Happy Diwali, dear reader!
After a day full of lamps, new clothes, deep-fried snacks and sugary treats, I realized I hadn’t quite explained to my husband the significance of Diwali. This anime movie, made in 1992, by a partnership between India and Japan, is a short, beautifully animated version of the Ramayana story.
Google announces that it has achieved Quantum Supremacy. I must admit I don’t really know what that means other than that problems that took a long time (like 10,000 years) to solve computationally now can be solved in a matter of hours. IBM however put out its own blogpost challenging Google. I don’t yet have a great grip on analyzing either claim, but it sure is a significant moment in history.
ICYMI: My Saturday piece, “When Should You Sell Your Idea?” . I’m loving reading research papers on things that apply to my life and interpreting them for everyone else. This one confirmed some intuitive feelings I had about my chances in Hollywood.
The earliest records of Aurorae (Northern Lights) we have found have been three tablets from about 650 BC in the Middle East. The second-earliest has been a Babylonian tablet from 567 BC talking about a bright red glow in the sky. The TIL for me is that the Earth’s magnetic pole has moved in the past 2700 years. It apparently used to be in Eurasia, and now it’s in North America. What? How? Why? I’ll try to find out and report back.
UC Irvine now offers a course on Disneyland! It’s taught by a professor of Art History who specializes in the Byzantine era. Apparently, in that period, people were extremely into animatronics, and he connects the how and why of that with why people love Disneyland today.
Some Russian researchers put trackers on wild eagles. Did you know trackers work by sending location texts? TIL. Anyway. Some of these eagles flew into Iran and Pakistan which have extremely high roaming rates, and blew up the researchers’ budget. They had to crowdfund to pay their phone bill!
Researchers at the University of Richmond have taught rats to drive tiny cars and navigate mazes, all with the aid of froot loops! The videos on the page will make your heart melt.
Video of the week: This man celebrating Diwali lighting rockets with his cigarette….. Don’t try this at home!