Thank you, Stack Overflow (& the other sister websites) for helping me many times in the past. But my experience in the past years has become worse and worse. Now-a-days, I have my stomach almost in knots when I post a question there. The attitude of some people there is quite… negative (to put it very politely).
Mentatul Monthly Focus
March 2020 Edition
– Parenting –
This is not about being a mother or father to a bunch of freshly cooked dumplings, nor about how to educate dumplings on how to behave once they arrive in the stomach. This is simply me dumping a bunch of useful parenting articles.
Mentatul Monthly Focus
January 2020 Edition
– Big Data & Quantum Computing –
Machine Learning is powerful. But it’s still using good old transistors. And transistors might soon look like a horse & carriage compared to what quantum computers will be capable of (even though the two will no doubt have synergies fueling their co-existence for a while). So what will happen when we reach, and then dive deep into quantum supremacy and bring all our Big Data tech to that depth?
This article goes through:
1. Big Data & Machine Learning
2. How corporations profit from ML
3. How ML accelerates science
4. Basics of Quantum Computing
5. Quantum Computing today
6. Quantum supremacy
Mentatul Monthly Focus
November 2019 Edition
– Child Psychology –
Some adults lack morality even after an entire lifetime. Yet, as a study shows, healthy ethical values are something that the vast majority of us are born with. So when does one lose one’s moral compass? Perhaps, like almost any quality in life, it has to be cultivated.
Mentatul Monthly Focus
October 2019 Edition
– Antibiotics –
The antibiotics industry is going through rough times. Big Pharma is heavily polluting Asia, where India and China are the main producers of the world’s most commonly used drugs.
But it’s even worse when companies give up researching new antibiotics because these sort of medicine doesn’t give enough profit.
Mentatul Monthly Focus
August 2019 Edition
– Spamming privacy into numbness –
While surfing the web, did you perhaps, just by chance, come across popup messages and notifications? Doesn’t it seem like there’s more of those with every passing year? Have you been assaulted by updated “terms and conditions” statements from the plethora of services you use?
Notifications about cookies abound. The GDPR “spam” is wreaking havoc. At least in the EU, surfing is becoming increasingly annoying. The first access on almost any given site leads to at least two popups, and perhaps a third one about allowing the site to give notifications, or a fourth about social media interactions, or a fifth about sharing location… the list goes on and on.
This article focuses on the following 6 “main sources” of privacy-related notification spam:
1. The EULA (End User License Agreement)
2. Cookies
3. GDPR
4. Ad blockers
5. Social media-related notifications
6. Websites forcing users to install native apps
Mentatul Monthly Focus
June 2019 Edition
– Action, reaction and consequence-based education –
In my life as a human, husband and father, I was often confronted with the four words above. So I decided to highlight them all at once and see what shows up.
We’ll start with the differences. “Revenge is, by nature, personal; justice is impersonal, impartial, and both a social and legal phenomenon” and “Revenge is predominantly emotional; justice primarily rational”.
The difference between consequences and punishment is extremely important when it comes to child education.
This article will go through:
1. Don’t Confuse Revenge With Justice: Five Key Differences
2. Punishments vs. Consequences: Which Are You Using? (child education)
3. Truths About Consequences (child education)
4. Punishment (definition)
5. Retributive justice (definition)
Mentatul Monthly Focus
May 2019 Edition
– Expectation Management –
Happiness = Reality – Expectations
I came across this “formula” after a rather difficult day in my life at the end of which I found my expectations put through a blender and then thrown down the toilet. This isn’t the first time this happened. Being an optimist makes the clash with my own expectations even worse.
I decided to look more deeply into this topic and came across the above formula, which for a while seemed to make sense. Luckily, I wrote this article and I realized that of course things aren’t as clear cut. It’s good that “expectations” seems to be a subject everybody + their dog love to debate. That made it very easy for me to find some useful information about the topic.
This article will go through:
1. 5 Benefits of Having No Expectations
2. How Expectations Undermine Our Relationships and Happiness
3. Expectations: Why You Should Have Them
4. High Expectations + Reality = Happiness
5. The Truth About Expectations in Relationships
Mentatul Monthly Focus
April 2019 Edition
– (War-torn) Developing Countries –
The way superpowers and developed countries have spent money in order to „help” developing countries is often highly questionable. The „help” ranges from plain naive to ruthless neo-colonialism.
What adds insult to injury is that more often than not, the problem was caused by those „helpful” nation-states in the first place. This is a very complex topic that, for now, I will not debate. I’ll just give you the information along with a few short comments.
1. We’re going to start with borders, more specifically what happens when one draws a straight line between communities that share the same religion or put vastly different cultures in the same bucket.
2. Then we’re going to go into neo-colonialism with China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
3. A naïve interlude will tell the story of an idealist computer scientist who hoped that giving poor children laptops would improve their chances of success in a world where technology plays an ever-increasing role. We will never know if he was right, because the project failed (not with a bang, but with a whimper).
4. No list of atrocities done to/in developing countries would be complete without a story about weapons trade.
5. The dismal situation in the world’s youngest country.
Mentatul Monthly Focus
March 2019 Edition
– Energy –
Fusion is the holy grail of energy generation. It’s clean and the necessary fuel, hydrogen, is literally everywhere. Unfortunately, replicating the Sun’s mastery of fusion isn’t exactly a piece of cake.
1. The largest investment our species has banked on fusion is using a technology called tokamak. Unfortunately, the experiment called ITER is not doing very well.
2. Can we get lucky with the other type of fusion reactor, the stellarator? There’s good news about Wendelstein 7-X.
3. How can supercomputing help us?
4. Is clean(er) fission energy possible? Is Thorium worth it?
5. Renewable energy trends for 2019.
