varinsikka.github.io
I'm a senior at Khan Lab School
This blog is my sometimes random, sometimes deliberate, thoughts on linguistics, music, and climate change. I don't have a way yet to incorporate your comments in here, but I'm working on it. Thanks for visiting!
I read a paper recently that evaluated the performance of various LLMs in translating various languages. The results seem pretty interesting (overall), and then this got me into a rabbit hole of trying to understand exactly how LLms do machine translation. Read More
One question I've often debated with some fellow linguistics enthusiasts, and also seen talked about online, is what the hardest script to read/write, or the hardest language to speak/learn is. Many people have their own different opinions on these questions, but my personal "hardest script to read" and "hardest language to speak" would be Khmer, the official language of Cambodia. Read More
As I talked about in my last blog, in order to go carbon neutral we need to plant a LOT of trees (specifically ~1.607 trillion). I decided to put a spin on two important pieces of data from it by making them interactive. Here, we have some adjustable values that when adjusted produce different results, so you can see what different plans of action we'd need to take in different scenarios. The first of these shows how many trees we'd need to plant based on different amounts of carbon that we emit annually. Read More
According to NASA, we emit ~10 gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere every year (we emit far more carbon every year, but ~10 gigatons is the amount of carbon that is added to the atmosphere and not absorbed by trees, the ocean, or anything else). According to three experts on Quora (an unnamed research engineer, Frank Roeske and Riggald Eux), there is a total of ~3,200 gigatons of CO2 in the atmosphere, and of this ~1,100 gigatons of CO2 have been added due to human activity since 1880. There are about 3 trillion trees in the world (Source: gotreequotes.com), and because of deforestation in the Amazon rainforests, Indonesia, and many other parts of the world (Source: WWF), this number is decreasing. People are also thinking about, and launching, initiatives to plant more trees around the world. So the questions I want to explore are: What can we do using trees to reduce the excess carbon in our atmosphere? Is this feasible? And what would it take? Read more