This Week I Learned - Week #37 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* The eBook Azure Defenses for Ransomware Attack [PDF]  lays out key Azure native capabilities and defenses for ransomware attacks and guidance on how to proactively leverage these to protect your assets on Azure cloud.

* Doodle Ipsum - The lorem ipsum of illustrations. 

* IMDb began as a movie database on the Usenet group "rec.arts.movies" in 1990 and moved to the web in 1993. Colin Needham is an English entrepreneur who is known as the founder and CEO of IMDb. He has been general manager of IMDb since its acquisition by Amazon in 1998. Due to the time required for processing submitted data or text before it is displayed, IMDb is different from user-contributed projects like Discogs, or OpenStreetMap, or Wikipedia, in that contributors cannot add, delete, or modify the data or text on impulse, and the manipulation of data is controlled by IMDb technology and salaried staff. IMDb does not provide an API for automated queries. However, most of the data can be downloaded as compressed plain text files and the information can be extracted using the command-line interface tools provided. A Python package called IMDbPY can also be used to process the compressed plain text files into a number of different SQL databases, enabling easier access to the entire dataset for searching or data mining. It maintains a Top 250 and a Bottom 100 list of movies.

* According to a 2021 analysis by The Guardian and Transparency International, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), its Minister of Defence, and ruler of the Emirate of Dubai, is one of the largest landowners in the UK, owning more than 100,000 acres.

* Flying Officer Nirmal Jit Singh Sekhon is the only member of the Indian Air Force to be honoured with the Param Vir Chakra, India's highest military decoration during war time, in recognition of his lone defence of Srinagar Air Base against a Pakistan Air Force (PAF) air raid during the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.

* PayU, a subsidiary of Dutch tech investment firm Prosus, has acquired Indian payments gateway BillDesk for $4.7 billion. PayU has previously acquired firms such as CitrusPay, Paysense and Wibmo in India.

* Still waters run deep is a proverb that describes situations where more is going on under the surface than is apparent at the surface.

* Preter comes from the Latin word praeter which means "beyond"; so something preternatural is beyond nature. It is less commonly used than unnatural or supernatural but means the same thing. If you lift a truck off the ground and hold it above your head, people will marvel at you and say you have preternatural strength.

* In musical theatre, reprises are any repetition of an earlier song or theme, usually with changed lyrics and shortened music to reflect the development of the story. 

* Acoustic music is music that solely or primarily uses instruments that produce sound through acoustic means, as opposed to electric or electronic means.

* The human brain has a whole section dedicated specifically to recognizing face-shaped things. This is why we experience pareidolia, which is why we see smiley faces as faces despite the fact they are literally 2 dots, an arc, and a circle. The Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state.

* India, Thailand and Vietnam are the world's top exporters of rice 

* India's farm sector employs almost half of the nation’s 1.3 billion people and contributes about a fifth of Asia’s third-biggest economy. 

* The Telangana government has decided to implement 30% reservations in liquor shops allotment to Gouds (toddy tappers), SCs and STs from next year.

* In countries such as Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Canada, a few states in Australia and the US, ‘assisted dying’ is permitted with stipulated regulations to mitigate any abuse. In a landmark judgment in early 2018, a five-judge constitution bench led by then Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra recognized the right to die with dignity as a fundamental right. It was enshrined as an intrinsic facet of Article 21 of the Indian Constitution. The judgment also recognized the right of persons to draft and execute a Living Will (advanced directives) to turn down life-saving and sustaining medical interventions and treatments in case they were unable to communicate their decision at an advanced stage of their disease. The concept of Living Will originated in the US in the late 1960s and was a brainchild of noted US human rights attorney Louis Kutner. - Mint

* Sensex completed its journey from 57,000 to 58,000 in three days (August 31-September 3) and took eight more sessions (September 3-September 16) to scale 59,000.

* To help Indian Government websites become compliant with the National Informatics Centre (NIC) has formulated Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). GIGW Compliance matrix provides a checklist of 115 mandatory guidelines/checkpoints. Majority of these checkpoints relate to the front end of the website (accessibility, identity, content, and design) while others relate to backend policies, processes and plans to enable better management of websites.

* Nalanda was a renowned Buddhist University & a Mahavihara, a revered Buddhist monastery in the ancient kingdom of Magadha (modern-day Bihar) in India. Around 1193 CE, Bakhtiyar Khalji, a Turkic chieftain destroyed the Nalanda and Vikramshila universities during his raids across North Indian plains, massacring many Buddhist and Brahmin scholars. Tibetan Buddhist tradition is regarded to be a continuation of the Nalanda tradition. The Dalai Lama refers to himself as a follower of the lineage of the seventeen Nalanda masters. Traditional sources state that Nalanda was visited by both Mahavira and the Buddha in c. 6th and 5th century BCE.

* Anvita Dutt has worked as a lyricist and dialogue writer with Yash Raj Films and Dharma Productions. 

* Juhi Chaturvedi has been an illustrator, advertising professional before going on to write scripts for Bollywood films Vicky Donor (2012), Madras Cafe (2013), Piku (2015), October (2018) and Gulabo Sitabo (2020).

* Amitabh Bhattacharya migrated to Mumbai from Lucknow harbouring dreams of becoming a singer in 1999. After being urged by music composer Amit Trivedi to write song lyrics, Bhattacharya discovered that he had an innate talent of giving words to tunes. His major breakthrough came when the songs he wrote for Trivedi for Anurag Kashyap's Dev.D, became hits, thus nearly ending 8 years of his struggle for recognition. 

* "When life sucks, look like a million bucks"