Water it down
With World Water Day coming up in a couple of weeks, let’s take a look at where we get water from.
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Sudoku: February 27, 2024
In the mood for some number fun? Try your hand at this Sudoku. Can you complete the grid?
Love numbers? Then this is perfect for you. Try your hand at this popular game and see if you can ace it. A Sudoku is a grid consisting of columns, rows and blocks. This is a 6*6 grid.
How to play
The objective of the game is to fill the missing digits into the grid. Use digits 1 to 6 to fill this 6×6-grid.
In each column, row and block you can use a digit only once.
Rules
1. Each row will, upon completion, contain all of the digits from 1 to 6.
2. Each column will, upon completion, contain all of the digits from 1 to 6.
3. Each block will, upon completion, contain all of the digits from 1 to 6.
The real story
Did you know that the popular film The Sound of Music was based on a real-life story? It was the story of the von Trapp family from Austria.
On March 2, 1965, a new musical premiered at Rivoli Theatre in New York City. Almost 50 years later, the film continues to be popular. Which film are we talking about? The Sound of Music, of course.
The story of the almost-nun Maria and her relationship with the von Trapp family was based on a memoir, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers; a candid account of the family’s early years in Salzburg, Austria; Maria’s marriage to Captain Georg von Trapp, and their escape from Austria during the Anschluss and their life in the U.S. But the filmmakers and screenplay writers made a lot of changes to the family’s story. Take a look at the reality behind those famous scenes.
Quiz Whizz – February 26, 2024
Quiz time! Can you get all these six questions right? Find out now.
Six quick quiz questions for you.
Need for speed
It’s time to watch your favourite cars go vroooooom! The 2024 Formula One season is all set to begin.
Formula One racing is back! The 2024 season starts off on March 2 at Bahrain. The F1 caravan will move around the world, in a schedule that encompasses 24 races, until the final race on December 8 in Abu Dhabi.
20 drivers representing 10 teams will compete in a high-octane battle for racing glory. Do you know who these drivers are? The below task has 6 drivers and 6 teams. Can you match them correctly?
Photos: Wikimedia Commons
Keep a sharp lookout
This picture has 10 objects hidden in it. Can you find them all? Get started now.
It’s the end of the week and let’s see how sharp you are. Can you spot all the items on the right side in the main picture? Get set, go!
Freezing point
Did you ever think the cold making you shiver may have come from the Caspian Sea, the Pacific Ocean or even all the way from the Arctic?
In January 2024, Delhi experienced five cold waves, with its nights being the coldest since 2013 and days since 2003. In contrast, in December, the city was at its warmest in six years with not a single cold wave. So, how do cold waves occur? Let’s find out.
Click on ‘turn’ to flip the card and the arrow to move to the next card.
Sewing icons – Part I
Sewing is an art that gives you the opportunity to express yourself with needle and thread.
Sewing is the craft of fastening or attaching objects by stitching it with a needle and thread. It is one of the oldest of the textile arts.
For thousands of years, sewing was done only by hand. However, with the Industrial Age came the invention of the sewing machine. This led to mass production. Hand sewing is still practiced around the world.
In this grid below are words commonly used in needlecraft. Can you find them all?
Quick and brisk
Did you know that a workout need not always be long to be effective? Find out about the seven-minute workout.
Have you heard of the seven-minute workout? It consists of a series of exercises involving high-intensity training that could be just as effective as a 60-minute run.
The workout is made up of 12 30-second workouts in the following order: jumping jacks, wall sits, push-ups, abdominal crunches, chair steps, squats, tricep dips, planks, high knees, lunges, push up slides, and side planks.
Scroll through the below images to see the steps. Remember, this article is only for educational purposes. Always consult an adult before starting any workout or fitness routine!
Through the eyes of a machine
How do you teach a machine to think like a human? Can it learn everything we know?
Can you identify these pictures?
Of course you can. How would you describe them? Pictures of humans, perhaps? And you might notice that some are smiling, and some are not. You might mentally classify them as cheerful people and grumpy people. You may instead, focus on those with glasses and those without. Or you may notice that some people are wearing jackets, and some are not.
There are so many ways of classifying a few pictures!
Let’s perform a thought experiment now. Let’s assume you are not of the human species. Maybe you’re an alien, maybe you’re a machine – it doesn’t matter as long as you’re not human – and you have no idea what a human is, what a smile is, what glasses and jackets are, what “classifying” means.
But I have to teach you all that. Where do I start? I start with what is known as “training data”. My training data for smile recognition would be a set of pictures (the more the better), and a label that explains what it is. Each picture goes into the machine, along with the label. At the end of the training, I would give this machine a completely new image, and see if it recognises a smile or not.
What about other expressions? And glasses and jackets? It’s a LOT more work, and a LOT more training data!
Specifically, I would need hundreds of thousands of images showing every possible human expression, all of them labelled correctly. I would need a variety of clothing examples, again labelled correctly. And then glasses. And every other element that I might expect to find in the environment that I am training the machine on. This is machine learning.
What is machine intelligence?
If your machine can go beyond its training data, understand images that are not part of the original data set, and, in some way, extrapolate the learning, it can be called intelligent.
This extrapolation is built using statistics-based algorithms that deploy a variety of techniques to fine-tune a model for different objectives, such as reading expressions, classifying images based on clothing, understanding indoor and outdoor pictures, X-rays, satellite images and anything that humans can make sense of.
In a similar way, models are trained to understand written texts and their styles — formal writing, casual writing, funny writing, the complete works of Shakespeare, academic text books, medical diagnoses, and anything that humans can read.
When we put all this learning together, we can come up with an AI app that can create a completely new image based on instructions such as “generate an image of a child smiling in a playground”. Or anything really, limited only by the human imagination and, of course, the training dataset.
Now, let’s pretend you are a machine that has just learnt to recognise smiling faces. Can you click on all of them?