Organization developing photonic quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
Origins of Precision by Machine Thinking (2017) Updated 2025-07-16
Great overview of the earlier history of unit standardization.
Gives particular emphasis to the invention of gauge blocks.
Internet Archive Open Library Updated 2025-07-16
Previously called "Lending Library" it seems: help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016554912-Borrowing-From-The-Lending-Library
You can borrow online books from them for a few hours/days: help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016554912-Borrowing-From-The-Lending-Library This is the most amazing thing ever made!!! You can even link to specific pages, e.g. archive.org/details/supermenstory00murr/page/80/mode/2up
They seem to a have a separate URL with the same content as well for some reason: openlibrary.org/, classic messy Internet Archive style.
Bastards are suing them www.theverge.com/2020/6/1/21277036/internet-archive-publishers-lawsuit-open-library-ebook-lending: Hachette, Penguin Random House, Wiley, and HarperCollins
It is quite hard to decide if an upload is from the official legal lending library, or just some illegal upload, e.g.:so the URLs are basically the same style. Some legality indicators:
- archive.org/details/TheGoogleStory likely illegal
- archive.org/details/isbn_9780385342728 likely legal
Access-restricted-item: true- present in the collection: archive.org/details/internetarchivebooks?tab=about
Invariant vs covariant Updated 2025-07-16
OurBigBook.com Updated 2025-07-16
The website is the reference instance of OurBigBook Web, which is part of the OurBigBook Project, the other main part of the project are software that users can run locally to publish their content such as the OurBigBook CLI.
The project documentation is present at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-user-manual
The topics feature allows you to find the best version of a subject written by other users user
. Live demo: derivative. OurBigBook.com Learning management systems Updated 2025-07-16
This website basically aims to be a learning management system, allowing in particular a teacher to focus his help on students that he is legally obliged to help due to their job. But it will have the following unusual characteristics in current LMS solutions:
- public first, to allow reuse across universities, rather than paywalled as is the case for most top universities
- students can create material just like teachers, both are on equal footing. Students/teachers will see an indicator "this is your teacher"/"this is your student for this/past semester", but that is the only difference between their interfaces.
Inverse AC Josephson effect Updated 2025-07-16
If you shine microwave radiation on a Josephson junction, it produces a fixed average voltage that depends only on the frequency of the microwave. TODO how is that done more precisely? How to you produce and inject microwaves into the thing?
The Wiki page gives the formula: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_effect#The_inverse_AC_Josephson_effect You get several sinusoidal harmonics, so the output is not a perfect sine. But the infinite sum of the harmonics has a fixed average voltage value.
And en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_voltage_standard#Josephson_effect mentions that the effect is independent of the junction material, physical dimension or temperature.
All of the above, compounded with the fact that we are able to generate microwaves with extremely precise frequency with an atomic clock, makes this phenomenon perfect as a Volt standard, the Josephson voltage standard.
TODO understand how/why it works better.
Is fog computing more efficient than cloud computing? Updated 2025-07-16
Advantages of fog: there is only one, reusing hardware that would be otherwise idle.
Disadvantages:
- in cloud, you can put your datacenter on the location with the cheapest possible power. On fog you can't.
- on fog there is some waste due to network communication.
- you will likely optimize code less well because you might be targeting a wide array of different types of hardware, so more power (and time) wastage. Furthermore, some of the hardware used will not not be optimal for the task, e.g. CPU instead of GPU.
All of this makes Ciro Santilli doubtful if it wouldn't be more efficient for volunteers simply to donate money rather than inefficient power usage.
Bibliography:
- greenfoldingathome.com/2018/05/28/is-foldinghome-a-waste-of-electricity/: useless article, does not compare to centralize, asks if folding the proteins is worth the power usage...
I should have loved biology by James Somers Updated 2025-07-16
This resonates a lot with Ciro Santilli's ideas!
- physics and the illusion of life
- physics education needs more focus on understanding experiments and their history:
- Education is broken
- molecular biology feels like systems programming
I've never come across a subject so fractal in its complexity. It reminds me of computing that way.
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Qiagen DNeasy PowerWater Kit Updated 2025-07-16
www.qiagen.com/gb/products/discovery-and-translational-research/dna-rna-purification/dna-purification/microbial-dna/dneasy-powerwater-kit (archive) Here is its documentation: www.qiagen.com/gb/resources/download.aspx?id=bb731482-874b-4241-8cf4-c15054e3a4bf&lang=en (archive).
Don't be a pussy Updated 2025-07-16
!!! Survivorship bias alert !!!
quoteinvestigator.com/2018/05/07/overcome/
If you want to do something, but you are afraid to do it, then that is likely what you should do.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/50458-whatever-you-re-meant-to-do-do-it-now-the-conditions Doris Lessing:
Whatever you're meant to do, do it now. The conditions are always impossible.
For example, when Ciro Santilli was deciding what to do in university, he wanted mostly to do pure physics.
But because he was afraid he was going to die poor and unemployed because of that, he picked engineering instead.
That was a mistake.
His family was not even poor. He was young and did not have a family to support. His father even told him: "do whatever the fuck you want, we support your decision".
But he was a coward.
It was also in part because a physicist uncle which he respected suggested that as an engineer Ciro might be able to make useful contributions to tooling required by physics. When Roberto Salmeron died in 2020, Ciro's friends shared this 2013 video interview with the late professor, where he explains he first went to the University of São Paulo to study engineering (like Ciro), but then fell for his passion for physics (like Ciro?), his first task being to build a Geiger counter, thus explaining the likely origin of the uncle's theory. But who knows, maybe he was right. Maybe Ciro's OurBigBook.com will become huge and help a lot of people, and it might not have had Ciro not done engineering and learnt programming. Destiny operates in weird ways sometimes.
Furthermore, while in University, Ciro learnt about the molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo, a fantastic sounding full time course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural sciences topics which Ciro loves (Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology) and which students from the entire university can apply to transfer to only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they didn't adapt to the new course.
But did Ciro do it? Nope, he remained an even larger coward.
Had he studied more sciences, he might have been happier, and might have had greater achievements later in life, in particular when he went to École Polytechnique.
Similar thoughts crossed his mind when he started his campaign for freedom of speech in China, but this time he had learnt the lesson, and went for it, and it felt very good.
If you have a day job, but also have a dream, and want to keep the day job for a reason, try to reserve the time of the day that your brain works best before or after work for your dream: do one cool thing every day.
Companies can help you grow because you see real problems from within them, but their end goal is to consume you as much as possible. Don't let that happen. Invest part of what you gain, in yourself. www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/paradox-going-outside/ The Paradox of Going Outside by James Somers (2012) puts it incredibly well:
I work, for instance, as a Web developer. It's a very good job. Our office is a block south of Union Square, a 12-minute commute from my apartment. We're served breakfast every morning. Our kitchen is stocked with "provisions" of organic beef jerky, coconut water, craft beers, chips, and two restaurant-class espresso machines. We have two ping pong tables and buckets of 3-star ping pong balls. (A new office manager bought "1-stars" once and some of the guys protested by crushing them.) We work on 4-cored Apple Mac computers with dual monitors. We have an unmolested hour for lunch, 10-minute breaks in the morning and afternoon, and a "do not disturb" policy past the working hours. We even have a specific email address where employees can ask for free things: genuine maple syrup, hot chocolate, a $900 chair, a new keyboard. Most of the programmers make six figures, and many of those have only three or four years of experience.It's impossible to say so without sounding like the spokesperson for Entitlement itself but working there is still sort of soul-crushing. It's soul-crushing in the way that any job that doesn't command your full passionate attention must be. What happens is that I will be in my chair in the early afternoon and I will accidentally step out of myself and all I'll see is time passing, nine-hour parcels of healthy consciousness forever being packed away as the user experience of clerical workers or consumers or whoever gets marginally better; and I'll end up thinking that this enterprise of mine is not so much creative but bureaucratic, that what I've gotten good at is reading the instruction manuals of other people, finding my way around their insignificant warrens. And in those moments the whole business will seem to me like kind of a tragic waste.
Other quotes:
- is a phrase Sergey Brin uses. The Google Story claims he picked that up from academia, and quotes this from a september 2003 talk in an Israeli elite high school.
Healthy Disregard For The Impossible
- quoteinvestigator.com/2014/05/29/find-love/
Find What You Love and Let It Kill You
- Cute boy things by Caroline Ellison:
if you are a boy with the confidence to advocate for unconventional ideas and take actions based on them you are valid
- How can I be as great by Justine Musk:
rock the boat
- From the 1922 poem Portuguese Sea by famous Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, which gets drilled into the head of every Brazilian high school student:He who wants to pass beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.Quem quer passar além do Bojador
Tem que passar além da dor. - Translation of a poem by Muhammad Iqbal TODO date:One is reminded of As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
- "NPC life" as a way to refer to a soul crushing job
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:However there is one thing to lose, if you do safer investments and don't lose everything, then you might be able to retire earlier.
- archive.ph/mlaLK
- twitter.com/0xTenkito/status/1775167216641548732, a cryptocurrency investor says:
Dilbert "A small brain irrationally puts more weight on a small loss than on a huge opportunity" cartoon (2000)
Source. 
Jake Likes Onions "Slowly" cartoon
. Source. This is what trying to reach a dream part time feels like. The cartoon reads: "The tiger pursues its prey. Slowly. The human pursues its life goals. Slowly. Very slowly.".Excerpt from the documentary film "Steve Jobs: Secrets of Life" (1994)
Source. When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it... Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.
Of course, survivorship bias alert!
What Would You Do If Money Were No Object by Alan Watts
. Source. Sample transcription: genius.com/Alan-watts-what-if-money-was-no-object-annotated:What do you desire? What makes you itch? What sort of a situation would you like?Let's suppose, I do this often in vocational guidance of students, they come to me and say, well, "we're getting out of college and we have the faintest idea what we want to do". So I always ask the question, "what would you like to do if money were no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?"Well, it's so amazing as a result of our kind of educational system, crowds of students say well, we'd like to be painters, we'd like to be poets, we'd like to be writers, but as everybody knows you can't earn any money that way. Or another person says well, I'd like to live an out-of-doors life and ride horses. I said you want to teach in a riding school?Let's go through with it. What do you want to do? When we finally got down to something, which the individual says he really wants to do, I will say to him, you do that and forget the money, because, if you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you will spend your life completely wasting your time. You'll be doing things you don't like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing things you don't like doing, which is stupid. Better to have a short life that is full of what you like doing than a long life spent in a miserable way.And after all, if you do really like what you're doing, it doesn't matter what it is, you can eventually turn it - you could eventually become a master of it. It's the only way to become a master of something, to be really with it. And then you'll be able to get a good fee for whatever it is. So don't worry too much. That's everybody is - somebody is interested in everything, anything you can be interested in, you will find others will.But it's absolutely stupid to spend your time doing things you don't like, in order to go on spending things you don't like, doing things you don't like and to teach our children to follow in the same track. See what we are doing, is we're bringing up children and educating to live the same sort of lives we are living. In order that they may justify themselves and find satisfaction in life by bringing up their children to bring up their children to do the same thing, so it's all retch and no vomit. It never gets there. And so, therefore, it's so important to consider this question: What do I desire?
Keep Chargin' from a Show of Hands by Victor Wooten (1996)
Source. That's the way I live my life, I give it my all. I think that a person should really make up his mind what he wants to do, and when did made up, he cannot fail at it. The basic rule to sucess I think, is when the going gets tough, that is a positive signal to keep chargin'.
Charles Bukowski is one of the most hardcore don't be a pussy people ever. It's almost scary. Far beyond Ciro level.
thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/2008/11/the-laughing-he.html
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the Gods wait to delight
in you.
www.goodreads.com/quotes/39207-if-you-re-going-to-try-go-all-the-way-otherwise
If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the Gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
I have one of two choices - stay in the post office and go crazy... or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I have decided to starve.
Bukowski kissing his typewriter.
Like Ciro Santilli and his computer!All adults are bored scene from an Edward Teller, An Early Time
. Source. Up to the time that I met Klug ([a mathematiciam]), I was sure that all grown ups were people to be pitied. They had to work, they were tired, they were bored with what they were doing. I heard both my parents often complain. Klug was the first man whom I met who most obviously enoyed what he was doing.
Dot product Updated 2025-07-16
Most definitions tend to be bilinear forms.
We use the unqualified generally refers to the dot product of Real coordinate spaces, which is a positive definite symmetric bilinear form. Other important examples include:The rest of this section is about the case.
- the complex dot product, which is not strictly symmetric nor linear, but it is positive definite
- Minkowski inner product, sometimes called" "Minkowski dot product is not positive definite
The positive definite part of the definition likely comes in because we are so familiar with metric spaces, which requires a positive norm in the norm induced by an inner product.
The default Euclidean space definition, we use the matrix representation of a symmetric bilinear form as the identity matrix, e.g. in :so that:
Dots in Gmail address Updated 2025-07-16
Download all Wikipedia categories Updated 2025-07-16
Our WIP script: wikipedia/import-categories.sh.
Related:
- opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/1533/download-wikipedia-articles-from-a-specific-category
- webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16359/is-there-a-way-to-download-a-list-of-all-wikipedia-categories/172480#172480
- stackoverflow.com/questions/40119322/how-to-download-all-pages-inside-a-category-in-wikipedia
- category tree on Stack Overflow
- stackoverflow.com/questions/17432254/wikipedia-category-hierarchy-from-dumps/77313490#77313490 Canon but no good answers.
- stackoverflow.com/questions/12227134/how-to-fetch-category-tree-of-wiki
- stackoverflow.com/questions/21782410/finding-subcategories-of-a-wikipedia-category-using-category-and-categorylinks-t. Actually explains it: stackoverflow.com/questions/21782410/finding-subcategories-of-a-wikipedia-category-using-category-and-categorylinks-t/21798259#21798259
- stackoverflow.com/questions/27279649/how-to-build-wikipedia-category-hierarchy
- mdkzaman.com/knowledge-graph-from-wikipedia-category-hierarchy/
Consider:
Let's observe them in MySQL:outputs:
mysql enwiki -e "select page_id, page_namespace, page_title, page_is_redirect from page where page_namespace in (0, 14) and page_title in ('Computer_storage_devices', 'Computer_data_storage')"+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
| page_id | page_namespace | page_title | page_is_redirect |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
| 5300 | 0 | Computer_data_storage | 0 |
| 42371130 | 0 | Computer_storage_devices | 1 |
| 711721 | 14 | Computer_data_storage | 0 |
| 895945 | 14 | Computer_storage_devices | 0 |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+mysql enwiki -e "select cl_from, cl_to from categorylinks where cl_from in (5300, 711721, 895945, 42371130)"+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| cl_from | cl_to |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 5300 | All_articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements |
| 5300 | Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_2009 |
| 5300 | Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_2011 |
| 5300 | Articles_with_GND_identifiers |
| 5300 | Articles_with_NKC_identifiers |
| 5300 | Articles_with_short_description |
| 5300 | Computer_architecture |
| 5300 | Computer_data_storage |
| 5300 | Short_description_matches_Wikidata |
| 5300 | Use_dmy_dates_from_June_2020 |
| 5300 | Wikipedia_articles_incorporating_text_from_the_Federal_Standard_1037C |
| 711721 | Computer_architecture |
| 711721 | Computer_data |
| 711721 | Computer_hardware_by_type |
| 711721 | Data_storage |
| 895945 | Computer_data_storage |
| 895945 | Computer_peripherals |
| 895945 | Recording_devices |
| 42371130 | Redirects_from_alternative_names |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+So we see that
cl_from encodes the parent categories:- parent categories of categories:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_data_storage, which has ID
711721, has parent categories: "Computer hardware by type", "Computer data", "Data storage", "Computer architecture". This matches exactly on the database. These are all encoded on the source code of the page:{{DEFAULTSORT:Storage}} [[Category:Computer hardware by type]] [[Category:Computer data|Storage]] [[Category:Data storage|Computer]] [[Category:Computer architecture]] - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_storage_devices has parent categories: "Computer data storage", "Recording devices", "Computer peripherals". This matches exactly on the database.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_data_storage, which has ID
- parent categories of pages:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_storage_devices whish is a redirect gets the magic category "Redirects_from_alternative_names", a humongous placeholder with many thousands of pages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Redirects_from_alternative_names
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_data_storage shows only two categories onthe web UI: "Computer data storage" and "Computer architecture". Both of these are present on the database and at the end of the source code:The others appear to be more magic. Two of them we can guess from the templates:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Computer Data Storage}} [[Category:Computer data storage| ]] [[Category:Computer architecture]]are likely{{short description|Storage of digital data readable by computers}} {{Use dmy dates|date=June 2020}}Use_dmy_dates_from_June_2020andArticles_with_short_descriptionbut the rest is more magic and not necessarily present in-source.
So to find all articls and categories under a given category title, say en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematics we can run:
mariadb enwiki -e "select cl_from, cl_to, page_namespace, page_title from categorylinks inner join page on page_namespace in (0, 14) and cl_from = page_id and cl_to = 'Mathematics'" Download a single directory with git Updated 2025-07-16
- stackoverflow.com/questions/600079/how-do-i-clone-a-subdirectory-only-of-a-git-repository/52269934#52269934
- summaries:
- dupes:
- file or directory
- file
- only small files:
Download titles of all Wikipedia articles Updated 2025-07-16
dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-all-titles-in-ns0.gz Characterization:
- contains redirects, e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Ampere_North" redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere_North,_New_Jersey and both are present. Noted in this comment: stackoverflow.com/questions/24474288/how-to-obtain-a-list-of-titles-of-all-wikipedia-articles#comment136016773_24474476
Ising model Updated 2025-07-16
Toy model of matter that exhibits phase transition in dimension 2 and greater. It does not provide numerically exact results by itself, but can serve as a tool to theorize existing and new phase transitions.
As mentioned at: stanford.edu/~jeffjar/statmech/intro4.html some systems which can be seen as modelled by it include:
- the spins direction (up or down) of atoms in a magnet, which can undergo phase transitions depending on temperature as that characterized by the Curie temperature and an externally applied magnetic fieldNeighboring spins like to align, which lowers the total system energy.
- the type of atom at a lattice point in a 2-metal alloy, e.g. Fe-C (e.g. steel). TODO: intuition for the neighbor interaction? What likes to be with what? And aren't different phases in different crystal structures?
Also has some funky relations to renormalization TODO.
Bibliography:
The Ising Model in Python by Mr. P Solver
. Source. The dude is crushing it on a Jupyter Notebook. Drosophila connectome Updated 2025-07-16
The hard part then is how to make any predictions from it:
- 2024 www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02935-z Fly-brain connectome helps to make predictions about neural activity. Summary of "Connectome-constrained networks predict neural activity across the fly visual system" by J. K. Lappalainen et. al.
2024: www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03190-y Largest brain map ever reveals fruit fly's neurons in exquisite detail
As of 2022, it had been almost fully decoded by post mortem connectome extraction with microtome!!! 135k neurons.
- 2021 www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/science/drosophila-fly-brain-connectome.html Why Scientists Have Spent Years Mapping This Creature’s Brain by New York Times
That article mentions the humongous paper elifesciences.org/articles/66039 elifesciences.org/articles/66039 "A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection" by a group from Janelia Research Campus. THe paper is so large that it makes eLife hang.
Isomers suggest that atoms exist Updated 2025-07-16
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 85:so it is quite cool to see that organic chemistry is one of the things that pushed atomic theory forward. Because when you start to observe that isomers has different characteristics, despite identical proportions of atoms, this is really hard to explain without talking about the relative positions of the atoms within molecules!
However, it became increasingly difficult in chemical circles to deny the reality of molecules after 1874, the year in which Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel independently explained the isomerism of certain organic substances in terms of stereochemical properties of carbon compounds.
Drug liberalization Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli supports full legalization of all drugs, because he feels that it would be better overall for the world to have cheaper drugs and more drug addicts, but way, way less organized crime.
These should be extremely controlled of course, with extremely high taxes that puts their price just below the current illegal market, and a complete ban on any positive advertising.
Ciro believes that maybe the government could even go as far as giving free drugs to drug addicts so they don't have to rob to get a fix.
This is notably considering that drug-led organized crime completely dominates and corrupts the politics of many production and trafficking zones, which are already generally poor fucked up places to start with:Ciro's experiences in Brazil such as mentioned at São Remo, the favela next to USP, although much less extreme than the above, also come to mind.
Drug traffic corrupts everything. It prevents development of honest people. It is a cancer, which we have failed time and time a gain to cure. The only cure is to accept the other less insidious of addiction.
Bibliography:
- How to Fix a Drug Scandal (2020) gives a good sense of the relentlessness of the drug war, and how it affects people who are already poor the most
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