nikhil.io

Coached by a former Wall Street bond trader who studied the opposition and set up a pipeline that produces Superstar Mathletes:

“You wouldn’t grab a kid in ninth grade who’s never played football and expect him to be a great high-school football player,” he said. “For most of these kids, this is their football.”

Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped.

It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter.

Many of the gifted kids in his program have parents who work at the nearby University of Florida and push to get on Mr. Frazer’s radar. Others he finds on his own. He tracks down test scores of students in his district, follows the data and recruits high achievers. Some who were discovered by his spreadsheets have since graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with math degrees and landed on Wall Street themselves.

The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.”

Disturbing fictionalization of a real-life tragedy (cached). Based on a book by Jon Krakauer. Andrew Garfield is simply excellent as a devout Mormon, dogged detective, and patriarch (“priesthood holder”) of his family.

Features some quick lessons in the History of the LDS which was not very flattering to the Church. Characters say “I’ve had a revelation” a lot before proceeding to perform all manner of shitty deeds. It’s a meditation over common-sense and rationality, spiritual doubt and loss, and the unbridled power that most religions impress into the hands of men by upholding and sanctifying patriarchy.

Each episode would start with one of the most beautiful title cards I’ve seen for a show:

They should give this young actor an Emmy for the few minutes she’s on screen 💯

Came recommended by HU. I had to borrow them from PG¹. A limited, 7-part comic book series based on one of my favorite movies. Told from the perspective of John Doe and provides his backstory which is about as sad and disturbing as you can imagine it would be. About as gory as the movie itself. Most parts have a different style. Plenty of out-of-context Bible quotes. Just really well-executed.

You predict (or have insider information) that the price of lawnmowers will fall. The current market price of a lawnmower is $1,000. You go to Eddie’s Lawnmower Rental Company and rent a lawnmower from Eddie for $10 a day. He doesn’t care about you returning the same lawnmower; he just wants you to return a lawnmower (assume that all lawnmowers involved in this story are in great working condition).

You sell this lawnmower to your neighbour for $1,000.

Ten days later, and as you predicted, the price of lawnmowers falls to $500. Now you buy another lawnmower for $500 and return a lawnmower to Eddie. So now you have gained: $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $400.

Now say you made a bad prediction and the price of lawnmowers went up to $1,500. So now you have lost $1,000 - ($10 x 10 days = $100) - ($1,500 on the lawnmower you bought) = $600.

Theoretically, there is no bottom to your losses. So you have to be very careful when you short things. It’s not for everyone. Stick to Index Funds if you don’t understand what you’re doing.

Finally, here’s some discussion on where the expression ‘going short’ may have come from.

Macula is an absolutely lovely typeface by Jacques Le Bailly.

It reminded me of Impossible Type by Fleta Selmani.

I also found out that Eric Demaine has an “Impossible Folding Font”.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you’re selling to them. (link)

Jira is a tire fire. It should be condemned and officially designated a superfund site. My goddamn ticket tracker shouldn’t spin up my fans when I try to do something as austere as access the backlog, but, as we all know, it’s impossible to display tickets withou 21 MB of JavaScript and 164 HTTP requests. (Yes, those are real numbers.) (link)

and finally,

JIRA makes it dangerously easy to implement overly bureaucratic processes. A certain kind of organization is drawn to it for that reason. Even a healthy organization switching to JIRA can get carried away with the tools now at its disposal. JIRA is a software product but also a social institution, an organizational philosophy. Sure, you can have the software without the attitude or vice versa, but use of JIRA is still a (weak) negative signal about the quality of an employer.

Turns out that the main thing protecting employee autonomy is the logistical difficulty of micromanagement. JIRA “solves” that problem. (link)

A giant, disjointed fucking mess. Tried to pay attention but I zoned out twice watching it. I couldn’t even tell you what this movie is about.

For day-to-day things, a 10-year old MacBook Air is perfectly adequate (except, maybe, if you’re trying to read an article on the Des Moines Register’s or KCCI’s websites without using a PiHole…)

Didn’t realize it was a four-parter. Major nostalgia. Have forgotten most of my French but I somehow still remember a lot of words for things (and their gender!) thanks to these books (well, Volume 1 at least). Looks like the CBSE still uses it. Here’s audio to accompany the books.

This beauty is by Owen Gent an artist and illustrator from Bristol (Insta). He appears to do a lot of book covers and I just love his work. Here are a few favorites.

I know nothing of D&D, wanted to find out more after watching the latest season of Stranger Things, and came by this video. I still don’t understand how the figurines contribute to the gameplay but was amazed by his vast collection of them. Lots of lovely passion and camaraderie here ♥️

Here’s the campaign’s website and Instagram.

That would be a Swiss gun instructor. His country has 2.3 million guns per 8.6 million people and has had exactly one mass shooting since 2001.

They are able to do this despite being one of the most armed European countries because they have commonsense gun laws, actually fucking act to prevent senseless tragedy, and do not fetishize or worship their guns or the hallowed, immutable, “God-given” Second Amendment.

There was yet another mass shooting in America, this time in Ames, Iowa, a collegetown I lived in for many years. Three innocent people died. More thoughts and prayers by our effete, corrupt leaders until the next horrifying and avoidable tragedy. Nothing will change.

Update March 21 2023

Amil Niazi in a sobering article about ambition, COVID, women, mothers, and late-stage capitalism.

Think jq but for HTML/DOM. If you wanted to get all the post titles on this log,

 curl -s -o - https://log.nikhil.io/ | gunzip - | pup "header > h2 > a" text{}

Lovely stuff.

Saw with LD. Revenge flick set in Scandinavia in 895 AD. LD thought that the ultraviolence was a bit gratuitous and didn’t serve the plot very well. I don’t know what one would expect from a story about a beefy Viking beserker hell-bent on revenge. Lush, beautiful, amazing visuals from Eggers and crew. I wish I saw this in the theater. This is Eggers’ third movie after The Lighthouse (which we thoroughly enjoyed) and The Witch (which I am too much of a chicken to watch). Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy were excellent.

Excellent cinematography and art direction. Bouncy background score by Thaman. Rana Daggubati stole the show, is magnetic in every scene he’s in, and we were all amazed by the ease with which he plays arrogant douchenozzles 💯 Could’ve been at least an hour shorter. Lovely poetry.

It’s hosted by three University of Iowa engineers and scientists who are tired of “cropaganda” and is rather entertaining. The latest episode calls the recent E15 Law a “Fart in a Hurricane”.

One of the hosts is an engineer named Chris Jones who also writes a very lively blog with wonderful nuggets like this:

See also: “Iowa is Addicted to Cornography”

I can stare at photographs of the Nefertiti Bust all day. It’s just so alive. It was carved out of limestone and covered in stucco/plaster. The eyes were made out of quartz and affixed with beeswax. Just so beautiful. Wikipedia has a 3D model you can look at.

Indecision has been a pretty huge problem in my life and this comment by /u/tomwaste hit home.

I’m not sure if people have experienced the same but when I entered my 30s I became convinced I was rapidly running out of time. Rather than using that as motivation I let it paralyze me with indecision because I “couldn’t afford to make the wrong choice.” Consequently, I’m now 39 and, though I’ve had great things happen in my 30s, I regret spending so much time worrying and so little time committing to a course of action.

What’s the simplest way out of this mire of Analysis Paralysis?

“One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. ‘Which road do I take?’ she asked. ‘Where do you want to go?’ was his response. ‘I don’t know,’ Alice answered. ‘Then,’ said the cat, ‘it doesn’t matter.”

Their comment also reminded me of this Sylvia Plath poem illustrated by Gavin Aung Than of Zen Pencils.

This is Zephyr, a “captive-born gray wolf” at the Wolf Conservation Center in NY. Below, you can hear him and his friends orchestrate some of the most beautiful sounds you will hear today. I’ve watched this five times and it was somehow even better with my eyes closed.

Here’s the Wolf Conservation Center’s YouTube channel for more music. Fuck I love wolves ♥️🐺

Simple, consistent, SVG, adjustable stroke-width, and there are 1900 of them (and counting).

My dudes. Cached here via YouTube because it is too precious to be yanked off the internet. Via Rob G.

It also occurred to me that the OS in the video would be more usable, more respectful, and less full of spyware than the giant crock of shit that is Windows 11.

It’s what all the Patagonia-clads are raving about. They tell me it solves all perf problems in a snap.

Update

Here’s an NPM package. And, of course, Java if you’d like to deploy this in an Enterprise™ setting.

Summary of Wikipedia article: Japanese kimono didn’t have pockets. They needed something to store their stuff in. So they made containers that they hung from their kimonos’ sashes¹. The part that secured the container to the sash at the top was called a netsuke (“root attached”.)

Here’s a really cute one of a sleeping cat from the 19th century 😻

Update

Here’s another. It’s a crouching tiger 😍

This is from a while ago but I didn’t get the memo. It’s a little crazy:

It’s named after Reddit user /u/vaieriepieris, an ESL teacher from Texas, who made it for a map subreddit in 2013.

• There are more Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Communists inside the circle than outside it.
• It “pulls all of this off while being mostly water and including the most sparsely populated country on earth (Mongolia).” (Source).
• It also contains the highest mountain and deepest trench.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. This really got me:

My job is to keep our code running while other packagers are changing theirs.

Lord have mercy. NPM continued use and existence is proof that (Almost) Every Day is a Miracle ✨

As far as Indian Gurus go, I find this guy more illumined and full of practical, actionable advice than, say, this guy, less full of shit than this one, and definitely less batshit crazy than this one.

Via LT 🙏

Update

The creator of the video is Masood Boomgaard. Here’s his YouTube channel. And here’s the Balm your Soul needs in its entirety 🙏 🌸

I mean just look at it 🥰

Really cool stuff. Trained on the New York Times ingredients corpus (large 13.5MB CSV) and turns this

ingredients = [
  "3 large melons",
  "5 1/2 cups water",
  "2 cups flour",
]

into this

[
  {
    "name": "melons",
    "unit": None,
    "qty": 3.0
  },
  {
    "name": "water",
    "unit": "cups",
    "qty": 5.5
  },
  {
    "name": "flour",
    "unit": "cups",
    "qty": 2
  }
]

Heslin’s vow on Wednesday comes one day after Jones offered an FBI agent and 18 members of 10 families who lost loved ones in the school shooting $120,000 each to settle defamation lawsuits he lost against them in Texas and Connecticut late last year.

[…] Jones, the host of the “Infowars” internet program, called the Sandy Hook tragedy “staged,” “synthetic,” “manufactured,” “a giant hoax,” and “completely fake with actors.”

Saved me a ton of time with small project I’m working on right now. Looks like it’s written in C.

Tedious “I can make longass movies like Marty too!” stuff from Ridley Scott. Fascinating and tragic story in real life though. Adam Driver is reserved. Lady Gaga is outstanding. Jared Leto is a fucking clown and is either trying too hard or doesn’t give a shit anymore.

Al Pacino is in this movie as well. He is this person in the movie.

Lessons learned from “Frog and Toad Together”: Don’t be like Toad and yell at your seeds. Do what you must with love and care and leave them be. They’ll be fine.

“But when?!”

Via this collection of lovely talks by my main man Jack Kornfield ♥️

Opportunity and luck bestow their benisons upon a once-in-a-generation genius, mathematical mystic, and one of the greatest theoretical physicists to have walked the planet.

You never hear of Dirac much¹. I read this article about him being in love and decided to read more about his life and work. This award-winning book came highly recommended. I enjoyed its breadth and depth thoroughly. I am a slow reader and was surprised by the speed at which I got through its heft: 625 pages²! Farmelo expertly weaves world history, politics, religion, and humor into Dirac’s story. The epilogue spends some time conjecturing that he may have been autistic in a bid to explain his many eccentricities and severe taciturnity³. Lots of painful family tragedy that was rather difficult to read. Intuition and Mathematical beauty were paramount to him:

If you are receptive and humble, mathematics will lead you by the hand. Again and again, when I have been at a loss how to proceed, I have just had to wait until [this happened]. It has led me along an unexpected path, a path where new vistas open up, a path leading to new territory, where one can set up a base of operations, from which one can survey the surroundings and plan future progress.

Here’s an In Our Time episode with Farmelo and two other physicists if you want to get a taste of what this excellent and riveting biography is about. I thought this description of Dirac by a young Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (who took Dirac’s Quantum Mechanics course at Cambridge four times in 1930 because it was “just like a piece of music you want to hear over and over again”) was rather funny:

“Dirac showed none of the confidence that might be expected of a young man at the top of his game. Chandrasekhar wrote home to his father that he was disappointed that Dirac did not show a bit more swagger: ‘[Dirac is a] lean, meek shy young “Fellow” (FRS) who goes slyly along the streets. He walks quite close to the walls (like a thief!), and is not at all healthy. A contrast to Mr Fowler […] Dirac is pale, thin, and looks terribly overworked.”

Here’s a video of the author giving a presentation on Dirac and Mathematical Beauty

Unknown artist, circa 1800

Not gonna lie: Her head reminded me of the Dust Bunnies in Spirited Away 🙏

What a strange, strange creature. Those bumps remind me of rivets on a submarine. But because they are anglerfish, the bumps are even more bizarre than you’d expect:

Lovely.

Adrien Brody is a great actor and I love watching him act. I absolutely love good, easy revenge flicks. So this was an easy pick. Mr. Brody channels his inner Travis Bickle (for the most part.) This was Taxi Driver meets Taken meets John Wick, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Brody produced, wrote, and scored the movie, leading someone on Reddit to call this a “tough guy savior vanity project”. I loved the camera work, the overall revenge theme, ass-kicking, and little else. Recommended, easy watch if you like this genre. Others include The Equalizer (Denzel), Man on Fire (Denzel), and The Man from Nowhere (absolutely not Denzel).

Oh and RZA’s in this! His presence in this movie somehow reminded me of his role in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, which is another fantastic movie of the “kind-hearted lone mumblegrumbler with a dark and troubled past kicks badguy ass to save the innocent” genre 💗

I’ve been nearing capacity for a while and this is a Godsend.

These articles are from a while ago. I love them a lot. By Michael Deacon.

And the renowned encore:

I read The Da Vinci Code when it was all the rage a long while ago¹, and so much of what’s being ridiculed here reminds me of submissions to the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest².

Update

Here’s John Oliver on the phenonemon that was The Da Vinci Code. 19-year old Nikhil was absolutely mesmerized. His reaction at 5:45 is chef’s kiss

The Steller’s sea eagle is one of the world’s rarest eagles. There are only around 4,000 left. It’s native to Russia and Japan. One was spotted in Maine and got bird watchers very excited.

It also just happens to be an absolute unit of a bird at 20lbs with an 8ft wingspan 🔥🦅😍

by Andres Vasquez Noboa

Photographer unknown (source)

by John Charles Putrino

by Andres Vasquez Noboa

Dr. Lees said vagrancy, as a biological mechanism, could help migratory birds expand their ranges, a potential advantage as global warming redraws the contours of suitable habitat. Dr. Farnsworth said, conversely, extreme weather — which is anticipated to grow in frequency and intensity as climate change progresses — can also play a role in displacing birds by hundreds or even thousands of miles.

What’s next for the lone, pioneering Steller’s sea eagle? It could migrate along with native bald eagles down the coastline. It could find its way back to northeastern Asia. It could stick around Nova Scotia, as it is well adapted to the cold and seems able to survive there. It could die, out of range of its original flock.

“It’s like an avian soap opera,” Dr. Lees said. “We’re all rooting for it. Will it make it home? Or is it doomed to never see another species of its own in its lifetime?”

Nailbiter.

We all know one. They used to wear fedoras or berets or other identifiable hats. Many of them don’t anymore.