Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Updated 2025-07-16
Founded partly due to the influence of Edward Teller who thought Los Alamos National Laboratory was not making good progress on thermonuclear weapons, large part of which was developed there.
Linear differential equation Updated 2025-07-16
The name is a bit obscure if you don't think in very generalized terms right out of the gate. It refers to a linear polynomial of multiple variables, which by definition must have the super simple form of:and then we just put the unknown and each derivative into that simple polynomial:except that now the are not just constants, but they can also depend on the argument (but not on or its derivatives).
Explicit solutions exist for the very specific cases of:
- constant coefficients, any degree. These were known for a long time, and are were studied when Ciro was at university in the University of São Paulo.
- degree 1 and any coefficient
Poincaré sphere Updated 2025-07-16
In it, each of the six sides has a clear and simple to understand photon polarization state, either of:
The sphere clearly suggests for example that a rotational or diagonal polarizations are the combination of left/right with the correct phase. This is clearly explained at: Video "Quantum Mechanics 9b - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat II by ViaScience (2013)".
MacOS Updated 2025-07-16
Nice looking and expensive operating system by Apple. Ciro Santilli believes that:
- if you want to be ripped off, just use Microsoft Windows which has more software available
- or if you want to attain Enlightenment, just use Linux, which is free and open source
Magic Aids Updated 2025-07-16
His combination of politically incorrect dirt talk with amazing quirky decks captures Ciro's imagination.
Anonymous no face-reveal.
The videos are heavily edited with all pauses cut out, which makes them very quick to watch and saves viewer time.
Modern focused, with some occasional newer formats mixed in.
When Wizards publishes several useless sets in a row without a single modern playable card, he's just forced into Standard.
Busy beaver scale Updated 2025-07-16
The Busy beaver scale allows us to gauge the difficulty of proving certain (yet unproven!) mathematical conjectures!
To to this, people have reduced certain mathematical problems to deciding the halting problem of a specific Turing machine.
A good example is perhaps the Goldbach's conjecture. We just make a Turing machine that successively checks for each even number of it is a sum of two primes by naively looping down and trying every possible pair. Let the machine halt if the check fails. So this machine halts iff the Goldbach's conjecture is false! See also Conjecture reduction to a halting problem.
Therefore, if we were able to compute , we would be able to prove those conjectures automatically, by letting the machine run up to , and if it hadn't halted by then, we would know that it would never halt.
Of course, in practice, is generally uncomputable, so we will never know it. And furthermore, even if it were computable, it would take a lot longer than the age of the universe to compute any of it, so it would be useless.
However, philosophically speaking at least, the number of states of the equivalent Turing machine gives us a philosophical idea of the complexity of the problem.
The busy beaver scale is likely mostly useless, since we are able to prove that many non-trivial Turing machines do halt, often by reducing problems to simpler known cases. But still, it is cute.
But maybe, just maybe, reduction to Turing machine form could be useful. E.g. The Busy Beaver Challenge and other attempts to solve BB(5) have come up with large number of automated (usually parametrized up to a certain threshold) Turing machine decider programs that automatically determine if certain (often large numbers of) Turing machines run forever.
So it it not impossible that after some reduction to a standard Turing machine form, some conjecture just gets automatically brute-forced by one of the deciders, this is a path to
Butterfly dream Updated 2025-07-16
Chapter 2 paragraph 14:
Formerly, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, a butterfly flying about, feeling that it was enjoying itself. I did not know that it was Zhou. Suddenly I awoke, and was myself again, the veritable Zhou. I did not know whether it had formerly been Zhou dreaming that he was a butterfly, or it was now a butterfly dreaming that it was Zhou. But between Zhou and a butterfly there must be a difference. This is a case of what is called the Transformation of Things.'
C3 Oxford physics course Updated 2025-07-16
- web.archive.org/web/20170907092044/http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/students/course-materials/c3-condensed-matter-major-option it wasn't paywalled in the past up to 2017, but later became. Bastards.
- www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/page/2011/10/04/c3-intro-vacprobs17-41753.pdf gives the 2016 structure:
- Crystal Structure & Dynamics 10 lectures Dr Roger Johnston
- Band Theory 10 lectures Prof Michael Johnston
- Magnetism 7 lectures Prof Radu Coldea
- Optical Properties 6 lectures Prof Laura Herz
- Superconductivity 7 lectures Dr Peter Leek and Dr Amalia Coldea. web.archive.org/web/20170912021658/http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/page/2011/10/04/cmpsc-handout-2017-41006.pdf
C7.4 Oxford physics course Updated 2025-07-16
- qubit.guide/ HTML version od the book.
- github.com/thosgood/qubit.guide. Source code. Written in Bookdown.
- www.arturekert.org/iqis links to the lectures: www.youtube.com/@ArturEkert/playlists Well done in splitting those videos up!
- zhenyucai.com/post/intro_to_qi/
Interesting presentation cycle at Merton BTW: www.arturekert.org/teaching/merton
Cabbage (Csound) Updated 2025-07-16
Caenorhabditis elegans Updated 2025-07-16
- www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(16)30120-X
- www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(16)30151-X A Genome-Scale Database and Reconstruction of Caenorhabditis elegans Metabolism Gebauer, Juliane et al. Cell Systems , Volume 2 , Issue 5 , 312 - 322
Caesium-137 Updated 2025-07-16
Highly radioactive isotope of caesium with half-life of 30.17 y. Produced from the nuclear fission of uranium, TODO exact reaction, not found in nature.
The fucked thing about this byproduct is that it is in the same chemical family as sodium, and therefore forms a salt that looks like regular table salt, and dissolves in water and therefore easily enters your body and sticks to things.
Another problem is that its half-life is long enough that it doesn't lose radioactivity very quickly compared to the life of a human person, although it is short enough to make it highly toxic, making it a terrible pollutant when released.
This is why for example in the goiânia accident a girl ended up ingesting Caesium-137 after eating an egg after touching the Caesium with her hands.
caesium-137 decay scheme
. Source. Caesium standard Updated 2025-07-16
Uses the frequency of the hyperfine structure of caesium-133 ground state, i.e spin up vs spin down of its valence electron , to define the second.
International System of Units definition of the second since 1967, because this is what atomic clocks use.
TODO why does this have more energy than the hyperfine split of the hydrogen line given that it is further from the nucleus?
Caetano Veloso Updated 2025-07-16
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Cambridge Updated 2025-07-16
The city appear to exist there because it was a convenient crossing of the Cam. It also lies near the start of the ancient navigable section TODO towards north or south? Castle hill also offered a convenient fortification location near the river, and is part of the reason for the early Roman settlement. The original bridge was presumably in the current Magnalene bridge, just under the castle hill.
TODO why did the University of Oxford scholars flee to after the The hanging of the clerks in 1209? Why not anywhere else?
Can ISPs deanonymize Tor users based on timestamps of public posts? Updated 2025-07-16
Can't get you out of my head by Adam Curtis (2021) Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli was touched by this, and then watched several other documentaries by Curtis.
Notably the part of the governments have lost all power to companies, and can't do anything meaningful anymore to actually represent the people, because globalization reduces the power of governments.
Capacitor Updated 2025-07-16
They can only absorb electrons up to a certain point, but then the pushback becomes too strong, and current stops.
Therefore, they cannot conduct direct current long term.
For alternating current however, things are different, because in alternating current, electrons are just jiggling back and forward a little bit around a center point. So you can send alternating current power across a capacitor.
The key equation that relates Voltage to electric current in the capacitor is:So if a voltage Heavyside step function is applied what happens is:More realistically, one may consider the behavior or the series RC circuit to see what happens without infinities when a capacitor is involved as in the step response of the series RC circuit.
- the capacitor fills up instantly with an infinite current
- the current then stops instantly
Finding capacitance with an oscilloscope by Jacob Watts (2020)
Source. Good experiment. Capital flight Updated 2025-07-16
Capoeira music Updated 2025-07-16
Capoeira music is amazing. And some Brazilian pop adaptations of it have also been awesome.
Parabolicamará
. Source. By Gilberto Gil. Title track of the 1991 album.Na Roda de Capoeira by Nara Leão
. Source. From the 1964 album "Opinião De Nara" Unlisted articles are being shown, click here to show only listed articles.