Kashif's Blog

2018 is likely to be remembered as the year when the Chinese took over Indian smartphones. In December 2017, the top 10 mobile apps on Google Playstore looked a lot different than what they look from a year later. The Playstore rankings for India in 2018 have China written all over it. Five out of the top 10 mobile apps in India are Chinese — versus two at the end of 2017.

That’s not all. As of December 2017, there were 18 Chinese apps among the top 100 across various categories on Google Playstore. These included popular ones such as UCBrowser, SHAREit, and NewsDog. Fast forward to the end of 2018. The number of Chinese apps in the top 100 Playstore apps has reached 44.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/7cRf66dW4gj

This is one of the best articles I have read in a long time.

Instilling in your child a scientific worldview will help both to inoculate them against irrationality and inspire them about the world. Science won’t be a career for most people, but it should be a worldview for anyone interested in understanding the true nature of reality. Science is a candle in the dark, dispelling irrationality and superstition.5Science is the opposite of faith. The story science tells about the origin of our world and of ourselves is less comforting but far more compelling than the soothing myths told by the multitude of human faiths.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/WFSKaVSP3Fm

In computers, we can stuff laws into it and create a world.

– Alan Kay

I will miss your posts :-(

Android 9 Pie uses #MachineLearning to make your phone simpler to use. One of the ways this is done is with the Smart Linkify feature, a new API that adds clickable links when certain types of entities are detected in text.

Google AI originally shared:

Android 9 Pie uses #MachineLearning to make your phone simpler to use. One of the ways this is done is with the Smart Linkify feature, a new API that adds clickable links when certain types of entities are detected in text.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/DNVG4e4XPzB

“By looking at the sky alone, we can see the apparent, angular sizes of the Sun and Moon. But when the Sun, Earth, and Moon all align to produce a total eclipse, it teach us how far astronomical distances truly are. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon…”

If you wanted to learn the distances to the stars, you have to start closer: with distances and length scales you can measure before reaching for the heavens. During a total lunar eclipse, we can get there! We can not only determine the shape of the Earth, but also the Earth-Moon distance and the size of the Moon. With a little bit of care in our measurements, we can know the Earth-Sun distance and the size of the Sun, too, and this gives us a calibration point to reach for the stars. Simply by looking at relative brightness or, for more accurate results, a parallax measurement, we can learn the distance to astronomical objects beyond our Solar System.

All from measurements you can make during an eclipse, with no special equipment like a laser reflector on the Moon.

Ethan Siegel

Ethan Siegel originally shared:

“By looking at the sky alone, we can see the apparent, angular sizes of the Sun and Moon. But when the Sun, Earth, and Moon all align to produce a total eclipse, it teach us how far astronomical distances truly are. During a lunar eclipse, the Earth’s shadow falls on the Moon…”

If you wanted to learn the distances to the stars, you have to start closer: with distances and length scales you can measure before reaching for the heavens. During a total lunar eclipse, we can get there! We can not only determine the shape of the Earth, but also the Earth-Moon distance and the size of the Moon. With a little bit of care in our measurements, we can know the Earth-Sun distance and the size of the Sun, too, and this gives us a calibration point to reach for the stars. Simply by looking at relative brightness or, for more accurate results, a parallax measurement, we can learn the distance to astronomical objects beyond our Solar System.

All from measurements you can make during an eclipse, with no special equipment like a laser reflector on the Moon. Come get the scoop today!

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/MEFkf4suNfH

Apple's market cap just surpassed $1 trillion, exceeding the GDP of 174 countries.

Apple's market cap just surpassed $1 trillion, exceeding the GDP of 174 countries.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/MsdepJtCj6B

Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers through automation will miss the full potential of AI. Such a strategy is misguided from the get-go. Tomorrow’s leaders will instead be those that embrace collaborative intelligence, transforming their operations, their markets, their industries, and—no less important—their workforces.

Gideon Rosenblatt originally shared:

Organizations that use machines merely to displace workers through automation will miss the full potential of AI. Such a strategy is misguided from the get-go. Tomorrow’s leaders will instead be those that embrace collaborative intelligence, transforming their operations, their markets, their industries, and—no less important—their workforces.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/J9oEKs5YXjn

Ethan Siegel originally shared:

“The description that General Relativity puts forth — that of matter telling space how to curve, and curved space telling matter how to move — needs to be augmented to include an uncertain position that has a probability distribution to it. Whether gravity is quantized or not is still an unknown, and has everything to do with the outcome of such a hypothetical experiment. How an uncertain position translates into a gravitational field, exactly, remains an unsolved problem on the road to a full quantum theory of gravity. The principles that underlie quantum mechanics must be universal, but how those principles apply to gravity, and in particular to a particle passing through a double slit, is a great unknown of our time.”

Perhaps the greatest holy grail in theoretical physics is the quest for a quantum theory of gravity. For all the gravitational phenomena we’ve ever measured, observed, or subjected to a test, General Relativity has come through with predictions that match what we’ve seen exactly. For all the other physical phenomena in the Universe, the rules of quantum field theory and the Standard Model of particle physics match up perfectly. But what would happen if we tried to apply General Relativity to an inherently quantum phenomenon? In particular, what happens if we fire a single particle, like an electron, through a double slit? What happens to that particle’s gravitational field?

Believe it or not, measuring that (or something analogous to it) would tell us whether gravity is a fundamentally quantum force or not! Come learn why this is arguably the most important, first stop on the road to quantum gravity.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/1q1ZqBb16bi

Using technology to enhance our brains sounds terrifying, but trying to better our abilities may be part of our human nature.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/Zzp3VrvDuap

We’ve divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it’s not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It’s true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.

https://plus.google.com/113839778987212293817/posts/2rJU1ftavCV

https://youtu.be/9Y-YJEtxHeo