Heres the story of how I volunteered to be infected with 50 parasitic worms (hookworm) for a year as part of a research study. Check out this thread & follow me for more #parasite & marine biology content [t]
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महाभारत की कहानी कौन नहीं जानता।लेकिन क्या आपको पता है कि महाभारत के ज्यादातर पात्र किसी न किसी श्राप में फंसे थे।अगर ये श्राप न होते तो कदाचित महाभारत की कहानी कुछ और होती।हिन्दु पौराणिक ग्रंथों में विभिन्न श्रापों का वर्णन मिलता है व हर श्राप के पीछे कोई कहानी अवश्य होती है।

आइए आज जानते हैं महाभारत कथा में वर्णित कुछ श्रापों के बारे में।

1) राजा पाण्डु को ऋषि किन्दम का श्राप

एकबार महाराज पाण्डु शिकार खेलने वन गए।झाडियों के पीछे कुछ हिल रहा था। मृग है सोचकर राजा ने बाण चलाया जो जाकर ऋषि किन्दम और उनकी पत्नी को लगा।वे दोनो रति-क्रीड़ा में लिप्त थे।

जब राजा ने उन्हें देखा तो बहुत दुखी हुए कि ये मुझसे क्या पाप हो गया।बहुत क्षमा याचना के बाद भी किन्दम ऋषि ने पाण्डु को श्राप दे दिया कि जब भी वो किसी स्त्री को काम भावना से स्पर्श करेंगे उसी क्षण उनकी मृत्यु हो जाएगी।पश्चाताप करने, वे सिंहासन पे अन्धे राजा धृतराष्ट्र को बैठाकर...

..स्वयं अपनी रानियों कुंती व माद्री के साथ वन चले गए।पांडवों का जन्म भी कुंती को ऋषि दुर्वासा द्वारा दिए गए मंत्र से हुआ था जिसमे किसी भी देव का स्मरण कर उस देव से कुंती,पुत्र प्राप्त कर सकती थी।एक बार माद्री पे मोहित हो जब पांडु ने उसे स्पर्श किया,उसी क्षण पांडु की मृत्यु होगयी।

2) उर्वशी का अर्जुन को श्राप

महाभारत युद्ध से पहले जब अर्जुन दिव्यास्त्र प्राप्त करने स्वर्ग गए तो वहां उर्वशी नाम की अप्सरा उन पर मोहित हो गयी। अर्जुन ने जब उन्हें अपनी माता के समान बताया तो यह सुनकर उर्वशी क्रोधित हो गयी और अर्जुन को श्राप दे डाला कि तुम नपुंसक की भांति...

*Heads-up that this thread will feature some extreme examples of homophobia and transphobia.*

Hey folks, have you ever wondered why trans people face constant accusations of fetishism, sexual predation and child abuse/grooming? Well, today let's talk about stochastic terrorism.

So, first we have to talk about what stochastic terrorism actually is. Remember when there was a conspiracy that there was a pedophile ring operating out of a pizza parlour basement, and a crazed gunman showed up? It's that sort of incitement that stochastic terrorism describes.

It's the demonisation or incitement against a group of people or individuals with the intent that other, unaffiliated parties will act upon it; it's the releasing doctored footage and a shooter show up at Planned Parenthood as a direct result of what he's been led to believe.

So with that in mind, let's talk about Russia's extreme anti-LGBT laws that banned the "promotion" of LGBT lifestyles to children. A move that specifically marked LGBT people as a threat to children, and resulted in neo-nazis meting out vigilante "justice" against gay men.

Groups such as this would lure unsuspecting gay men via dating sites, and brutalise and humiliate them on camera. They did so under the guise of combating child abusers, one group calling themselves "Occupy

RANI GAIDINLIU:THE LESSER KNOWN FREEDOM FIGHTER

Rani Gaidinliu joined the freedom struggle at 13 &was sentenced to life imprisonment at 16."We r free people—the White should not rule over us.”Thus calling out to her Zeliangrong tribesmen was the voice of 13yr-old Rani Gaidinliu.

She joined the freedom struggle in the present-day Northeast India. Today, her struggle is lost in history as most of her countrymen wouldn’t even have heard her name. B'coz our history textbooks tell us that only Mahatma Gandhi &Pandit Nehru got India its Independence.

At 16 yrs of age, this valiant girl was sentenced to life imprisonment for leading a movement to drive out the colonial rulers from Manipur and Nagaland. Nevertheless, she was released in 1947 after India’s independence and was given the title ,"Rani of Nagas".

EARLY LIFE AND HERAKA MOVEMENT

Gaidinliu belonged to the Rongmei clan of the Zeliangrong tribe in the Tamenglong district of western Manipur. Born on January 26, 1915, she was fifth among eight children.

Her native village was Nungkao, which is present day Tamenglong distt. Brought up in a specially backward region,she couldn't receive any formal education. However,this didn't stop her from joining the freedom struggle. At the age of 10 she came under the influence of her cousin.

Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ

The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.