Life in Belgorod – Science and Everyday Life

I have long wanted to write about life in Belgorod. At the same time, I deliberately try to avoid details about military actions and the difficulties associated with them. I believe it is inhumane to keep describing how people destroy one another. There is already more than enough of that kind of content online.

Nevertheless, it seems impossible to completely avoid the topic. Drones fly over the city quite often. You can hear the air-raid alerts, the work of air-defence systems, and the sounds of them being shot down. I have never actually seen a flying drone myself — and, frankly, that is probably for the best.

Over the past year life in the city has become noticeably more tense. The conflict is escalating and expanding, and I strongly dislike that. I believe it must be stopped: too many people are dying and suffering. I see no other way out except a freeze. Most likely this will happen this year or next. How we will live after that is another question entirely.

I find it especially painful to watch what is happening because I am a carrier of three cultures at once. I speak English fluently and have even been teaching a foreign language a little lately. At the same time I belong to Russian culture and come from the Komi Republic; by nationality I am Komi. This combination leaves me with complex, far from the brightest feelings about the conflict.

About the project, life, and the idea of the application

I’ll say it honestly right away: there won’t be large series of posts here or attempts to turn all of this into some kind of large-scale public project. Rather, this is simply a recording of the process — of how everything is developing inside me and around me.

Life right now is quite simple and clear: work, fundamental science, and sometimes applied things that I do more “out of interest” than out of necessity. Everything else is an additional layer that exists in parallel.

I have already written a book. It did not become something widely known or massively discussed, and probably that is exactly why there is no particular desire now to ramp all of this up to large volumes of content. Not because there are no ideas — there are. It’s just that there is no feeling that this necessarily has to turn into something big.

About the idea of the application itself

To put it simply, the idea of the application is connected with what I call generalization.

The human central nervous system is not just a set of wires along which signals run. It is a much more complex structure in which information is not only transmitted, but also constantly processed.

As the signals rise higher — toward the brain — the system becomes more and more branched. It ceases to be linear. It begins to “think” inside itself, even at the level of simple reflexes.

And this property — nonlinearity — seems key to me.