This Week I Learned - Week #3 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure vWAN provides *managed hub and spoke topology* facilitating any-to-any connectivity

* An n-gram is a statistical analysis of how frequently something, such as a word or phrase, appears in writing or speech. The Google Ngram Viewer is a tool that allows you to generate n-grams and compare how often certain words appear.  can:

• See which spelling is considered standard between two variants.
• Check whether a variant spelling is still used in modern English.
• Compare the use of words and spellings in American and British English.
• Check whether a term is typically capitalized (e.g., Brownian motion vs. brownian motion).

* Hitachi Vantara was created in 2017 as the combination of three previously separate Hitachi organizations: the Hitachi Data Systems storage subsidiary, the Pentaho data integration and analytics business, and the Hitachi Insight Group. The company sells a range of block, file and object datacenter storage systems. 

* Nidhi Razdan is a former Executive Editor, NDTV with a 21-year career in TV. She found out that a “terrific opportunity” of an offer as an associate professor at Harvard was "an elaborate and sophisticated phishing attack". India’s job-fraud industry is neither new nor small, but its prospects have never looked brighter. 

* The percentage of the female population is 48.04 percent compared to 51.96 percent male population in India. In the United States in 2020, the percentage of female population is 52.52 percent compared to 49.48 percent male population.

* According to Jewish law, when a Jewish boy is 13 years old, he becomes accountable for his actions and becomes a bar mitzvah. A girl becomes a bat mitzvah at the age of 12 according to Orthodox and Conservative Jews, and at the age of 13 for Reform Jews. As with charity and all other gifts, it has become common to give in multiples of 18, since the gematria, or numerical equivalent of the Hebrew word for "life", ("chai"), is the number 18. Monetary gifts in multiples of 18 are considered to be particularly auspicious and have become common for the bar and bat mitzvah.

* In Season 29 Episode 11 of The Simpsons, "Frink Gets Testy", Professor Fink tells us about his system of the Personal Value Quotient, which doesn't just measure how intelligent you are but also measures your worthiness as a human being. The P.V.Q. test tests for a wide range of attributes in a person including sympathy, empathy, group collaboration, artistry, neatness, complex socialization, sarcasm, prudence, confidence, ambition, the teams you root for, earnestness and ego - every trait that integrates a winning personality.

* On Independence Day, the national flag is hoisted (tied at the bottom and then pulled up) by the Prime Minister at the Red Fort. On Republic Day, the flag is tied up on the top and is unfurled by the President (without pulling it up depicting that the country is already independent) at Rajpath. 

* Failures like IL&FS, Yes Bank and Templeton have been absorbed by the Indian financial system, but at a cost. For years now, faith in the integrity of India's markets has hemorrhaged, with everyone from rating firms to auditors, fund managers and trustees putting their own commercial interests above — and often against — those of the investing public. - Bloomberg Opinion

* Former Indian Cricket captains, Kapil Dev and Saurav Ganguly have undergone coronary angioplasty following heart attacks they have suffered.

* Narinder S. Kapany is considered the father of Fiber Optics. 

* George Bernard Shaw  was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1925. He accepted the award, but rejected the monetary prize that went with it, on the grounds that "My readers and my audiences provide me with more than sufficient money for my needs". Shaw provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award in 1938 thereby becoming the first person to win the Nobel Prize & Oscar. 

* When Mao came to power in 1949, he recklessly encouraged Chinese women to produce as many children as possible, to boost the workforce and the ranks of the Red Army. By 1976, China’s population had almost doubled. Panic-stricken, the new leader, Deng Xiaoping, introduced the draconian one-child policy. - Economist

* A Starbucks branch in Dublin has been ordered to pay compensation to a customer of Thai heritage after an employee drew "slanty" eyes on her cup. 

* Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol) and Virginia Wolf self-published their books. In a way, Dickens was a blogger who released his stories in instalments. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, The Joy of Cooking by Irma S. Rombauer and  John Grisham’s A Time To Kill are some famous books that were self-published. Indian authors Amish Tripathi and Ashwin Sanghi self-published their first books.

* Dr. Mayim Bialik who played the role of Amy Farrah Fowler, a neuroscientist and Sheldon's love interest in The Big Bang Theory holds a PhD in Neuroscience from UCLA in real-life.

* Maye Musk is the mother – of Elon, the world’s most famous inventor, Kimbal, a tech and food entrepreneur, and Tosca, a film director who recently started a streaming service to bring romance novels to television. She is a dietician who has run her own nutrition business for 45 years and has been a model for 54 years (after starting at at 15). At schools she was a “science nerd”, and teachers would send her to demonstrate mathematics to classes of older children. Her brains made her a magnet for bullies – South Africa was a rough place – but her larger and more athletic twin, Kaye, fought them off. In 1970, she married an engineer, Errol Musk.  After the divorce nine years later, she took the children and started on her own as a single, working mother. She was hands-off, just as her parents had been. Her business, run from home, provided her children with training as budding entrepreneurs. Elon was an obsessive reader and thinker from an early age, so absorbed in his own world that his parents thought he might have a hearing problem and took him to the doctor. He struggled to make friends at school and was badly bullied. But he developed strong, lifelong bonds with his brother and sister which, to this day, seem to serve as a stabilising influence in his life. While Maye regards cooking as “torture”, Kimbal was always an enthusiastic and ambitious cook. Kimbal’s cooking created connections. After starting two technology companies with Elon – Zip2 and PayPal – in 2004,  Kimbal became a founding father of the farm-to-table movement. He has built 13 restaurants since then and has more on the way. They specialise in unprocessed, locally sourced foods. By the age of 18, Tosca had landed a job in a studio and from there went on to become a film director. Elon has tackled this dilemma of child rearing by setting up a private school, which his five children attend, that teaches problem-solving and matches the curriculum to the aptitudes and capabilities of the child. It is called Ad Astra, meaning “to the stars”. - Economist

* Smiles are the hooks by which we are drawn into each other’s lives, if only for a moment. Smiles are capable of almost infinite variation and subtlety, and of split-second shifts, passing over like weather. The Rueful, when something hasn’t gone as planned. The Uneasy, when you’re not quite sure how the land lies. The Triumphant, just making it as the carriage door shuts, and the Relieved, as you settle back at the end of a long day. The False, the Febrile, the Delighted, the Empty, the Defensive, the Innocent, the Fixed. Not the least deprivation of the covid world is that all this variety is so often covered up. Eyes may be the mirrors of the soul, but they need the mouth to show what they mean.

* Yeast is a fungus that, as it consumes sugar, produces ethanol and carbonation, which is the process of fermentation. Louis Pasteur developed pasteurization to kill yeast (and microbes and other bacteria), but brewers saw the possibility of using this same idea to create new strains of yeast. Much of beer’s flavor comes from yeast.

* In wine tasting, there are high level categories like flavor, appearance, aroma and texture, then subcategories, so within aroma, wine that can be leathery, or tobacco within flavor. The same world exists for audio - there are high level categories like timbre, artefacts or spatial components, and lower levels for each. For example in dynamics you have attack or punch. Bass anchors the fidelity, it anchors the music and adds a layer of depth and emotion. Within bass there are negative attributes like boxy and boomy, and positive ones like bass strength and depth. - Forbes

* Of the energy that people pay for (as opposed to the energy that comes from burning firewood) 34% comes from burning oil, 27% from coal and 24% from gas. Nuclear power, hydroelectric power and all other renewables combined provide just 15%. The result of all this fossil fuel use is a modern industrial economy and an annual flow of 9.5bn tonnes of carbon out of the ground and into the atmosphere. Humans have unbalanced the carbon cycle. The world’s seas and plants suck up roughly half of all the extra carbon dioxide that industry puts into the atmosphere. This is not enough to compensate for the damage climate change does to agriculture by higher temperatures and altered rainfall. - The Economist

* If prices for fossil fuels reflected their true cost to society—in deadly heat waves, water stress, disappearing crops—they’d be a lot higher than they are now. The costs of climate change are not going to be spread evenly. 

* Rich-world countries continue to consume totally disproportionate shares of the world’s energy, resources, food, forests and even water—in terms of the water embedded in all the food we import from poorer countries. - The Economist

* Adults tend to have anywhere from 10 to 40 of these moles on their bodies.

* "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness" - Mark Twain

* 

Let everything happen to you.
Beauty and terror.
Just keep going.
No feeling is final.
- Rainer Maria Rilke