This Week I Learned - Week #38 2020

This Week I Learned - 

* During Azure Site Recovery replication between source and target regions for Azure VM disaster recovery between Azure regions, if the source VM has a Hybrid User Benefit (HUB) license enabled, a test failover or failed over VM also uses the HUB license. RBAC policies, Extensions, Virtual machine scale sets are not replicated to the failover VM in target region. 

* Interesting to know that each node in a cluster can run a different container platform/runtime 

Google unveiled Google Cloud Rapid Assessment & Migration Program (RAMP), which has six components meant to help customers adopt its cloud platform and services. Google is also offering prospects a migration assessment at no charge. The assessment includes an inventory of a company's virtual and physical servers, as well as a total cost of ownership report on moving to the cloud that is valued at $20,000, according to the company. Google partners StratoZone and CloudPhysics will help generate the reports. Microsoft too added new options to its Azure Migration Program (AMP). Both RAMP and AMP ultimately serve as lead and sales generation tools for Google and Microsoft, by convincing customers the move to their clouds will be easy, low-risk and present opportunities for cost savings. Google's Anthos & Microsoft's Azure Arc container management platforms support hybrid infrastructure that includes both on-premises and public cloud environments, as well as multi-cloud deployments that span multiple public clouds.

Temenos, the banking software company, has acquired Kony Inc, a digital banking SaaS company to accelerate Temenos’ US presence and strengthen Temenos Infinity (digital banking product). 

Chernoff faces, invented by Herman Chernoff in 1973, display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty. Chernoff faces handle each variable differently. Because the features of the faces vary in perceived importance, the way in which variables are mapped to the features should be carefully chosen (e.g. eye size and eyebrow-slant have been found to carry significant weight).  In 1981, Bernhard Flury and Hans Riedwyl suggested "asymmetrical" Chernoff faces; since a face has vertical symmetry (around the y axis), the left side of the face is identical to the right and is basically wasted space. One could have the 18 variables that specify the left be one set of data, but use a different set of data for the right side of the face, allowing one face to depict 35 different measurements.


Chernoff faces for evaluations of US judges - Wikipedia

* Wikipedia has  a list of hair styles - head & facial

In general, whales are not dangerous to humans. Whales don’t see humans as food. Even if they did, they don't have the ability to chew, some don't have teeth, and most except the sperm whale have tiny throats no bigger than a football. 

Human hunting has reduced the world’s great-whale biomass by as much as eighty per cent. Like traditional whale hunters, early commercial whalers sought out whales largely for their flesh, a food approved by the Vatican for meatless Fridays. By the nineteenth century, though, whales had become prized as a source of a much more valuable commodity: oil. In 1854, whale oil, extracted from blubber, traded at, in today’s terms, eighteen dollars a gallon. A single mature right whale could yield seven thousand gallons. Increasingly, whales were seen not as prey but as a natural resource to be mined. nineteenth century. Whales consume much of the eight million metric tons of plastic that enter the oceans each year, which gather in swirling trash vortexes known as gyres and can extend for miles. Animals that win human sympathy tend to be readily anthropomorphized (elephants, chimps, dolphins), or cute (baby tigers, pangolins), or—the holy grail of animal conservation—both (otters). Whales, by contrast, are too large to be taken in easily by the human eye, let alone imaginatively given human form. They are magnificent but hardly cute. Scientists know that whale vocalization—the singing of humpbacks, the chattering of belugas, the powerful clicks of sperm whales (at up to two hundred and thirty-six decibels, the loudest animal noise on the planet)—performs an important communicative function. - The New Yorker

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