I hate when this sort of thing happens. That sort of behavior is truly universal in that sort of work, so much goofing around and personality when the cameras are off. And one miscue on camera timing and this poor woman has to jump through PR hoops.
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Japan to make university free for families with three or more children starting in 2025
I saw this mentioned on Mastodon and so I went to find a related article for more information:
In a significant policy shift to tackle Japan's severe decline in birth rates, the Japanese government is planning to offer free college tuition to families with three or more children starting the 2025 academic year. This move is a part of the broader "Children's Future Strategy," which Prime Minister Fumio Kishida discussed in a recent press conference. This policy and the broader strategy is set for a Cabinet decision later this month.
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COP28 Leader Slammed after claim against fossil fuel phaseout
"There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5C."
In his remarks revealed earlier this week by The Guardian, Al Jaber not only attempted to discredit the idea that preserving a livable climate requires phasing out fossil fuels—he attempted to paint the idea as extremist.
He said he expected a "sober and mature conversation," not an "alarmist" one, when former Ireland president Mary Robinson asked him during a panel discussion whether he would support a global effort to phase out fossil fuels. He appeared offended she even asked.
Al Jaber has attempted to walk back these comments amid uproar this week, claiming he believes "the phase down and the phaseout of fossil fuel is inevitable." Even U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry has shrugged off the comments, saying they probably "came out the wrong way."
🙄
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Two Years without Invasive Hornets in Washington State
For the second year in a row, no northern giant hornets were detected in Washington, the state Department of Agriculture reported Dec. 4.
The department recently completed its annual invasive pest survey and will begin removing more than 800 northern giant hornet traps that have been monitored since July. An additional 200 traps were placed throughout the state by federal state and local agencies, community groups and private citizen scientists.
I guess you could say these hornets have... buzzed off.
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Miller Shuffle Algorithm
Everyone loves 'shuffle' on their music player. I never really thought about how it worked to ensure that it randomly shuffled through a playlist without repeats, but this guy has, and he has improved on it.
From the linked instructables page:
With the case of an MP3 player, or any play-list shuffle, one might and apparently some do (even on big name electronics and streaming services), simply use an operation like songIndex=random(NumOfSongs). This use of a PRNG will give you a good mathematical randomness to what is played. But you will get many premature repetitions of song selection. With a population of 1000 to choose from you will get ~37% repeats out of 1000 plays. From the start of a listening session on average a song will repeat within ~26 songs. The % of repeats is the same regardless of the selection population size.
The accepted goal of a “Shuffle” algorithm is herein defined as providing means to reorder a range of items in a random like manner, where each item is referenced once, and only once, when going through the range (# of items). So for 1-52 (think card deck) you get 52 #s in a pseudo random order, or similarly for a song list of 1000s. Re-shuffling gives a very different mix.
The Fisher-Yates (aka Knuth) algorithm has been a solution that fixes this unwanted repetition. The 1000 songs play in a 'random' order without repeating. The issue this algorithm does come with is the added burden of an array in RAM memory of 2 times the maximum number of songs (for up to 65,000 songs 128KB of RAM is needed) being dedicated to shuffled indexes for the duration that access to additional items from the shuffle are desired (so as to not give repeats).
After reading it and trying to read the code (written in C, I believe), there is also a link to a github repo with more iterations on the algorithm. A few excerpts:
The way the algorithm works its magic is by utilizing multiple curated computations which are ‘symmetrical’, in that the range of values which go in are the same values which come out albeit in a different order. Conceptually each computation {e.g. si=(i+K) mod N } stirs or scatters about the values within its pot (aka: range 0 to N-1) in a different way such that the combined result is a well randomized shuffle of the values within the range. This is achieved without the processing of intermediate “candidates” which are redundant or out of range values (unlike with the use of a PRNG or LFSR) which would cause a geometrically increasing inefficiency, due to the overhead of retries.
So basically you can query the algorithm, providing the "deck" of things, and what your location in the query is, the seed info (for randomness), and then it can tell you what is next in the shuffle without actually having to move things around.
For example, let's say we had a deck with five cards in it: [a, b, c, d, e] - We just tell the algorithm three things:
- What our current index is in the deck
- A "shuffle ID" which is the seed for the randomizing
- How many entries are in the deck
So if we're just starting it, we'd say we're at position -1, which doesn't exist. We give it the random shuffle ID of "123" and lastly we tell it there are 5 entries. It then calculates that the next position to start playing is 4th in the queue. Then when it is time to play the next song the algorithm is fed "4", "123" and "5" to then return 2, etc.
Under the most common other way of handling randomizing playlists what happens is it takes the indexes for each item in the deck, then shuffles them. So it might create a separate list of the deck positions, [2,5,1,3,4] which requires you to maintain this memory. For desktop computers, obviously that is not a problem. But what if you're making a tiny computer using a simple board like an Arduino or something and you have memory limitations, etc. This is a big step forward for it.
Will it change the world? Doubtful. But still interesting to learn about.
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Phanpy.social is my new Mastodon website
No, I didn't change my account, this is the site I'm using to connect to Mastodon. It's not perfect, but I really enjoy the UI and plan to use it moving forward.
Also, I think it's pronounced "fan-pie"? No idea.
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Automated Archives for December, 7th 2023
This post was automatically generated
Wallabag Additions
These are articles that which I saved today so that I may read them later. Substance and quality will vary drastically.
Chess For the Day
Record: 4-0-5
Net Elo Change: -7
Games Played
- asimsek01 - LOSS
- haniabuzaid - LOSS
- Vick_Shiv - LOSS
- Dastinbln - WIN
- Panordlu - WIN
- Andrmat - WIN
- magnusaprerlevaccin - LOSS
- hakami333 - LOSS
- LeoLucarelli - WIN
Blog Posts On This Day
- 1 year ago (1 post)
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