Telephone-based system Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about telecommunication systems that are based on top of telephone lines.
Telephone lines were ubiquitous from early on, and many technologies used them to send data, including much after regular phone calls became obsolete with VoIP.
These market forces tended to eventually crush non-telephone-based systems such as telex. Maybe in that case it was just that the name sounded like a thing of the 50's. But still. Dead.
Long Distance by AT&T (1941)
Source. youtu.be/aRvFA1uqzVQ?t=219 is perhaps the best moment, which attempts to correlate the exploration of the United States with the founding of the U.S. states. Point-contact transistor Updated 2025-07-16
As the name suggests, this is not very sturdy, and was quickly replaced by bipolar junction transistor.
Text-based user interface Updated 2025-07-16
Political parties in the United States Updated 2025-07-16
Polyphyly Updated 2025-07-16
Basically mean that parallel evolution happened. Some cool ones:
- homeothermy: mammals and birds
- animal flight: bats, birds and insects
- multicellularity: evolved a bunch of times
Positrons are electrons travelling back in time Updated 2025-07-16
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.
Primate Updated 2025-07-16
Probably quantum secure encryption algorithm Updated 2025-07-16
x86 Paging Tutorial Page table entries Updated 2025-07-16
The exact format of table entries is fixed by the hardware.
The page table is then an array of
struct.On this simplified example, the page table entries contain only two fields:so in this example the hardware designers could have chosen the size of the page table to b
bits function
----- -----------------------------------------
20 physical address of the start of the page
1 present flag21 instead of 32 as we've used so far.All real page table entries have other fields, notably fields to set pages to read-only for Copy-on-write. This will be explained elsewhere.
It would be impractical to align things at 21 bits since memory is addressable by bytes and not bits. Therefore, even in only 21 bits are needed in this case, hardware designers would probably choose 32 to make access faster, and just reserve bits the remaining bits for later usage. The actual value on x86 is 32 bits.
Here is a screenshot from the Intel manual image "Formats of CR3 and Paging-Structure Entries with 32-Bit Paging" showing the structure of a page table in all its glory: Figure 1. "x86 page entry format".
The fields are explained in the manual just after.
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.
Program optimization Updated 2025-07-16
Dual vector Updated 2025-07-16
In the context of tensors , we use raised indices to refer to members of the dual basis vs the underlying basis:The dual basis vectors are defined to "pick the corresponding coordinate" out of elements of V. E.g.:By expanding into the basis, we can put this more succinctly with the Kronecker delta as:
Note that in Einstein notation, the components of a dual vector have lower indices. This works well with the upper case indices of the dual vectors, allowing us to write a dual vector as:
Early Google employee Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
ChatGPT produces:Omid Kordestani - Joined in 1999 as Google’s first business hire, focusing on sales and revenue generation.
- Heather Cairns (Employee #4) - Joined in 1998. She handled HR and was one of the earliest administrative hires.
- Harry Cheung (Employee #5) - Joined in 1999. An early engineer.
- Gerald Aigner (Employee #6) - Hired in 1999. Worked as a software engineer.
- Susan Wojcicki (Employee #16) - Joined in 1999. She rented her garage to Larry and Sergey in 1998 and later became an integral part of Google's business and advertising teams.
- Marissa Mayer (Employee #20) - Hired in 1999. Played a major role in Google Search and design.
Endocytosis Updated 2025-07-16
E. Coli genome starting point Updated 2025-07-16
The conventional starting point is not at the E. Coli K-12 MG1655 origin of replication.
biocyc.org/ECOLI/NEW-IMAGE?type=EXTRAGENIC-SITE&object=G0-10506 explains:If it is a bit hard to understand what they mean by "origin of transfer" though, as that term is usually associated with the origin of transfer of bacterial conjugation.
This site is the origin of replication of the E. coli chromosome. It contains the binding sites for DnaA, which is critical for initiation of replication. Replication proceeds bidirectionally. For historical reasons, the numbering of E. coli's circular chromosome does not start at the origin of replication, but at the origin of transfer during conjugation.
E. Coli K-12 MG1655 Updated 2025-07-16
NCBI taxonomy entry: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?id=511145 This links to:
- Interactively browse the sequence on the browser viewer: "Reference genome: Escherichia coli str. K-12 substr. MG1655" which eventually leads to: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/556503834?report=graphIf we zoom into the start, we hover over the very first gene/protein: the famous (just kidding) e. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene thrL, at position 190-255.The second one is the much more interesting e. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene thrA.
- Gene list, with a total of 4,629 as of 2021: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/?term=txid511145
E. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene of unknown function Updated 2025-07-16
E. Coli replication time Updated 2025-07-16
20 minutes in optimal conditions, with a crazy multiple start sites mechanism: E. Coli starts DNA replication before the previous one finished.
Otherwise, naively, would take 60-90 minutes just to replicate and segregate the full DNA otherwise. So it starts copying multiple times.
- biology.stackexchange.com/questions/30080/how-can-e-coli-proliferate-so-rapidly
- stochasticscientist.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-e-coli-grows-so-fast.html
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2063475/ Organization of sister origins and replisomes during multifork DNA replication in Escherichia coli by Fossum et al (2007)
Maxima and minima Updated 2025-07-16
Given a function :we want to find the points of the domain of where the value of is smaller (for minima, or larger for maxima) than all other points in some neighbourhood of .
- from some space. For beginners the real numbers but more generally topological spaces should work in general
- to the real numbers
In the case of Functionals, this problem is treated under the theory of the calculus of variations.
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