This Week I Learned - Week #41 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* Microsoft lists prioritizing assessments as one of our top three recommendations to accelerate your cloud migration journey. Comprehensive cloud migration assessments should cover the entire fleet and help you arrive at key decisions related to candidate apps, optimum resource allocation, and cost projections. You’ll want to understand your applications, their on-premises performance, uncover dependencies and interrelated systems, and estimate cloud readiness and run-cost. This analysis is critical to fully recognize what you are working with and proactively understand how to best manage these resources in the cloud. Further, in our experience with customers, inadequately planned migrations—especially those that don’t focus on optimizing infrastructure resources and cost levers such as compute, storage, licensing, and benefits including Azure Hybrid Benefit and Software Assurance—often result in long-term sticker shock.

* Azure Migrate provides a hub of tools including third-party independent software vendor (ISV) offerings, that help you to discover, assess, and migrate apps, infrastructure, and workloads to Microsoft Azure. 

* The Call health view (More actions > Call health) in Teams helps you identify and troubleshoot issues you might experience during a Teams meeting or call. In this view you will get data on your network, audio, screen sharing, and outgoing video quality. These real-time metrics are updated every 15 seconds and are best used to troubleshoot issues that last for at least that long.

* Technical debt is the coding you must do tomorrow because you took a shortcut in order to deliver the software today. 60% of engineering team members surveyed for the State of Technical Debt 2021 Report claim that most of the technical debt lives in the backend, specifically, in web server endpoints. 

* According to Shikhar Ghosh, senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, about 75% of venture-backed firms in the U.S. don’t return investors’ capital. The number one reason why startups fail is because they run out of cash.

Life of an author - A garage of stories that were never assembled. Some in their original boxes...

* Fugues were developed in the Baroque era, and was popularised by the famous German composer Johann Sebastien Bach. Bach’s fugues are characteristic due to two main traits – counterpoint in contrary motion, and augmentation. Both traits are noticeable in the opening of Humnawaa.

* We all have nearly 200 different types of fungi colonising our feet. The most complex fungal habitat is the heel, home to about 80 types of fungi. The researchers found about 60 types in toenail clippings and 40 types in swabs between the toes. - BBC

* Hypothyroidism is a condition where the thyroid gland (the small, butterfly-shaped gland that sits just below the Adam's apple in the throat) fails to produce enough of certain hormones, such as thyroxine (or T4) and triiodothyronine (or T3). These hormones are essential to a number of functions in the body including the regulation of body temperature and heart rate. Potential causes of hypothyroidism include autoimmune diseases (the most common cause), in which the body develops antibodies against its own thyroid gland, such as Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, atrophic thyroiditis, Riedel’s thyroiditis, and postpartum thyroiditis. Babies who are born without a thyroid gland, or one that doesn't work properly, initially show few symptoms, but as time goes on, they're likely to have issues feeding and growing properly. If left untreated, hypothyroidism can lead to severe physical and mental problems. - Go Ask Alice!

*  The fluid in our blood and surrounding our cells is strikingly like seawater.  All body fluids have the same concentration of electrolytes. Our kidneys and hormones keep that concentration steady: we thirst when the concentration of  electrolytes gets too high and pee when it gets too low. - Break Through: Boston Children’s Hospital and the Bold Ideas that Change the World [PDF]

* The International Society of Blood Transfusion recognizes 36 blood group systems, not just ABO and Rh. Some 600,000 different combinations of blood  antigens are distinguishable in human blood!

* HealthMap detected the 2014 Ebola outbreak nine days before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued its first alert.

* Seasoned investor and owner of DMart chain of hypermarkets, Radhakishan Damani is the fourth richest Indian, with a net worth of $29.4 billion , as per Forbes.

* S. Rangarajan better known by his allonym Sujatha (his wife's name), was an Indian author, novelist and screenwriter who wrote in Tamil. His Tamil literary career spanned more than four decades.  As an engineer, he supervised the design and production of the electronic voting machine (EVM) during his tenure at Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL), a machine which is currently used in elections throughout India. 

* Nihang is an order of Sikh warriors, characterised by blue robes, antiquated arms such as swords and spears, and decorated turbans surmounted by steel quoits.

* Udham Singh killed Michael O'Dwyer, the former lieutenant governor of the Punjab in India, responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919. The day of his death, 13th March is a public holiday in Punjab and Haryana. A district (Udham Singh Nagar) of Uttarakhand was named after him.

* Jayaram Jayalalithaa served as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu six times for more than fourteen years between 1991 and 2016. She was born on 24 February 1948 as Komalavalli in Melukote, then in Mysore State (now Karnataka) to Jayaram and Vedavalli (Sandhya) in a Tamil Brahmin Iyengar family. She was fluent in several languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi, Malayalam and English. She had 119 box office hits between 1961 and 1980, of the total 125 films she did as the main female lead. She did double roles in eight films.

* OK Soap by Tata Oil Mills Company was India’s first indigenous produced branded soap.

* Bharti Airtel has around 137 million 2G users that are yet to go 4G.

* JRD Tata founded Tata Aviation Service in 1932 with an investment of Rs 2 lakh and piloted the first flight of Air India, then called Tata Air Mail. It was a cargo flight. It soon became a profit-making venture. Tata changed the name to Tata Airlines in 1938. JRD Tata renamed the airlines as Air India in 1946 and went public as a joint-stock company. After Tata allowed the government to own a 49 per cent stake, the Nehru government decided to nationalise Air India. When the government floated a disinvestment bid for Air India, the Tata Group was among the four bidders who entered the race. Tatas won the bid. The winning bid brings to the Tatas, a 100 per cent stake in Air India and its low-cost arm, Air India Express as well as a 50 per cent stake in ground-handling company Air India SATS Airport Services Private Limited (AISATS). The government said as on August 31, Air India has a total debt of Rs 61,562 crore. Tata takes over Rs 15,300 crore of the debt. The rest would be transferred to a special purpose vehicle (SPV) - India Today

* Though he couldn't pursue the career of being an aviator, JRD Tata served as an advisor to the Indian Air Force from time to time. He earned the rank of honorary Air Vice Marshal in 1974

* According to a Cartoon Network survey of 2009, urban Indian kids were expected to 'earn' as much as Rs 664 crores as pocket money that year, compared to Rs 478 crores in 2008. Some children of Ludhiana made out like bandits, receiving as much as Rs 1,600 per week. The same survey also showed that children didn't splurge; instead 62 per cent of them saved some of the cash at least.

* Dognapping is the crime of taking a dog from its owner. The word is derived from the term kidnapping.

* "I want to invent things. I think I have a knack for it, but more important, it's what I want to do most in the world." - George Westinghouse, Inventive Wizard [PDF]

* "You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions." - Naguib Mahfouz

* “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” —Winston Churchill, 1943