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pustam.bsky.social
Pustam Raut (पुस्तम राउत) 🇳🇵
@pustam.bsky.social
30 followers 110 following 110 posts
A lifelong philomath, STEM enthusiast, and hodophile! ⚛️🚀🌌✈️🧳

Reposts/Likes/Follows aren't endorsements.

X/Twitter: https://x.com/pustam_egr
Mathstodon: https://mathstodon.xyz/@pustam_egr
StackExchange: https://stackexchange.com/users/9553906/pustam-raut
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pustam.bsky.social
Not every river needs to reach the sea...

When I first heard about the Okavango River in Africa, I thought, “How can a river end in the desert?”

Read more:
suburbanodigital.blogspot.com/2025/10/not-...

#Okavango #OkavangoRiver #OkavangoDelta #SouthernAfrica #Africa #Desert #KalahariDesert
The Okavango River in Southern Africa.
November 11, 2025 at 3:56 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Mapping the Writing Systems of the World.

Photo: Maximilian Dörrbecker
matadornetwork.com/read/mapped-...
Mapping the Writing Systems of the World.
November 5, 2025 at 1:04 PM
pustam.bsky.social
3D scanning preserves ancient Buddhist temples in Nepal’s Himalayas
archaeologymag.com/2025/10/3d-s...

3D models preserve threatened Buddhist temples in Western Himalayas
phys.org/news/2025-10...

interestingengineering.com/culture/adva...

Article: www.mdpi.com/2571-9408/8/...
Samye Tsoling Gonpa, along with the bon stupa.
October 27, 2025 at 5:03 PM
pustam.bsky.social
Ibn Battuta’s Travels, 1325-1354.

Map by Simeon Netchev
Published by World History Encyclopaedia
www.worldhistory.org/Ibn_Battuta
www.worldhistory.org/image/18929/...
Ibn Battuta’s Travels, 1325-1354.
October 24, 2025 at 12:41 PM
pustam.bsky.social
Remarkable Environmental Recovery in History!

This transformation was driven by progressive policies like the 1993 Forestry Act, which empowered local communities to manage and restore degraded forests through community forestry programs. #Forest #Nepal #Ecosystem #Himalayas #Environment
Nepal's forest area in 1992 vs 2016.
October 24, 2025 at 12:39 PM
pustam.bsky.social
Digits 0 to 9 in different languages' scripts.
October 13, 2025 at 4:32 PM
pustam.bsky.social
September Equinox.🌗🍂🌸

Northern Hemisphere→First day of Fall/Autumn.
Southern Hemisphere→First day of Spring.
#Equinox #SeptemberEquinox #FallEquinox #AutumnalEquinox #SpringEquinox #NorthernHemisphere #AstroEvent #SouthernHemisphere #Spring #Fall #Autumn #Season
September 23, 2025 at 7:02 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Main Biomes in the World.

via Internet Geography: www.internetgeography.net/topics/what-...
Biomes in the world.
August 25, 2025 at 6:28 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Explainer: Earth — layer by layer

The thickest part of Earth’s crust is about 70 kilometres (43 miles) thick and lies under the Himalayan Mountains, seen here.
www.snexplores.org/article/expl...
#Earth #EarthLayer #Geology #EarthScience #Core #Mantle #InnerCore #Crust #OuterCore #EarthSystem
Anatomy of the Earth.
July 6, 2025 at 12:28 PM
pustam.bsky.social
Imagine being a brilliant physicist/mathematician and still avoiding the most important problems because your career depends on publishing frequent papers, not solving the biggest mysteries in the world.

That's why you can't do things like this in academia.

#NavierStokes #MillionDollarProblem
July 1, 2025 at 4:39 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds Meet for the First Time

In a surprising turn of events, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, recently met for the first time. The historic encounter took place at a dinner hosted by Sysinternals' creator Mark Russinovich.
Mark Russinovich, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Dave Cutler.
June 23, 2025 at 6:32 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Google encourages users to adopt more secure, passwordless authentication methods like passkey. They also suggest using tools like their Password Manager to store passwords, which will notify you if they are involved in a breach.
www.google.com/account/abou...
passwords.google.com
Passkeys
June 21, 2025 at 11:52 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Crossing the Chenab: The world's highest rail bridge

Witness the engineering marvel behind the construction of the Kashmir Rail Link across the Chenab River in India, which shall become the world's tallest bridge.

artsandculture.google.com/story/crossi...
The Chenab Rail Bridge is 359 m above the river bed and has a 467 m single arch span across the mighty Chenab River, making it the highest Railway Arch Bridge in the world. This iconic bridge soars 359 metres above the bed of the River Chenab. Attribution: Konkan Railway Corporation Limited, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
June 7, 2025 at 6:25 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano 🌋 as seen from space during the 2018 eruption.

Credit: ESA
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano
June 4, 2025 at 7:05 AM
pustam.bsky.social
#ProudIPLGuide 🏏📍🌏✨
#IPLT20 #IPL #Cricket #LocalGuide #IPLGuide
June 4, 2025 at 6:24 AM
pustam.bsky.social
The President-elect of 🇷🇴 Romania holds a PhD in mathematics, is an Olympiad gold medalist (twice with a perfect score of 42/42), and has publications and preprints on arXiv related to Zagier's conjectures!
Romania's president-elect Nicușor Dan and his IMO performance.
May 19, 2025 at 6:51 PM
pustam.bsky.social
The collision of the Indian, Arabian and Eurasian plates formed the Tibetan and Iranian plateaus, but their timing and processes remain debated. This Review explores the evidence behind initial collision estimates and discusses the tectonic and geodynamic implications. Paper: go.nature.com/4kehMw8 🔒
The Tethys realm, suture zones and India–Arabia–Eurasia collision.
May 15, 2025 at 11:14 AM
pustam.bsky.social
🎉 Celebrating 6 years of contributions to Google Maps!

Being part of the global community has been an incredible journey. Every contribution, whether big or small, helps make Google Maps a more useful tool for everyone.🌍✨ #GoogleMaps

Join the community here:
www.google.com/localguides/...
May 11, 2025 at 2:18 PM
pustam.bsky.social
This means that every farm, field, and vegetable patch across the Himalayan state is free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
#Sikkim #OrganicState #Farm #Farming #Pesticides #NortheastIndia #Himalaya #Himalayas #HimalayanFoothills #HimalayanState #Fertilizer #ZeroPesticides #Organic
Temi Tea Garden, South Sikkim, in the northeastern Indian state of Sikkim (Indian Himalayan Region). Credit: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 Gautama Buddha statue at Buddha Park, Ravangla, Sikkim, India. Credit: Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0
May 2, 2025 at 10:09 AM
pustam.bsky.social
The Sahara Desert used to be a green savannah – new research explains why theconversation.com/the-sahara-d...
#Sahara #Desert #Savannah #HotDesert #GreenSavannah #Africa #Algeria #Climate #Atmosphere #Climatology #NorthAfrica #Ethnology #AxialTilt #AxialPrecession #Precession #Earth #Nature #Cycle
Africa’s vegetation cycles.
April 4, 2025 at 6:32 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Evolution of the price per kg of #payload (LEO) for several #space missions:

🇺🇸 Space #Shuttle - $19.8k/kg
🇪🇺 #Ariane 5 - $10.3k/kg
🇷🇺 #Soyuz FG - $7.2k/kg
🇯🇵 #H-IIB - $7.1k/kg
🇨🇳 #LongMarch 3B - $5.8k/kg
🇮🇳 Polar #Satellite - $3.9k/kg
SpaceX Falcon - $2.7k/kg
#SpaceX #Falcon 9 (reuse) - $1.9k/kg
Cost per kg of payload (LEO - Low Earth Orbit) for human spaceflight.
March 27, 2025 at 8:25 AM
pustam.bsky.social
It approaches a problem gradually, refines potential solutions, and chooses the best one.

It excels at:
🔘 Creating visually compelling web apps
🔘 Developing agentic programming applications
🔘 Code transformation and editing

Prompt: p5js to explore a Mandelbrot set.
editor.p5js.org/divinf.philo...
Mandelbrot set.
March 26, 2025 at 6:09 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Rhododendrons: Why these antiques of the plant kingdom must be conserved
scroll.in/article/1080...

#Rhododendrons #Conservation #PlantKingdom #Plant #Nepal #Himalayas #Himalaya #Plants #Rhododendron #Flower #Environment #Asia #NorthAmerica #HimachalPradesh
Rhododendron flowers bloom in Nepal. | Aditya Pal, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
March 25, 2025 at 8:02 AM
pustam.bsky.social
"Random sampling works better than you think: Gemini 1.5 = o1. The secret? Self-verification magically gets easier with scale."

Thinking for longer (e.g. o1) is only one of many axes of test-time computing. In a new Google paper, the authors instead focus on scaling the search axis. #Sampling
Sampling 200 solutions from Gemini 1.5 Pro and having it self-select the seemingly best one (without knowing the correct answer) beats o1-Preview.
March 21, 2025 at 8:36 AM
pustam.bsky.social
Moore’s Law for AI agents: the length of tasks that AIs can do is doubling about every 7 months.

These results appear robust. The authors were able to retrodict back to GPT-2. They further ran experiments on SWE-bench Verified and found a similar trend. #AIBoom

Read more: metr.org/blog/2025-03...
The length of tasks (measured by how long they take human professionals) that generalist frontier model agents can complete autonomously with 50% reliability has been doubling approximately every 7 months for the last 6 years. The shaded region represents 95% CI calculated by hierarchical bootstrap over task families, tasks, and task attempts.
March 21, 2025 at 7:14 AM