The Notes of Glitch the Hamster
Alexey Gerasimovich's blog about books, music, Cyprus, and everything else
Well, here’s another song from a Belarusian band that caught my attention this week. Honestly, I hadn’t heard of them before, but the song is catchy, the video is fun, and it’s quite original.
I should point out that the instrument shown and played in the video is not a Scottish bagpipe, as many might assume, but a similar instrument—the Belarusian duda.
The Belarusian language is very beautiful and melodic, though in recent years, it has become less well-known compared to Ukrainian. During Soviet times, it was at least heard in the performances of the most famous Belarusian groups, Pesnyary and Syabry. Sometimes, people even recognized the melody more than the song itself, as with “Kasiu Jas’ Kaniushynu” (Jas Mowed Clover), which all children heard countless times in “Nu, Pogodi!” when the wolf was racing through a field on a combine harvester. Later, some songs in Belarusian could be heard in the works of the band Lyapis Trubetskoy, though I’m not sure how well their Belarusian-language songs are known outside Belarus.
I’ve already shared Belarusian-language songs on my blog several times, and now I’ve decided to do so more often. Not everything, but the ones I truly like.
This time, I want to draw attention to a song I love in its original Italian version performed by the charismatic Adriano Celentano—“Confessa.” A few years ago, it was translated into Belarusian and performed just as beautifully. No, it’s not Celentano, but it touches the soul just as deeply:
Working with numbers, analytics—all of it always ends the same way: with graphical representation to clearly present data to ordinary people, management, shareholders, or even to understand it yourself. Many authors focus on the skill of presenting information in this form, although it’s often just a single chapter in books on broader topics. Even from those mentioned in my blog, you can refer to “The Numbers Game“ by Vasiliy Sabirov or “How to Lie with Statistics“ by Darrell Huff.
Following a recommendation from Vasiliy Sabirov, I read a book entirely dedicated to the correct way to convey any information through charts—“Charts That Persuade Everyone” by Alexander Bogachev. As a manager, I encounter charts frequently, but even I hadn’t considered some of the finer details that can drastically change how information is perceived.
This is a very short book—240 pages, nearly half of which are examples of various charts. But this is precisely its value: there’s almost no filler here; everything is strictly focused on the topic.
Read moreOn my Facebook, I wrote about how much I disliked the series “The Witcher,” and I found the second season to be far worse than the first. However, in the first season, everyone was blown away by the bard Jaskier’s song “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher,” which unexpectedly became far more popular on the internet than the series itself for a while. And that was true for both the original English version and the Russian adaptation.
In the second season, there was another song performed by Jaskier—“Burn Butcher Burn.” The Russian version sounds rather bland, while the English rendition is far more powerful, almost as if they were two completely different songs. This is unusual because Russian dubbing is typically excellent, owing to decades of experience from the Soviet school of dubbing.
At first, I wanted to feature only the English version in my blog, but then I found a video that compiled the scene in multiple languages with different audio tracks. It starts with the English version and then includes many others, such as Russian and Ukrainian. I must say that in most cases, the voice chosen for the character fits quite well. The Czech and French performances are on par with the original. I’m not as confident about the others. As for my personal playlist, I’ve added the original version.
When I wrote about the IT industry in Cyprus, I briefly touched on the topic of languages on the island. However, I’ve now decided to delve deeper into the subject because it’s not as straightforward as it seems, and it’s a fascinating topic.
I believe Cypriots themselves are well aware of the languages spoken on their island, but if you ask an immigrant who arrived a few years ago and generally feels like a “local,” they will confidently tell you that the island has three official languages: Greek, Turkish, and English. The more informed ones might even show you a residence permit or a birth certificate (like the one illustrated in this post), where all terms are presented in these three languages. However, this statement is incorrect.
Before I explain why it’s incorrect, it’s worth exploring the historical background by going back centuries.
Originally, some population lived on Cyprus, but during the time of the Trojan War, when the Greeks were returning victorious, some of them settled on the island. This marked the beginning of the assimilation of the local population, and Cyprus essentially became part of Achaean culture (since there was no unified country of Greece at the time, and the Greek city-states were constantly at war with each other, except when they united against the Trojans, for example).
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The book “404 Language Not Found” is about how difficult it is to use the Belarusian language in modern Belarus.
Let me start with a bit of background, with the history of my relationship with the Belarusian language. To be honest, Russian was always the native language in my family, although older generations occasionally mixed in either Belarusian words or dialects (the so-called “trasianka”) or some words from Yiddish. However, the Belarusian language surrounded me from childhood, and I understood it almost as if it were my native tongue. In the 1980s, I once visited Kyiv for a programming competition and was struck by how extensively Ukrainians used the Ukrainian language in daily life. In the Byelorussian SSR, in Minsk, Belarusian was not used as actively. On the second day of this “trip,” I decided to speak only Belarusian in Kyiv. The locals gave me slightly curious looks but generally understood me perfectly.
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I fell in love with mathematics in the early years of school. I was very fortunate to have a math teacher who not only showed us how fascinating this subject could be but also greatly influenced me and many of my classmates in shaping who we became as individuals. He was truly a Teacher with a capital “T.”
In the fourth grade, I completed both the fourth and fifth-grade math courses (even though the official education system didn’t really support such an approach at the time), and I carried my love for mathematics all the way to university, eventually earning a degree as an officially certified “mathematician-systems programmer.” (Though I must admit that by the time I was in university, I realized I didn’t enjoy all areas of mathematics equally—but that’s a story for another time.)
It was probably this childhood passion that made me pay attention to a book titled “Math with Bad Drawings” when it randomly appeared in my feed. Or perhaps it was the description, which mentioned that not every student is lucky enough to have a teacher like Ben Orlin, who knows how to reveal the beauty of this subject in an accessible and engaging way. I was eager to compare the methods of this unfamiliar American author with the approaches that had such an impact on me.
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