High flying bird vs gophers Updated +Created
Ciro once read that there are two types of mathematicians/scientists (he thinks it was comparing Einstein to some Jack of all trades polymath who didn't do any new discoveries):
  • high flying birds, who know a bit of everything, feel the beauty of each field, but never dig deep in any of them
  • gophers, who dig all the way down, on a single subject, until they either get the Nobel Prize, or work on the wrong problem and waste their lives
TODO long after Ciro forgot where he had read this from originally, someone later pointed him to: www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200212p.pdf Birds and Frogs by Freeman Dyson (2009), which is analogous but about Birds and Frogs. So did Ciro's memory play a trick on him, or is there also a variant; of this metaphor with a gopher?
Ciro is without a doubt the bird type. Perhaps the ultimate scientist is the one who can combine both aspects in the right amount?
Ciro gets bored of things very quickly.
Once he understands the general principles, if the thing is not the next big thing, Ciro considers himself satisfied without all the nitty gritty detail, and moves on to the next attempt.
In the field of mathematics for example, Ciro is generally content with understanding cool theorem statements. More generally, one of Ciro's desires is for example to understand the significance of each physics Nobel Prize.
This is also very clear for example after Ciro achieved Linux Kernel Module Cheat: he now had the perfect setup to learn all the Linux kernel shady details but at the same time after all those years he finally felt that "he could do it, so that was enough", and soon moved to other projects.
If Ciro had become a scientist, he would write the best review papers ever, just like in the current reality he writes amazing programming tutorials on Stack Overflow.
Ciro has in his mind an overly large list of subjects that "he feels he should know the basics of", and whenever he finds something in one of those topics that he does not know enough about, he uncontrollably learns it, even if it is not the most urgent thing to be done. Or at least he puts a mention on his "list of sources" about the subject. Maybe everyone is like that. But Ciro feels that he feels this urge particularly strongly. Correspondingly, if a subject is not in that list, Ciro ignores it without thinking twice.
Ciro believes that high flying birds are the type of people better suited for venture capital investment management: you know a bit of what is hot on several fields to enough depth to decide where to place your bets and how to guide them. But you don't have the patience to actually go deeply into any one of them and deal with each individual shit that comes up.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980) episode 1 mentions as quoted by the Wikipedia page for Eratosthenes:
According to an entry in the Suda (a 10th-century encyclopedia), his critics scorned him, calling him beta (the second letter of the Greek alphabet) because he always came in second in all his endeavours.
That's Ciro.
Implosion-type fission weapon Updated +Created
Implosion-type fission weapons are more complicated than gun-type fission weapon because you have to precisely coordinate the detonation of a bunch of explosives.
ImageNet subset Updated +Created
Subset generators:
Unfortunately, since ImageNet is a closed standard no one can upload such pre-made subsets, forcing everybody to download the full dataset, in ImageNet1k, which is huge!
Pauli exclusion principle Updated +Created
Initially a phenomenological guess to explain the periodic table. Later it was apparently proven properly with the spin-statistics theorem, physics.stackexchange.com/questions/360140/theoretical-proof-of-paulis-exclusion-principle.
And it was understood more and more that basically this is what prevents solids from collapsing into a single nucleus, not electrical repulsion: electron degeneracy pressure!
Bibliography:
Video 1.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 17. Matter by Sean Carroll (2020)
Source.
Janko group Updated +Created
IBM Generalized Markup Language Updated +Created
SGML predecessor.
Spock Updated +Created
Readout (quantum computing) Updated +Created
Probability current Updated +Created
Mathieu group Updated +Created
Mathematics website Updated +Created
Important mathematical group Updated +Created
Infineon Technologies Updated +Created
In-order depth-first search Updated +Created
This is the order in which a binary search tree should be traversed for ordered output, i.e.:
  • everything to the left is smaller than parent
  • everything to the right is larger than parent
This ordering makes sense for binary trees and not k-ary trees in general because if there are more than two nodes it is not clear what the top node should go in the middle of.
This is unlike pre-order depth-first search and post-order depth-first search which generalize obviously to general trees.
Indel Updated +Created
Indefinite orthogonal group Updated +Created
Generalization of orthogonal group to preserve different bilinear forms. Important because the Lorentz group is .
Steve Jobs customers don't know what they want quote Updated +Created
TODO clear attribution source:
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Final Fantasy VI Updated +Created
OMG, the second half of the game where the world becomes quite open and all backstories are revealed, is one of the best gaming moments ever.
Exascale computing Updated +Created
The scale where human brain simulation becomes possible according to some estimates.
First publicly reached by Frontier.
Matrix similarity Updated +Created

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