This Week I Learned - Week #25 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* Visual Paradigm Online is an online tool to create Azure architecture diagrams.

* Minimal APIs are a simplified approach for building fast HTTP APIs with ASP.NET Core. 

* SvelteKit is free and open source web framework software released under the MIT license.

* Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. Like Chrome Dev Tools, Dev Mode is like a browser inspector for your design file, and it brings design concepts—shapes, layers, and groups—closer to developer concepts like code, icons, and tokens. By hovering and clicking around the Figma canvas, you can find and export all the information you need, like measurements, specs, and assets, and uncover additional context from your design system.

* Microsoft Learn currently has 25 Practice Assessments for Microsoft Certifications

* If you host a LLM based chatbot or API in AWS using Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, private or sensitive data will not leave your VPC. Further, your data is  not used to train the base LLM. You have a copy of the LLM in your VPC and model weights will be updated based on your training methodology.

* CPU vs GPU vs TPU - TensorFlow is the main framework that can run on TPU. TPUs are useful for large Deep Learning models (weeks or months) which require ONLY matrix multiplications (highly parallelizable). A TPU is also quite expensive but cheaper than a GPU now. TPUs can be up to 5 times faster than GPU. A CPU processes instructions on scalar data in an iterative fashion, with minimal parallelizable capabilities. GPU is very good at dealing with vector data structures and can fully parallelize the computation of a dot product between 2 vectors. A matrix multiplication can be expressed as a series of vector dot products, so a GPU is much faster than a CPU at computing a matrix multiplication. A TPU uses a matrix-multiply unit that, as opposed to a GPU, reuses vectors that go through dot-products multiple times in a matrix multiplication, effectively parallelizing matrix multiplication much more efficiently than a GPU. However, only deep learning models can really utilize the parallelizable power of TPUs as most ML models are not using matrix multiplication as the underlying algorithmic implementation.

* You can use Google’s grammar check feature to check if a phrase or sentence is written in a grammatically correct way or how to correct it, if not. To analyze the language, grammar check uses AI systems and might not be 100% accurate, especially with partial sentences.

* Shortened form of male & female names -

• Ted - Edward, Theodore or Edmund
• Bob - Robert. 
• Bill - William
• Bart - Bartholomew
• Alex - Alexander or Alexandra
• Chris - Christopher or Christine
• Ben - Benjamin or Benedict
• Sam - Samuel or Samantha
• Kate - Katherine or Kathleen
• Mike - Michael or Michelle
• Matt - Matthew or Matthias
• Dan - Daniel or Danielle
• Liz - Elizabeth or Eliza
• Nick - Nicholas or Nicole
• Andy - Andrew or Andrea
• Charlie - Charles or Charlotte
• Dave - David or Davina
• Jim - James or Jamie
• Tom - Thomas or Tomasina
• Jo - Joseph or Joanna
• Meg - Megan or Margaret
• Rob - Robin or Roberta
• Will - William or Willow
• Max - Maximilian or Maxine
• Jake - Jacob or Jacqueline
• Jen - Jennifer or Jenna
• Nate - Nathaniel or Natalie
• Steve - Steven
• Ellie - Eleanor or Ellen
• Pat - Patrick or Patricia
• Tim - Timothy or Tamsin
• Vic - Victor or Victoria
• Phil - Philip or Philippa
• Sal - Salvatore or Salome
• Steph - Stephanie or Stephen

* India has the second-highest number of Coursera learners worldwide, second only to the U.S.

* Russian uses a version of the Cyrillic alphabet, which includes both upper and lower case letters.

* The most common consonant in Polish words is Z

* Seeing familiar objects or patterns in otherwise random or unrelated objects or patterns is called pareidolia.

Source: Reddit

* James Parkinson was the first person to systematically describe six individuals with symptoms of the disease that bears his name. In An Essay on the Shaking Palsy (1817) that he wrote using the pseudonym "Old Hubert", he reported on three of his own patients and three persons whom he saw in the street. He referred to the disease that would later bear his name as paralysis agitans, or shaking palsy. He distinguished between resting tremors and the tremors with motion. Jean-Martin Charcot coined the term "Parkinson's disease" some 60 years later. 

* Parkinson erroneously suggested that the tremors in these patients were due to lesions in the cervical spinal cord.

* At age 14, in poverty and famine, a Malawian boy built a windmill to power his family's home. William Kamkwamba built the electricity-producing windmill from spare parts and scrap -- starting him on a journey detailed in the book and film "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind."

* Nootropics refers to any natural or synthetic substance that may have a positive impact on mental skills. In general, nootropics fall into three general categories: dietary supplements, synthetic compounds, and prescription drugs. Caffeine also gives you more access to several chemicals (neurotransmitters) in your brain such as acetylcholine, which helps with short-term memory and learning. Prescription nootropics largely consist of stimulants such as those in some ADHD medications. Green tea, which contains both the nootropics caffeine and L-theanine may help you multitask better. A traditional Indian (ayurvedic) herb, Bacopa monnieri -- also known as brahmi -- has been suggested by some to help the brain processes information faster. 

* Radium was formerly used in self-luminous paints for watches, nuclear panels, aircraft switches, clocks, and instrument dials. A typical self-luminous watch that uses radium paint contains around 1 microgram of radium. In the mid-1920s, a lawsuit was filed against the United States Radium Corporation by five dying "Radium Girls" – dial painters who had painted radium-based luminous paint on the dials of watches and clocks. The dial painters were instructed to lick their brushes to give them a fine point, thereby ingesting radium. Their exposure to radium caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia, and bone cancer. Radium was once an additive in products such as toothpaste, hair creams, and even food items due to its supposed curative powers. When ingested, 80% of the ingested radium leaves the body through the feces, while the other 20% goes into the bloodstream, mostly accumulating in the bones. This is because the body treats radium as calcium and deposits it in the bones, where radioactivity degrades marrow and can mutate bone cells. Exposure to radium, internal or external, can cause cancer and other disorders, because radium and radon emit alpha and gamma rays upon their decay, which kill and mutate cells.

* Thalidomide was first marketed in 1957 in West Germany, where it was available over the counter. When first released, thalidomide was promoted for anxiety, trouble sleeping, "tension", and morning sickness. While it was initially thought to be safe in pregnancy, concerns regarding birth defects arose, resulting in its removal from the market in Europe in 1961. Its initial entry into the US market was prevented by Frances Kelsey, a reviewer at the FDA. Kelsey was given a Presidential award for distinguished service from the federal government for not allowing thalidomide to be approved for sale in the U.S. It was approved in the United States in 1998 for use as a treatment for cancer. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.

* Heroin, derived from morphine, was synthesized by Bayer's chief chemist, Felix Hoffmann, in 1897. The company saw potential in the drug due to its potent pain-relieving properties. As a result, Bayer introduced heroin as an over-the-counter medication, widely available for purchase without a prescription. The marketing campaign for Bayer's heroin emphasized its effectiveness as a cough suppressant, particularly for children. 

* Gift in German means "poison". The corresponding verb is vergiften (to poison), and something poisoned is vergiftet. Gift means both married and poison in Swedish.

* Kalaikunda Air Force Station  (ICAO: VEDX) was built by the British for the Royal Indian Air Force during World War II. It was used to conduct raids against advancing Japanese in Burma and also for operations to transport aid to parts of China. A squadron of Su-30 MKIs is now at this Indian Air Force Base in West Bengal.

* Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world - Jean-Luc Godard

* Public speaking is a habit-forming activity, like coffee or tobacco; so many have now got into the habit that at present there are more speakers than listeners in our midst - R.K. Narayan: 'The Need for Silence' from Next Sunday

* 'Safety just is pure waste... if you want to be safe, don't get out of bed.' - OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush who piloted Titanic sub