Brain and Eyes

Our brain perceives only 40% of what our eyes see and the rest is made up from the mamory or patterns that we recognize from the past experiences. Read this in Creativity, Inc., more on this later.

Confirmation bias

I read this one also in Creativity, Inc. but it’s not the first I am reading about such a thing. Confirmation bias is the following.

People tend to ignore/neglect the ideas that do not align with their beliefs.

This is so common. The best and an extremist example would be of the flat-earthers. If they listen and try to understand what science is saying, they would not believe that Earth is flat. The problem is that they are trapped within their own beliefs and they are ignoring every argument that doesn’t align with their idea of flat Earth.

Every day we see people acting under confirmation bias. I do it, you do it. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s okay to do so. Having flat-earthers is not such a big problem. I mean, they are not causing any harm to the world, are they? But there are people who are very dangerous for the society. For example, Donald Trump and other people who believe that global warming is a hoax; BJP bhakts in India who believe that Modi is the best; people who believe that science is bullshit and the world is a creation of god; are some of the examples of people acting under confirmation bias. The first ones could destroy the planet, the second ones could destroy India, and the third ones would never fund the scientific projects – effectively stopping the growth of humans.

Now I want to read Rationality: From AI to Zombies. I keep saying this but I haven’t picked this book up ever since my friend from TIFR, Shrey, told me to read it. He used to point out a lot of bias in my actions. I have read a few chapters but that’s nothing considering the size of that book – about 1800 pages. Well, someday, someday I will read it.

Calcium-48

Yesterday, after searching for 20 minutes for the costliest material, the same friend, Shrey, found out that Calcium-48 is the costliest mass-produced material. I am Calcium-48, he said.

cron and anacron

I wanted to automate the process of updating this website using cron. I created the crontab task, if that’s what it’s called, by doing crontab -e and added this line to the file.

<min> <hour> * * * /path/to/script > /path/to/log.txt

This works for a simple script that contains echo "hello", but it doesn’t work for the script that I want to use to update this website.

Today I also got to know that I can use anacron to automate the update process and it is better for personal systems. I can setup the anacron by appending the following line to /etc/anacrontab.

@daily <delay in minutes after startup> process-name.daily /bin/bash /path/to/script

Here I am wondering if I can set the time for the job. I know that anacron only takes @daily, @weekly, and @monthly entries and there is start-hours, or something like that, by which we can specify the hours within which the jobs are supposed to be executed. But I don’t know if we can also specify the time for each job.

anacron is better than cron because anacron doesn’t require the system to be running 24/7. If the system is not running at the scheduled time then anacron runs the job at the next boot. cron doesn’t do that. I guess cron would run the job at the next scheduled time and not before that. I haven’t tried this, but I think this is how it should work. Even if it misses one job run, it would run at the next scheduled time.

Anyway, at the moment cron is not even running for me. I have to see where I made a mistake. The script runs when I run it directly but not with cron.

Also, thunderstorm!

Earlier, the biggest disadvantage (in my and many other people’s opinion) of having a static site was it’s inability to embed videos. Doing things like embedding videos (and I guess embedding Twitter/Facebook cards) was made possible by HTML5. I was not aware of HTML5’s magic when I first decided that I am going to build a static site. I thought, “Okay, I can do without embedding videos. It won’t be a big issue.” Later I found out that it’s possible. Even better. Now I have a static site and I can also embed videos. Great.

UPDATE (Jul 12, 2020): I just realized that HTML5 has been around since 2014. I don’t understand why all the tutorial/template websites make such a fuss about their tutorial/template being HTML5 compliant. I read all those things and thought that embedding YouTube videos in static sites is a brand new feature.