This Week I Learned - Week #38 2022

 This Week I Learned - 

* Azure Resource Graph is an Azure service designed to extend Azure Resource Management by providing efficient and performant resource exploration with the ability to query at scale across a given set of subscriptions so that you can effectively govern your environment. Azure Resource Graph powers Azure portal's search bar, the new browse All resources experience, and Azure Policy's Change history visual diff. It's designed to help customers manage large-scale environments.

* Azure mind-maps

* CIOs Guide to Kubernetes [PDF]

AWS Firecracker “microVMs” combine the security of virtual machines with the efficiency of containers. It was released in November 2018 as an open-source virtualization platform. Firecracker offers the best of both worlds: the security of hardware-virtualization-based virtual machines and the resource efficiency and fast startup time of containers. Firecracker powers the AWS Lambda service, where it currently handles trillions of requests each month for hundreds of thousands of AWS customers.

Anthos vs OpenShift

Anthos clusters on bare metal, a component of Google Distributed Cloud Virtual (GDC Virtual), is software that brings Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to your on-premises data centers. With Anthos clusters on bare metal, you can create, manage, and upgrade Kubernetes clusters on your own hardware in your own data center.

Anthos clusters on bare metal supports using OpenStack as a private cloud platform. This support allows you to use the following OpenStack services:

  • Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
  • Load balancing as a Service (LBaaS)
  • Storage

* RankBrain, Google's deep neural network for search ranking, was introduced in 2015 by Google's engineers. It outperformed many human built signals and, using ML, Google was able to replace many of the hand-coded rules. The neural network ended up improving search quality dramatically. In fact, Google's neural network is a key differentiator among similar technologies in the market. An added benefit of RankBrain or any machine learning model is that the system could continually improve itself based on new user queries and new user clicks. Search is one example of how ML leverages vast amount of data to provide highly accurate predictions in a rule-based system.

* The Personal Computer mode of Samsung Smart TVs lets you convert your TV into a PC enabling you to work from the cloud on presentations, Excel and Word documents. 

* Virtual-assistant Siri's technology spun out of SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center in 2007 and was based in Menlo Park, the heart of Silicon Valley. Its name isn't derived from SRI. Siri is a Norse name for “beautiful woman who leads you to victory.”

* You can ask Siri to call someone, get directions, play music, or check the weather using English mixed with Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Malayalam, or Gujarati.

* Suspension of disbelief (also called the willing suspension of disbelief) is the willingness of a reader to ignore critical thinking in order to enjoy a story. If you want to break suspension of disbelief, introduce a plot hole. Plot holes take on a number of forms, essentially because something integral to the story has not been explained adequately, or because there is an inconsistency. -  writing.stackexchange.com

* Diesel engines are usually more efficient at higher speeds than petrol or gas engines, while hybrid and electric vehicles perform better in stop-and-go traffic. 

* Once liquefied, Natural Gas takes about 1/6th the space and can be easily loaded on to tankers. This is called LNG.

* The Airbus A321 was the first derivative of the A320, also known as the Stretched A320, A320-500 and A325. The A321 is the largest variant of the A320 family.

* Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the Samsung brand, and is the largest South Korean chaebol. Samsung was founded by Lee Byung-chul in 1938 as a trading company. 

Bones is an American crime procedural comedy-drama television series that ran for 246 episodes over twelve seasons. It is based on forensic anthropology and forensic archaeology, with each episode focusing on an FBI case file concerning the mystery behind human remains. It is inspired by the life of forensic anthropologist and author Kathy Reichs. Reichs works as a producer on the show to "keep the science honest".

Bats produce echolocation by emitting high frequency sound pulses through their mouth or nose and listening to the echo. With this echo, the bat can determine the size, shape and texture of objects in its environment. The nocturnal world is filled with a high-pitched cacophony of sound just beyond our ability to hear. Bats pierce the shadows with ultrasonic pulses that enable them to construct an auditory map of their surroundings, which is bad news for moths, one of their favorite foods. Not all moths are defenseless prey, however. Some (like tiger moths, hawk moths and a single species of geometrid moth) emit ultrasonic signals of their own that startle bats into breaking off pursuit. 

* Although it can help you visit the loo, coffee is also known to be a cause of bloating in some people. The acidic nature of coffee can irritate the lining of your gastrointestinal tract, leading it to produce gas. 

Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that result in damage to the optic nerve (or retina) and cause vision loss. Glaucoma mostly affects adults over 40, but young adults, children, and even infants can have it. African American people tend to get it more often, when they're younger, and with more vision loss. glaucoma is often called the "sneak thief of vision." You can’t prevent glaucoma. Have regular eye exams every 3 to 5 years. If you’re over age 40 and have a family history of the disease, get a complete eye exam from an eye doctor every 1 to 2 years. If you have health problems like diabetes or are at risk of other eye diseases, you may need to go more often. Caffeine increases intraocular pressure in those with glaucoma, but does not appear to affect normal individuals. The invention of the ophthalmoscope by Hermann Helmholtz in 1851 enabled ophthalmologists for the first time to identify the pathological hallmark of glaucoma, the excavation of the optic nerve head due to retinal ganglion cell loss. The first reliable instrument to measure intraocular pressure was invented by Norwegian ophthalmologist Hjalmar August Schiøtz in 1905.

* First instituted in 1901, as of 2018 the Nobel Prize has been awarded to a total of 904 individuals (852 men and 52 women) and 24 organizations. Among the recipients, 12 are Indians (five Indian citizens and seven of Indian ancestry or residency)

* John Goodenough is an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He is widely credited with the identification and development of the lithium-ion battery. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, and, at 97 years old, became the oldest Nobel laureate in history.

Charles Addams was the creator of the Addams Family -- the warped and gruesome stars of magazine cartoons, a TV show and two movies.  According to those who knew him, Addams was as strange as some of his characters. Since childhood he had a fascination for gruesome things. His sense of humor resembled that of Uncle Fester, the bald-headed ghoul that Addams once depicted in a movie theater, laughing at a movie that makes the rest of the audience cry. He liked to imagine "that if he hadn't been a cartoonist, he might have been a criminal." Some of Addams early cartoons were so run-of-the-mill that it's hard to believe he would soon develop a personal, highly eccentric, taboo-breaking style. He signed his cartoons under the pen name Chas Addams. He was only 20 years old when he published his first cartoon in The New Yorker. As The New Yorker’s star cartoonist from the 1930s to the 1980s, Charles Addams practically invented dark humor in America. His cartoons, unlike those of so many other cartoonists, were for the most part timeless and dealt with universal themes. Addams drew upon his fears—fears about marriage, fears about alienation, fears about death—to show us that on the dark side of life, there is light, or at the very least, levity. While producing a unique body of work featuring lovingly drawn homicidal spouses, demonic children, genteel monsters, and an everyday world crosshatched with magic, Addams raced classic sports cars, juggled beautiful women (Joan Fontaine, Jackie Kennedy, and Greta Garbo, to name a few), and charmed everyone. The Addams family first appeared in the mid-1930s as a series of unrelated single-panel comic strips by cartoonist Charles Addams in The New Yorker. The Addamses are a satirical inversion of the ideal 20th-century American family: an odd wealthy aristocratic clan who delight in the macabre and are seemingly unaware or unconcerned that other people find them bizarre or frightening. The family lives in a haunted mansion. Their butler is a grumbling giant, Lurch, who resembles Frankenstein's Monster. Another servant is Thing, a crawling hand. Most of the gags revolve around the contrast between the Addams Family and "normal" people. They delight in macabre interests and activities, which disturb and scare off the outside world. According to the film version, the family credo is, Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc (pseudo-Latin: "We gladly feast on those who would subdue us"). Addams’s creepy crew injected a dose of gleeful dread. His game was to turn values upside down: bad was good; ugly was beautiful; freaky was normal; the deadly gave life. Addams’s surreal juxtapositions made horror hilarious. By making darkness delightful, Addams struck a lasting cultural chord; his macabre mishpokah has been the basis of a television series, a TV movie, two feature films, and two animated cartoons. The Addamses "provid[ed] the design for cartoonish clans to come, like the Flintstones and the Simpsons". 

Janaki Ammal, the wife of Srinivasan Ramanujan was widowed at 22. Janaki went to live with her brother in British Bombay, learnt English and acquired the skills of a seamstress. In 1931, she returned to Chennai, beginning a new life, working to supplement her meagre pension, and eventually adopting a little boy, who cared for her till her end in 1995 at the age of 94. 

* The Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM), also called Mangalyaan is a space probe orbiting Mars since 24 September, 2014. The Rs 450 crore Mars Orbiter Mission was launched onboard PSLV-C25 on November five, 2013, and the MOM spacecraft was successfully inserted into Martian orbit on September 24, 2014 in its first attempt. The MOM -- a technology demonstration venture -- carried five scientific payloads (total 15 kg) collecting data on surface geology, morphology, atmospheric processes, surface temperature and atmospheric escape process. The Mars orbiter craft functioned for almost eight years, well beyond its designed mission life of six months.

Kanha Shanti Vanam is a spiritual retreat center or Ashram and an integrated township spread across a sprawling 1,400 acres in Chegur village of Ranga Reddy District, 25 kilometres from the Hyderabad International Airport.

* In simple words, an internet car or connected car is a car with an inbuilt internet connection on board that can be utilised for multiple operations like navigation, music streaming and a lot more. With this, the car can offer internet access not only to the occupants inside but also to devices outside the car within a certain range. India's first internet car, the MG (Morris Garages) Hector comes equipped with a 10.4-inch touchscreen infotainment head-unit that is compatible with Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. 

* The market capitalisation of Adani group companies has crossed Rs 3 trillion and has increased the personal wealth of Gautam Adani to make him the richest Indian. The growth of Adani group companies contributed to 79% of Indian mid-cap gain in 2022. However, the debt levels of the Adani group companies might be one of the reasons why mutual fund companies are staying away from Adani stocks. Mutual funds hold only a very small percentage of Adani group stocks amounting to 0.76% of the market capitalization of Adani group companies. The two companies - Adani Ports and Adani Enterprises which has big holdings in various mutual fund schemes due to the fact that these two companies are a part of the Nifty Index. So ETFs and index funds replicating Nifty will have to hold all the index constituents in the same composition.  

* China is buying less (down from 6.5% in January-August 2021 to 3.5% in January-August 2022) from India and selling more. 65% of India's imports from China is limited to three product groups — electronics (30% share), machinery (20%) and organic chemicals, including APIs (15%). Here are some products whose imports grew big during January-August 2022: mobile phones, telecom equipment, parts ($4.57 billion, a growth of 14.7%), solar cells ($4.3 billion, 110%), laptops, PCs ($4.3 billion, 16%), laptop memories, ICs, parts ($3.6 billion, 16.8%), lithium ion battery, etc, ($1.4 billion, 103%). Lithium-ion battery imports surged more than 100% during January-August 2022 y-o-y. The adoption of electric vehicles will increase this steeply. India must eschew the lure of low-value-added products and invest in deep manufacturing.

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