste it, but I managed. I also bought a big pack of this coffee for my friends (they asked me before my trip), but I still didn’t understand why they asked me for that. I was not impressed to put it mildly, but it made me think about the market of posh products in general.

It seems to me that people like to pay for special characteristics even if they result in worse products afterwards. I have visited many restaurants in my life and tasted many different things, but  I still think that the best products were just simple, fresh and ordinary dishes. Never in my life have I found something great in posh restaurants besides white cloth-tables and silverware.

As for me, the same thing happened with kopi luwak — over-complicated process, ridiculous price, and pretty average result at the end.

Would you like to try such coffee?
Do you agree with my conclusion?

Old New Year

On the night of Jan 14 we celebrate Old New Year in Russia.

How can the New Year be old? It's simple if you are in Russia.

The trick is that before 1918 in Russia we used the Gregorian calendar, which differs from the Julian calendar. It is shifted by two weeks.

Jan 1 of the Julian calendar is Jan 14 by  the Gregorian calendar.

I like standardization, and I am proud that we made the change, that we haven't chosen to create a mess with different standards like with miles, kilometers, liters and pints.

But some people didn’t like that shift at that time, and they continued to celebrate New Year by the Gregorian calendar.

It was called New Year by Old style or Old New Year for brevity.

Since we like any reason for celebration, people started to love the traditional New Year and it ha become our new tradition.

How do we celebrate it? Well, it's kind of the same New Year, but a lighter version.
When the holidays are almost over, and we are getting ready to get back our duties, celebrating the Old New Year is kind of the final point in that holiday's journey.

Despite all that, it is still an "unofficial" holiday, and I have no idea why.

If something is widely common and exists for 100 years, in my opinion it’s time to admit it officially, even if it’s strange.

Do you have something like that? Do you celebrate something twice?

Simple things that can (or already can't) make you so happy.

With my family I live for a while in a new place, in a new country as well.

Everything is different, and there are so many things to notice.

So does my older son. He has thousand questions every minute and I can't answer many of them.

Near to our house there is a small shop or workshop of a shoemaker.

I never saw that in Russia. We have a few places where you can repair your shoes, but definitely there are no more artisan shoes, everything is manufactured.

We visited that workshop once, twice, just to look around, and then my boy asked for a belt, real "man's" belt made from the leather, black and strict.

I didn't pay enough attention to that, belt as belt who cares, what is interesting in it?
But then I found that my boy spoke with me about belts too much in a few next days. What kind of belts men wear, why belts are mandatory for soldiers, why they are made of different material, and have different colors, and many many others.

And I realized  that he never had one yet.

Well, there is no choice I thought. We made a deal.
He learned enough vocabulary to buy this belt, and I gave him money for that.

So, next day he want to this workshop, and said something like that:

Hola, señor, como estas? 
Quiero un cinturon de piel. Tengo seis euros. 
Cuanto cuesta eso? y eso? Puede darme eso.
Gracias!

I was proud of him, I stayed and listened to that in the distance, without ability to help him.

But what happened next was interesting for me as well.
After my boy chose the model of the model, master didn't give him this one, but made another of the same type.
He measured my boy, and using some work-piece made the new one in no time.
Tailored to my boy, the individual one.

That was pretty unusual, we usually buy ready things.

And after he has got this belt, my boy became so happy that I started to think about that for a while.
Looking at his smiley and happy face, listening to him about all those comparisons of belts, I am thinking is there any simple thing that can makes as happy as he is.

And I can't find an easy answer. It seems for me that I have to buy a new house, or an yacht to be so happy, not less.

Of course he wears this belt always now, even during swimming and sleeping.
Even under the t-shirt and shorts. And I definitely can do nothing with that.

I think it is the receipt of happiness: to be unsophisticated and to have less experience. 
 

It's harder and harder (for me at least) feel this pure happiness as years go.

Can you?
Do you know anything what can make you happy so easily?

Ice slides

The winter is coming here, so it’s a good time to tell about our traditional fun thing that we have during winters.
In my place, we don’t have lack of snow, on contrary, we have as much of it that we like to utilize the excessive amount of it for anything.

But if you just crude those piles of snow on the curb, the roads start to look like long corridors or trenches.

The municipality has to find another way to use that snow. They try different ways.
They build sculptures and ice towns for decoration. For some reason, we call those sculptures as “small forms”.

They build ice slides for fun, and people do like them.

They transfer snow to the special snow polygons out of the city.
But it’s related only to public, municipal, and federal places. For other places, we have to solve those problems on our own.

For instances, many groups of children in my boys’ kindergarten have their own places to walk. And the snow is a problem there as well.
As part of my volunteer job, every year I take care of those snow for those lands.
It’s too boring for me just transfer the snow somewhere, and because I can remember how much I loved those ice slides – I always construct those sliders.
It takes a few days of work for me because ice needs some time to get strength structure.

I start from making a big pile of snow, much larger than ice sliders would be.
Then I form the ladder to top, and the slope.
It’s the most laborious part of the work, and it takes 5 or more hours of my efforts.

Then starts the easiest part, I have to gradually pour the construction with water. I use long pipe connected to central water supply. It’s easy, I don’t have to do any hard physical work, but it’s really time-consuming.

I can’t pour too much water because snow will melt too active and form holes, and I have to do it layer by layer to make ice strong enough for children’s sleds.

Sometimes if I make mistake with water, I have to stop and add some snow to the place where I made that mistake.

Also, I have to make pauses up to half-hour (depend on the temperature outside) to wait for transformation water to ice.

It’s a long work, but seeing how children happy using it is rewarding enough.

Hammam

Once I wrote about Russian banya. it’s the most popular type of saunas in my place but it’s not the only one.

Other popular types are Finish sauna and Hammam.

Hammam origin is Turkish or Arabic. I never visited a hammam in those countries so it might be that I can speak about a localized version.

In the case of hammam I can see a few key difference from other types of sauna:
1. It’s not as hot as Russian banya. 30-50 C degrees normally.
2. It’s wet, ultra wet, the main substance of transferring heat is the water steam.
3. There must be a massive stone bed or play to lay down.
4. As I got it hammam usually implies massage.

My kids like hammam very much, we alway visit the same one.
Because it’s a lot of steam inside it looks like thin fog.
And they ask me: father let’s go to play hedgehogs.

It’s kind of a joke. They refer to a famous Russian cartoon about a hedgehog who was lost in the fog. When they inside that steam they often pretend that they are those hedgehogs.
Here is a picture of the hammam that we usually visit:

It has tiled walls, floor, and ceiling. It has a tap with cold water.
And there is a big stone bed in the center and stone benches on the perimeter.
The process is quite simple: you get in, lay down on the warm stone, and the steam generator starts working.

In a few minutes, there are so many steam that you can’t even see your own nose. It’s hot and wet because of steam.

The ceiling is not flat. It has the form of the dome. And it makes an interesting effect. The steam is precipitated on the highest part of the dome, in the center and drop down on you as a cold rain. Not too much a few drops per minutes but it’s good for contrast.

After 5-10 minutes steam generator stops working and air begin to cool down, that is the time for relaxing. You can just lay in the cooling room and relax.

I’ve read on the Internet that people spend a lot of time sitting in hammams, but I don’t think that those are the same types that we have.

In our hammam I can’t lay inside more than for twenty minutes.
Then I have to jump into the cold pool.

Tell me about your favorite type of sauna?

Do we do our hammams close enough to the original?

Greenhouses

Russian climate isn’t good enough for gardening. We have a few warm zones, but in general we are pretty Northern Country.  Many regions are not suitable for agriculture at all, the rest we call “risky for agricultural”. Risky means you can’t predict the harvest. Sometimes it’s good but often it is not.


My region, Ural, is what we joke “Not risky already”, you should know what kind of game you play with the nature. The only good thing is that we have enough water in form of precipitations, but we rarely have enough warm sunny days.
We had to find solution for that, and we use greenhouses. In past we used to have massive greenhouses made of wood, steel and glass. Now it’s obsolete. Modern greenhouses made of plastic and metal wire.

Many of them have special lamps that helps to plants growing, many of them have irrigation systems.
Some greenhouses managed by microcomputers and they base they decisions on sensor’s data: temperature, moisture, etc.

I didn’t own that fancy devices yet, I got sick of them in my childhood. It was a hard, full-time job to manage a huge greenhouse. At that time it was necessary for our family, and I’m happy that this time is gone.
Unfortunately for me my wife haven’t such an experience and because of that she has a ridiculous idea that growing tomatoes in greenhouse if fun. Of course I lost the argument about this, and got to build a small greenhouse. Something for trial period that helps us to make a decision do we need one or not.
I didn’t wanted to waste any extra money for that projects, so I found a few planks, roll of plastic and a few assistants.
On the very beginning stage of construction

 And that is how it looked a few hours later:

Not a fancy one, I agree but it saves my marriage and my money. I always judge my projects by their effectiveness and this one hard to beat in that regard.
That construction has a lot of cons. One have to open when it too hot otherwise there is a chance to have cooked tomatoes inside. It doesn’t produce too many vegetables, but it’s enough for having fun.
Weekly crop looks like that:

I am really afraid if I let the cat out of the bag because in this case I’ll have to build a new, better one greenhouse for the next season.

Hidden threat

Happily, we don’t have too many menacing animals in our place. There are no poisonous scorpions, blood-thirsty crocodiles, no stealthy panthers — even the birds are peaceful. The only candidates to scare people are wolves, bears, and tigers. Most of them are tired of seeing Russians, and that’s why they avoid human contact while living on their own deep inside the forests. But it doesn’t mean that there are no threats at all. Some of them are so little that it’s even hard to notice them, but they can be more dangerous than a bear.

I’m going to show you the scary one: Ixodes ricinus. There are many varieties of them: Ixodes ricinus, Ixodes
persulcatus, Ixodes ricinus, Dermacentor reticulatus and others. But for simplicity let’s just say we have only one type and call them all “Ixodes”.

Why are they dangerous? Those tiny bugs are carriers for many fatal mortal diseases. Lyme disease, borreliosis, encephalitis are his “friends”. They need the blood of animals for their offspring, so they try to reach some animal or human after they wake up after winter. They are tiny; their bite is undetectable because they use some anesthetic during biting, so it’s really hard to protect yourself.
But there are a few tricks still.

1. They don’t bite immediately after contacting human skin. They crawl for a pretty long time trying to find the most prospective place to bite. So if you are in the forest, you’d better scan your skin more often that once in 2 hours.
   
2. After biting, they suck your blood for 5-6 days, enough time to notice them and to apply for medical help. But remember that it’s better to detach the bug immediately after detection.
   
3. Never throw away the bug after removing. Keep it and pass it to the medical center. They can determine if it is infected or not, and this can save your life.
   
4. To prevent getting bit, it is best to use special aerosols and special forest clothes.
   
5. If Half you are going to live in a place where there are many Ixodus insects, you had better get vaccinated.

 

Those bugs live not only in forests, but they can also spread into cities and parks. And there are many cases of biting inside the cities. Usually in my area local services do special manipulations, spreading chemicals that kill those bugs. All the territories where children might play are processed in a special way. We can even call that service and ask them to process our personal territories of houses, gardens, and summer houses, but I’ve never done it. It’s a real threat there, and I have many personal stories about those bad guys, but regarding all that amount of time I spend in the forest, it should be so, just a consequences of the law of big numbers.

I just read that in May more than 10,000 people were bitten by those bugs in my area. If you are a city boy and follow these simple rules of safety, perhaps you will never meet them anywhere but in this blog.

Movie posters

We have a lot of cinemas in my town, and in Russia in general. Сinematography used to be extremely popular art here since USSR.

I’ve heard that all the old movies were really profitable because hundred million people went to cinemas to watch them.

Now with DVD, tv, the internet, and other ways of watching movies, local cinemas almost extinct. We don’t have “simple” cinema anymore.

Those that we have are super-duper fancy: they offer you powerful sound with many sources, huge screens, air conditioning, some snacks etc.
On contrary small local cinemas from my youth offered you exactly one thing — a movie.
Today I am going to show you a fun thing from the old good days, those movie posters.

Printing was an expensive technology and thus many cinemas couldn’t use it. They used to use painted poster.

Some artist painted the poster after watching the movie for them.
It became to be a special art, as I see that.
Many people found it very special and fun.

I heard that some cinemas still use that to attract people.
Enough words! I was told that a picture worth a thousand words, so here they are.

For the movie “Terminator”

 For the movie “Men in black 2”

For the cartoon “Shreck 2”

A poster for the movie “Total recall”

Birch sap

Russia has a lot of forests, and the most common type of tree here is birch.

Birches are very common all over the world but nevertheless, we call it “our” tree.

We even have a joke about it, usually, we say to anyone who is going abroad “how would you subsist without birches”.

Birches lose their leaves during the winters, and they draw the water from the trunk for a winter period, because frozen water can damage the structure.

When winter ends they need to grow back their leaves and they suck in a lot of water from the earth, fortunately, there is a lot of water made from melting snow.

Some people joke that if in the spring you can “hear” the birch by leaning your ear to the trunk and hearing those pumps working.

We use that water movement to make birch sap.

The procedure is quite simple. One has to have a small drill, a few conduits, and a jar or a bottle to store it.
Make a small hole in the bark of the tree, connect all the pipes with duct tape and leave it for a few hours.
The time needed to fill the bottles varies; it depends on the tree, place, and the time of the spring.

Generally speaking, there is only a week in the beginning of May when the speed of the water is high. You can collect 7-10 liters of sap in a day from a reasonably big tree.

It is still possible to collect the sap after the season, but it will take too long.

The sap is sweet but not too much. It contains about 1-3% of sugar. It has a very special flavor, but for me personally, it reminds me of a dash of honey dissolved in water.

Many people believe that it’s very healthy.
And I can remember that when I was young I used to be able to get some  in our school cafeteria.

You can see on the picture how they collect that sap if they need a lot of it:

The modern generation of children prefers Cola for sure.

I collected a medium-sized jar of the birch sap recently. My boys only tasted it briefly but weren’t impressed.

Managing ice bridges

Roads in Russia is the typical subject for jokes. Since the country is big and the population is spread unequally there are many white spaces between cities and villages, hundreds and thousands kilometers of roads without anyone living around.  Add to that our climate and puzzle will be solved.

That’s why we got used to using some unique ways to improve the connectivity.  One of them is winter roads and bridges.
Bridges is a hard thing to manage in our climate. We have a few factors those make this task harder.

Those are:
– Ice movement in spring, when a huge ice plates can destroy anything on their way
– Water overflows, when snow is melting the river stream can have hundred times more water than usual.
Mostly those troubles happen in spring, and we found a way to avoid them:  seasonal bridges. The bridges that exist only in winter.
When the temperature is bellow zero, the water turns into ice easily. And ice is a good material for construction if you know what are you doing.

A specialized car is able to build a bridge from nothing just in a few days.
It takes water from the river and spread it in the tiny drips into the air under a future bridge. Because of physics the tiny amount of water turns into ice almost immediately, and when they fall on the surface them meld together.
Depending on the needs this car can freeze as much ice as it needed for bridge capacity.

It’s cheap: you don’t need to transfer any materials, the main component (water) is already in the place.

It’s efficient: 70 cm of ice can carry a 60 tons car, and when it’s -15 outside you need only 50 minutes for each centimeter of new ice.
Thus you need about 60 hours to make a bridge which can serve for 6-8 months.
It’s a good technology but it has some cons.

It forces people to do some planning. If some regions accessible for trucks only in the winter period, we have to manage that properly and accumulate all that we need in the stores before summer will come. We call it “winter delivery” and got used to that.

Another cons is that in Spring, the massive amount of ice is dangerous for objects which are located downstream.
That’s why we need to destroy all those bridges on our own before ice will go.

If the bridge is small the road workers can do the markup with chainsaws and then ice will be broken on small parts with those line, but if the bridge is big it’s much easier to blast it.

Scuba diving lake

I live in industrial area and we have a lot of quarries here.
When the mining is done usually they got flooded by water.

Sometimes because of type of that mine those hand-made lakes are interesting. For instance: this one on the picture above is flooded nickel quarry, and it somehow prevent any green weeds or fish live in it. So it's water always clear and transparent.

Probably it is not useful for humans as well, that's why we don't have holidaymakers here.
But there is one kind of people who liked empty and transparent water more than others: it's divers.
They made this lake their residence.

They create a lot of stories in the depth, there are a few pictures of those stories:

• a taxi bus

• a post apocalypse picture

• a place for office worker

• a recreation room for playing checkers
• a bike for cycling

• and even a plane

They use that lake for training and also for giving shows.
I like such examples when motivated people do things and create circumstances for themselves without asking others help.

They were not crying and bombarding our municipality with requests to create a park for them, they just made it.

It reminds me ancient times, when people were able to make things for common prosperity: building churches, bridges and roads without asking someone.

3D Printing Experience

Reading Facebook once, I ran into a funny contest. It was a “whistle contest”.  Contestants were trying to create a whistle, as loud as possible .
Most of them were using 3D printing for their models.
It’s logical because it’s hard or impossible to do their fancy models in other ways.
The topic was kind of interesting for me. I read it, and I found that many of the participants used physics and math in a way which was hard for me to understand.
They were struggling hard for each 0.01 decibel (dB).

Immediately I wanted to try one of the whistles. I found last year‘s contest winner and downloaded his model.  In case if you are interested already, here is the link to the model: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1179160 

The next challenge for me was finding a 3D printer around. Never before had I used a 3D-printer.  
In fact this was the easiest part. Google easily helped me find a 3D-printer owner who lived in my neighborhood.  
I called him, and he agreed to print those whistles.  
I got three of them on the next day. They were able to produce a very loud sound indeed, but honestly I expected even more from them. 
I was slightly disappointed by this fact.

But another thing which I got was even better — an acquaintance.
The guy who I found was an interesting one, and I was very glad to have met him.
He is deep into the topic of 3D printing. He builds and sells them and has written a book about 3D printing.  He is a big enthusiast and coach.

Because of those whistles I got a fascinating lecture about 3D printers and trends for free.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to take photos during that, but I got an agreement to do that later.
It’s a quite interesting topic as it seems for me now, and I am pretty sure I am going to get a 3D printer soon.