Reading Gandhi’s autobiography last year opened up my eyes to the importance of mental discipline and training, which is not often as discussed as physical training. But I would argue that mental training is as important (if not more) than physical training. The difference is that when you train your body, you see improvements when you look at yourself in the mirror. This positive feedback gives you motivation to continue exercising as part of a weekly regimen. In most cases, the mirror is a true physical reflection of your physical self. However, there is no such reflection of an improving…

The impacts of the recent Colonial pipeline ransomware cyber-attack are being felt across the entire southeast of the United States. The perpetrators — a well known ransomware group known as DarkSide—have claimed that their goal was never to disrupt the society:

“Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society. From today we introduce moderation and check each company that our partners want to encrypt to avoid social consequences in the future.”

But one wonders if this is entirely true. After all, DarkSide is based in Russia, and the recent SolarWinds cyber-attacks that originated from Russia resulted…

We must do our utmost to stop COVID-19, the healthcare worker tells you. It’s the usual speech: masks are a must to keep the virus at bay. Keep your distance from people; avoid unnecessary contact. Don’t be foolhardy after vaccines; they don’t make you invincible — but you should definitely still take them.

Sanitizers are provided at every corner, to keep you clean at all times. Mask dispensers are available whenever you need them; mask dustbins for when you don’t. Alternate seats are marked as such, so you remember not to sit. Payments have gone digital; temperature-scanners contactless. Want to…

The day after Valentine’s day, Texas was less than 5 minutes from a black start — an indefinite blackout that could have lasted months. Thankfully this did not happen, but the 2021 Texas power crisis was a disaster, resulting in 70 people dead, and almost $200 billion in damages, making it the costliest disaster in Texas history. So what really happened?

Nice article! I've also recently encountered the lack of python packages for large scale graph visualization..NetworkX is my bread and butter for network analysis, but it is not build for visualization; igraph seems good but it is also new to python, not much documentation

Awesome Aleksa! I'm thinking: how is it possible for a human to be this good at grasping knowledge so quickly, and then I read how humble and aware you are about relative vs absolute knowledge... Very inspiring to continue trucking on and sharing knowledge for the greater good!

Twitter is an impressive data source, and tweets have so much information about societal sentiments. In fact, some work has shown that aggregated tweet data can be used as a metric of societal happiness! With a short character limit, and wide prevalence, Twitter sounds like the perfect combination for a true reflection of society’s thoughts.

Apart from the text aspect, tweets can also contain important location information. Certain users agree to share their tweet locations with Twitter. This adds potentially another layer of information. …