This Week I Learned - Week #45 2023

This Week I Learned - 

* The user-select:none style can block a user from selecting text -

body{-webkit-user-select:none;-moz-user-select:-moz-none;-ms-user-select:none;user-select:none}

* Pangrams are sentences that have all 26 letters of the alphabet in them.  Codepo8 has written a Pangram Checker to write pangrams and check them while typing. 

* ScyllaDB is a NoSQL data store compatible with Apache Cassandra that runs on top of Seastar. Discord migrated trillions of messages from Cassandra to ScyllaDB. The book Database Performance at Scale written by engineers at Scylla, covers strategies for achieving low latencies at high throughput. Scylla is the new name of the Israeli startup Cloudius Systems that is behind ScyllaDB.

* GitHub Skills is a collection of interactive courses on how to use GitHub designed for beginners and experts.

* Jupyter AI brings generative artificial intelligence to Jupyter notebooks, giving users the power to explain and generate code, fix errors, summarize content, ask questions about their local files, and generate entire notebooks from a natural language prompt. Jupyter AI supports LLMs from AI21, Anthropic, AWS, Cohere, HuggingFace Hub, and OpenAI.

* Your face has a unique set of data measurements called a faceprint. It is possible to use your faceprint alongside other methods like eye tracking, gait recognition, voice recognition, emotion recognition to get a deeper understanding of who you are and what you like.

* Tactical Tech works towards empowering communities worldwide to shape their digital futures. The Glass Room project is an interactive exhibition on data and privacy.

* Confluent offers Kafka as a service with a contractual uptime SLA. 

* Wasteless is a turnkey food waste Solution which optimises food price markdowns based on expiry dates. Wasteless is a proprietary dynamic pricing algorithm for products with a limited expiration date, allowing retailers to deploy AI to mark off prices.

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* Gaza is about the size of Las Vegas - NY Times

* Nutraceuticals are a class of products such as pills, powders, bars and tinctures with ingredients derived from plant and animal food products. The FDA (Food and Drug Administration) regulates all prescription and over-the-counter drugs on the U.S. market. FDA approval is typically a years-long process and involves many phases of research and testing from basic efficacy (the drug does what its developers say it does) to human safety (trials involving thousands of people to measure side effects and adverse reactions). The agency also inspects plants where prescription drugs are manufactured, and it can issue drug recalls if there are problems. Beyond post-market regulation, nutraceuticals do not have these guardrails. Nutraceutical makers can perform their own testing for safety and purity, but those tests, as well as any purported health benefits, are not required to be independently verified or submitted to the FDA.  

* The Matsés, or Jaguar People, of Peru and Brazil, who number approximately 3,300,1 have created a comprehensive, 500-page encyclopedia of their tribe’s medicinal knowledge. The Matsés Traditional Medicine Encyclopedia is a compilation of the rainforest medicinal knowledge (including knowledge of medicinal plants) of five shamans and is written exclusively in the native language of the Matsés, which is also called Matsés. The encyclopedia has not been translated in order to prevent biopiracy, which is a real issue for the Matsés. The Matsés first established contact with the Peruvian and Brazilian national cultures relatively recently, in 1969. 

* For about three years, the composer Mozart kept a pet starling. The starling is remembered for the anecdote of how Mozart came to purchase it, for the funeral commemorations Mozart provided for it, and as an example of the composer's affection in general for birds. Starlings are known to have a very strong capacity for vocal mimicry. Mozart was very fond of animals, and – particularly – birds. He also owned dogs & a pet grasshopper.

* An estimate from the Bengaluru Development Authority in 2018 – released as part of the city’s Master Plan 2031 – suggested that 11.8 million citizens are deprived of a total of 600 million manhours annually, while almost 280,000 litres of fuel are lost every hour in the city because of congestion, a staggering waste in terms of the impact on gross domestic product (GDP).