Baltimore is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Maryland, as well as the 30th most populous city in the United States, with a population of 585,708 in 2020. Baltimore was designated an independent city by the Constitution of Maryland in 1851, and today is the largest independent city in the United States. As of 2017, the population of the Baltimore metropolitan area was estimated to be just under 2.802 million, making it the 21st largest metropolitan area in the country. Baltimore is located about 40 miles (64 km) northeast of Washington, D.C., making it a principal city in the Washington–Baltimore combined statistical area (CSA), the third-largest CSA in the nation, with a calculated 2018 population of 9,797,063.
Prior to European colonization, the Baltimore region was used as hunting grounds by the Susquehannock Native Americans, who were primarily settled further north than where the city was later built. Colonists from the Province of Maryland established the Port of Baltimore in 1706 to support the tobacco trade with Europe and established the Town of Baltimore in 1729. The Battle of Baltimore was a pivotal engagement during the War of 1812, culminating in the failed British bombardment of Fort McHenry, during which Francis Scott Key wrote a poem that would become “The Star-Spangled Banner”, which was eventually designated as the American national anthem in 1931. During the Pratt Street Riot of 1861, the city was the site of some of the earliest violence associated with the American Civil War.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the oldest railroad in the United States, was built in 1830 and cemented Baltimore’s status as a major transportation hub, giving producers in the Midwest and Appalachia access to the city’s port. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was once the second leading port of entry for immigrants to the United States. In addition, Baltimore was a major manufacturing center. After a decline in major manufacturing, heavy industry, and restructuring of the rail industry, Baltimore has shifted to a service-oriented economy. Johns Hopkins Hospital and Johns Hopkins University are the city’s top two employers. Baltimore and its surrounding region are home to the headquarters of a number of major organizations and government agencies, including the NAACP, ABET, the National Federation of the Blind, Catholic Relief Services, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Social Security Administration.
Many of Baltimore’s neighborhoods have rich histories. The city is home to some of the earliest National Register Historic Districts in the nation, including Fell’s Point, Federal Hill, and Mount Vernon. These were added to the National Register between 1969 and 1971, soon after historic preservation legislation was passed. Baltimore has more public statues and monuments per capita than any other city in the country. Nearly one-third of the city’s buildings (over 65,000) are designated as historic in the National Register, which is more than any other U.S. city. Wikipedia
If you’re looking for a remote work opportunity that pays at least $100,000, you’ve never had a better chance. Ladders, Inc., the career site for high-paying jobs, researched data from the top 50,000 North American employers to find which professional fields saw the most growth in remote work. In March of 2020, there were just over 7,000 high-paying remote jobs available. Today, there are more than 80,000. The availability of remote work across all fields has exploded by more than 1,000%. So, do you really need to go back to the office?
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Delta variant is putting workers on edge about returning to work, especially for those in areas where cases are surging. Employees don’t want to return to the office and try to work in a mask. Survey data from Glassdoor contradicts the Journal, citing that 96% of employees plan to return to the office in some capacity. That statistic, from Glassdoor’s July survey, shows an increase from April’s response of 72% of who were eager to return.
However, the Delta variant, vaccine requirements, and looming mask mandates have changed the enthusiasm for returning to work. Employees who have learned to ditch their commute, and to connect via tools like Zoom and Slack, have discovered a less-risky, low-hassle alternative to returning to the office.
Over two decades ago, Warren Buffett lectured at the University of Florida’s school of business and gave students life lessons on happiness, careers, finances, and relationships.
Buffett urged students to do the things they know will enjoy throughout their lives and gave good counsel about making business connections with likable people. “I only work with people I like,” Buffett told students. “If I could make $100 million with a guy who causes my stomach to churn, I’d say no.”
Since childhood, our parents have been trying to teach us that beauty comes in different shapes and sizes. Whether we are too tall, too short, or self-conscious about our ears, growing up, many of us wished we look like someone else.Unfortunately, physical appearance has always been an essential part of our lives, and probably always will be. These people struggled with their exceptional appearance growing up, but eventually, their unique features are what made them famous.
After meeting someone for the first time, do you see yourself as a glittering conversationalist, a kind of Wildean wit whose bons mots sparkled and delighted? Or do you find yourself wincing at every possible faux pas, imagining all the ways you may have bored or offended?
If you identify with the former description, you are in the minority. Multiple studies show the average person takes a rather low opinion of their conversational abilities, and the social impressions they leave.
In most situations, we are often much more pleasant company than we imagine, yet we forget all the cues of friendliness towards us and think we were irritating or dull. It is as if we are remembering a completely different conversation from the one that actually happened.
The mismatch between our perceptions of our social performance, and others’ opinions of us, is known as the “liking gap”, and it may limit our ability to form connections in our personal lives, and also stand in the way of mutually beneficial collaborations at work. Like many of our brain’s biases, the liking gap can be hard to correct – but the latest research suggests there are ways to overcome this common form of social anxiety.
Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.” In other words, the medium doesn’t matter, only the computational ability.
Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?
To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev, and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron.
Spiral galaxies form a class of galaxies originally described by Edwin Hubble in his 1936 work The Realm of the Nebulae and, as such, form part of the Hubble sequence. Most spiral galaxies consist of a flat, rotating disk containing stars, gas, and dust, and a central concentration of stars known as the bulge. These are often surrounded by a much fainter halo of stars, many of which reside in globular clusters.
Spiral galaxies are named by their spiral structures that extend from the center into the galactic disc. The spiral arms are sites of ongoing star formation and are brighter than the surrounding disc because of the young, hot OB stars that inhabit them.
Roughly two-thirds of all spirals are observed to have an additional component in the form of a bar-like structure, extending from the central bulge, at the ends of which the spiral arms begin. The proportion of barred spirals relative to barless spirals has likely changed over the history of the universe, with only about 10% containing bars about 8 billion years ago, to roughly a quarter 2.5 billion years ago, until present, where over two-thirds of the galaxies in the visible universe (Hubble volume) have bars.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral, although the bar itself is difficult to observe from Earth’s current position within the galactic disc. The most convincing evidence for the stars forming a bar in the galactic center comes from several recent surveys, including the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Together with irregular galaxies, spiral galaxies make up approximately 60% of galaxies in today’s universe. They are mostly found in low-density regions and are rare in the centers of galaxy clusters. Wikipedia
The math wizards at Numberphile have brought back an age-old multiplying algorithm known as halves and doubles, peasant math, Egyptian math, or—as math presenter Johnny Ball describes it—Russian multiplying.
To do the method, begin by writing the two numbers you want to multiply at the top of two columns. In the left column, you progressively halve the number and take the integer floor of any “and a half” values, all the way down to 1. In the right column, you double the number as many times as there are digits in the left column…
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Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.
An image from Baltimore, MD, USA
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James' World 2 