Oleg Zabluda's blog: September 10, 2016

Oleg Zabluda's blog

Saturday, September 10, 2016

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The Japan Air Lines DC-8 plane, named the Shiga, landed at close to 9:30 a.m., Nov. 22, 1968, on a shallow reef at the eastern tip of Coyote Point. This was about three miles short of the runway. The plane was on a trip from Tokyo to SFO, after making a stop in Honolulu. The pilot was experienced (he had flown during World War II), but apparently misread the instruments on the DC-8, which was less than a year old. [...] Passengers were evacuated to the Coyote Point Yacht Harbor
[...]
A local salvage firm called Bigge Drayage Company started planning the excavation of the plane just 45 minutes after the landing. It was a race against time, because the salt water was quickly corroding the hull. “”We’ve got to get that plane out of there within 24 hours or it will be just an $8.3 million piece of junk.” [...] Two derrick cranes lifted the plane out of the water, and onto a barge. It was transported to the San Francisco airport, where five cranes lifted it off the barge.
[...]
About a year and $4 million later, this DC-8 flew again. [...] the plane flew for Japan Air Lines until 1983, was sold more than once, and continued flying well into the 1990s. It was dismantled in 2001.
"""
http://blog.sfgate.com/parenting/2011/04/20/the-japan-air-lines-miracle-water-landing-of-1968-photos/
http://blog.sfgate.com/parenting/2011/04/20/the-japan-air-lines-miracle-water-landing-of-1968-photos

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
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twenty commercially-insured launches a year [...] one loss that can give you a hit of $400 million, and annual market premium is $750 million. One loss that burns more than 50% of the annual income for the entire market.”

Indeed, in 2013, the market hit the red after $775 million in premiums were outstripped by more than $800 million in claims, according to industry data. That year, among other failures, a Russian Proton rocket carrying three navigation satellites exploded when its guidance sensors were installed upside down, and a youthful rocket company called Sea Launch put an Intelsat communications satellite right into the Pacific.

The industry saw another weak year in 2014, paying out about $650 million in claims on $700 million in premiums, according to Willis records. A disastrous 2000 wiped out profits for years.
But where there are risks, there are great rewards: From 2008 to 2012, space insurance premiums easily overtopped losses; in 2008, industry revenue hit a net of $600 million after payouts.
[...]
“We don’t insure our launches, nobody in the rocket business does, except for damage on the ground,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said last year after a Falcon 9 carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded.
[...]
satellite operators typically buy two products: Launch insurance, which covers the satellite from when the rocket ignites for launch until it is safely in orbit, and orbital insurance, to cover the failure of the satellite when it is doing its job in space—and more satellites are lost during their first year in space than during launch mishaps.
[...]
But even so, most satellite operators don’t buy insurance. As of 2013, only 212 orbiting satellites were insured, out of 1,300 currently active satellites [...] Today, more than forty companies provide different kinds of space coverage, often in consortiums. This has led to record-low premium rates for the reliable-if-pricy European Ariane rocket and proven satellite platforms. In recent years, Russia’s somewhat failure-prone Proton rockets have been a major source of revenue, providing a third of industry premiums in 2014.
"""
http://qz.com/775481/how-to-insure-something-that-blows-up-once-every-twenty-times-you-use-it/
http://qz.com/775481/how-to-insure-something-that-blows-up-once-every-twenty-times-you-use-it

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

"""
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a normal number is a real number whose infinite sequence of digits in every base b is distributed uniformly in the sense that each of the b digit values has the same natural density 1/b, also all possible b^2 pairs of digits are equally likely with density b^−2, all b^3 triplets of digits equally likely with density b^−3, etc.
[...]
While a general proof can be given that almost all real numbers are normal (in the sense that the set of exceptions has Lebesgue measure zero), this proof is not constructive and only very few specific numbers have been shown to be normal. For example, Chaitin's constant [1] is normal. It is widely believed that the numbers √2, π, and e are normal, but a proof remains elusive.
"""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

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Chaitin constant is a real number that informally represents the probability that a randomly constructed program will halt. [...] Although there are infinitely many halting probabilities, it is common to use the letter Ω to refer to them as if there were only one. [...] Each halting probability is a normal and transcendental real number that is not computable, which means that there is no algorithm to compute its digits. Indeed, each halting probability is Martin-Löf random, meaning there is not even any algorithm which can reliably guess its digits.
"""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_number

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Ladybugs on anise
Ladybugs on anise

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

Why does deep and cheap learning work so well? (2016) Henry W. Lin, Max Tegmark
Why does deep and cheap learning work so well? (2016) Henry W. Lin, Max Tegmark
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although well-known mathematical theorems guarantee that neural networks can approximate arbitrary functions well, the class of functions of practical interest can be approximated through "cheap learning" with exponentially fewer parameters than generic ones, because they have simplifying properties tracing back to the laws of physics. The exceptional simplicity of physics-based functions hinges on properties such as symmetry, locality, compositionality and polynomial log-probability, and we explore how these properties translate into exceptionally simple neural networks approximating both natural phenomena such as images and abstract representations thereof such as drawings. We further argue that when the statistical process generating the data is of a certain hierarchical form prevalent in physics and machine-learning, a deep neural network can be more efficient than a shallow one. [...] Various "no-flattening theorems" show when these efficient deep networks cannot be accurately approximated by shallow ones without efficiency loss - even for linear networks.
"""
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08225
https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.08225

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

WikiLeaks release excludes evidence of €2 billion transfer from Syria to Russia
WikiLeaks release excludes evidence of €2 billion transfer from Syria to Russia
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But one set of emails in particular didn’t make it into the cache of documents published by WikiLeaks in July 2012 as “The Syria Files,” despite the fact that the hackers themselves were ecstatic at their discovery. The correspondence, which WikiLeaks has denied withholding, describes “more than” €2 billion ($2.4 billion, at current exchange rates) moving from the Central Bank of Syria to Russia’s VTB Bank.
"""
http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-russia-bank-2-billion/

WikiLeaks threatens Daily Dot journalists over report on missing Syria emails
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Crucial emails have gone missing from WikiLeaks’ Syria files, according to a report published today by The Daily Dot — and WikiLeaks isn’t happy about the discrepancy coming to light. The missing emails detail a 2011 transaction that moved $2.4 billion from the Central Bank of Syria to Russia’s VTB Bank, indicating both suspicious financial activity by the Assad regime and unusually close ties to the Russian banking sector.

The email is present in a cache of court-recorded emails taken from the Revolusec hacking group, who are believed to have provided the raw materials for WikiLeaks’ Syria Files, but it is absent from the Syria Files themselves. A number of emails sent on the same day are present in the files, leading to suspicion that WikiLeaks may have purposefully removed the message.

Reached for comment by The Daily Dot, a WikiLeaks spokesperson denied removing the email and made an apparent threat against the Dot reporters, saying that if they pursued the story, "you can be sure we will return the favor one day."

The Verge has reached out to WikiLeaks to clarify the spokesperson’s intent. We will update with any response.
"""
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/9/12864328/wikileaks-threat-reporters-syria-russia-emails
http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-russia-bank-2-billion

Labels: Oleg Zabluda

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