This Week I Learned - Week #27 2021

This Week I Learned - 

* Azure BareMetal Infrastructure offers certified hardware for specialized workloads like SAP & Oracle in some US & European regions. 

* AWS Application Discovery Service helps in discovering on-premises server inventory and behavior

* Google Cloud Migrate for Compute Engine (formerly Velostrata) migrates VMs from your on-premises data center, AWS, or Azure into Compute Engine.

*A comparison of Device42 with alternative Discovery / Migration, CMDB, DCIM / ITAM, IPAM  product vendors

*AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2.  AWS Graviton2 processors, based on the 64-bit Arm architecture, are supported by popular Linux operating systems including Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu. Many popular applications and services from AWS and Independent Software Vendors also support AWS Graviton2-based instances. Amazon EC2 instances running on AWS Graviton2 processors provide up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances for a wide variety of workloads. 

*For multi-region backup storage, Backup administrators typically have compliance requirements to keep secondary copies of their data in a different region from production data, sometimes at a prescribed minimum distance like 1000 kilometers or 500 miles....the 3-2-1 rule advises to keep three copies of data, two backup copies on different media, and one backup copy offsite. Google Cloud Persistent Disk snapshots are stored in multi-region storage (e.g., eu or us) by default, at no additional cost.

* Poverty map shows estimates of wealth and poverty around the world. The estimates are computed from satellite imagery, internet data, and other non-traditional sources of data. 

* The city of Seattle, in the U.S. state of Washington, is named after tribal Chief Si'ahl (pronounced “See-ahlth) making it the only major city named after a Native chief. Ironically, Native Americans were banned by law from living in Seattle, Washington, the city named after him, one year after the chief's death. Now his descendants own less than an acre of city land. 

* Loved this cool, well-written & illustrated comic from Tinyview Comics' In Science We Trust series about the legendary Indian scientist, inventor, polymath & the father of plant neurobiology, Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose 

* Unlike what many people think - Satyendra Nath Bose didn't discover Bosons - it was named after Bose by that legendary physicist Paul Dirac to commemorate the contribution of Bose.

*The Nagpur-born and Hyderabad-based environmental cartoonist, Rohan Chakravarty bid goodbye to a career in dentistry in 2010 to merge the two things he loved the most – cartoons and wildlife. His award-winning illustrated series Green Humour, which applies humour to grave subjects like climate change while breaking down the uncomfortable truth that surrounds humanity’s ecological impact, has become the first Indian comic to be syndicated globally by Universal Press’ GoComics. The 33-year-old self-taught artist's latest book, Green Humour For A Greying Planet, is a 200-page compilation of some of his best works that feature eye-opening conversations about our often-neglected surroundings. 

* "Blessed with the 'Maria' in my surname, many thought I was a Christian from some coastal town down South. Those who had learned that I was a Punjabi, took me to be straight from up North somewhere. Little did they know that 1 was from a Maharashtrian village called 'Vandre' which had become 'Bandra' because the Portuguese and the British could not handle the pronunciation. I never tried to change people's perceptions as I believed that ultimately it was me as a person and as a police officer that would matter to them, rather than my origin, language, caste, creed or religion. Most of the time I was proven right and it reinforced my faith." - Rakesh Maria, Let Me Say it Now

* The Parsi families under British rule decided to adopt their profession as a surname. But when someone moved out of the profession, it did lead to hilarious consequences. The famous Parsi cricketer Farookh Engineer’s father was Manekshaw Engineer - who was a doctor. He took great pride in introducing himself as “Hi I am Doctor Engineer”. 

* YSRCP MP Ayodhya Ram Reddy is the Chairman of Ramky group. Ramky group showed artificial loss (on paper) of  Rs 1200Cr to set off capital gains.

* In the current 17th Lok Sabha, barely 4% of the 542 Lok Sabha MPs week are lawyers. Representation of other professionals – “political and social service” – 39%, agriculture - 38%, business - 23%, medical doctors (4%); teachers (2%) and those classified as “artists” (3%). The Constituent Assembly that authored the Constitution of India was packed with lawyers, while 36% of the MPs in the 1st Lok Sabha were lawyers. - PRS Legislative Research [PDF]

* An SC judge gets a salary of Rs 2.5 lakh a month, which works out to approximately Rs 8,333 per day, during which he hears arguments from lawyers on an average in 40 cases. This translates to Rs 208 per case, be it a simple appeal, a PIL on Covid issues, or one involving intricate questions of law. In contrast, a newly designated senior advocate commands a price of Rs 1 lakh to Rs 5 lakh for arguing a case. The services of a seasoned advocate like A M Singhvi, Kapil Sibal, Mukul Rohatgi or Harish Salve may find the litigant's bank balance lighter by Rs 10 lakh-20 lakh per hearing. This is the reason why many SC judges look forward to their retirement, which allows them to offer legal expertise as arbitrators, or, for that matter, provide valued opinion to corporations and multinationals on legal issues in their operations in India, or in disputes arising from contracts, agreements and MoUs. In rendering an opinion, a retired SC judge gets between Rs 5 lakh and Rs 10 lakh while each opinion of a retired CJI fetches her/him Rs 10-20 lakh. - Economic Times

* Centralized Public Grievance Redress And Monitoring System (CPGRAMS) is an online web-enabled system over NICNET developed by NIC, in association with Directorate of Public Grievances (DPG) and Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances (DARPG).

* You eat 60 tons of food in a lifetime -  The Body: A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson - reviewers have called it - "User's guide to the body", full of wit and accessible humour

* Beatboxing is a form of vocal percussion primarily involving the art of mimicking drum machines, using one's mouth, lips, tongue, and voice.

* "Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they're two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you're always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there." - Marjane Satrapi

* "Our hunger for wealth and status is eroding our ability to create meaningful inner lives. In order to fulfil yourself, you must learn how to forget yourself." - David Brooks, The Road to Character