Utah Updated 2025-07-16
Variational formulation of a partial differential equation Updated 2025-07-16
Arithmetic mean Updated 2025-07-16
Arline Greenbaum Updated 2025-07-16
Feynman's first wife, previously his local-high school-days darling. Feynman was like an reversed Stephen Hawking: he married his wife knowing that she had a serious illness, while Hawking's wife married him knowing that as well. Except that in Feynman's case, the disease outcome (tuberculosis) was much more uncertain, and she tragically died in 1945 much earlier while Feynman was at Los Alamos Laboratory, while Hawking, despite his decline, lived much longer.
Feynman first noticed Arline on the beaches on the region of his home in Far Rockaway, in the Queens, New York, near Long Beach. She lived a bit further inland in Cedarhurst. Arline was beautiful and boys competed for her, but Richard persisted, stalking her at an after-school social league sponsored by the local Synagogue and joining an art class she went to, until he eventually won it out. The region was highly Jewish, and both were from Jewish families, as also suggested by their family names.
Reading about her death e.g. at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) is a major tearjerker, it's just too horrible. The book mentions on chapter "The Last Springtime" that at last, during the last months of her life, after much hesitation, they did fuck in the sanatorium Arline where was staying at in Albuquerque, the nearest major city to Los Alamos (154 km), despite the risk of Feynman being infected, which would be particularly serious given that Feynman would be in constant contact with students and possibly infect others as part of his career as a researcher/teacher. Feynman would visit her on weekends by bus, and stay in Los Alamos during the week.
Arline finally died on June 16th 1945, exactly one month before the Trinity nuclear test was carried out. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a little later on 6 and 9 of August 1945.
On one of his last trips to Oak Ridge town late 1945, after her death, Feynman walked past a shop window and saw a pretty dress. He thought to himself, "Arline would have liked that", and the reminder made him cry for the first time after Arline's death.
It is even sadder to think that the first antibiotics for tuberculosis, streptomycin, finished its first major clinical trial at around 1948, not long after her death.
Ciro Santilli considers this tragedy a cause of Feynman was a huge womanizer during a certain period of his life.
Richard Feynman with his first wife Arline Greenbaum
. Source. TODO date, location, original source.
Abacus scene from the film Infinity (1996)
Source. The film suggests that Feynman and Arline fucked a lot before the final Los Alamos fuck, that fuck story from book being only "fuck after tuberculosis diagnosis", after which they had to slow it down a bit.
This is likely true given how long they had been together for at that point. Ciro Santilli is such a pure soul for not having thought that! They were not very conservative at all those two.
Also their wedding got slowed down because there was a clause in Feynman's scholarship at Princeton University stating that the recipient could not be married, those were different times altogether.
Cirism Updated 2025-07-16
Cirism is totally not a cult, has been officially verified to be compatible with all major world religions.
Enlightened Cirists donate money to the cause at: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". It is totally optional of course, your soul will just be eternally damned if you don't.
Ciro Santilli once proclaimed:
Thou shalt eat thy watermelon in the morning, and thy melon in the evening. Thou shalt not eat thy watermelon in the evening, nor shalt thou eat thy melon in the morning.
Compound Atwood machine Updated 2025-07-16
Lagrangian Mechanics Example: The Compound Atwood Machine by Michel van Biezen (2017)
Source. Part of lagrangian mechanics lectures by Michel van Biezen (2017). Computer form factor Updated 2025-07-16
Computer vision dataset Updated 2025-07-16
Connected component Updated 2025-07-16
When a disconnected space is made up of several smaller connected spaces, then each smaller component is called a "connected component" of the larger space.
See for example the
Are cryptocurrencies useful? Updated 2025-07-16
Cryptocurrencies have two applications:
- illegal activities, notably buying drugs, paying for ransomware and money laundering. But also paying for anti-censorship services from inside dictatorships. Illegal activity can be good when governments are bad, and arguably selling drugs should be legal.For this reason Ciro Santilli believes that privacy coins like Monero are currently the most useful cryptocurrencies. Also, people concerned with their privacy are likely to more naturally make fewer larger payments to reduce exposure rather than a bunch of small separate ones, and therefore transaction fees matter less, and can be seen as a reasonable privacy tax. Also drugs are expensive, just have a look at any uncensored Onion service search engine, so individual transactions tend to be large.
- inflation-resistance due to money creation in fiat currencies. Money printing is a bad form of tax. But why not just instead invest in bonds or stocks, which actually have a specific intrinsic value and should therefore increase your capital and beat inflation? Even if crypto did take over, its value would eventually become constant, and just holding it would lose out to stocks and bonds. And pre-crypto, salaries should adjust relatively quickly to new inflation levels as they come, though there is always some delay. Also, for non-anonymous cryptocurrencies, governments will sooner or later find a way to regulate and pervert it. If you want to do things without anonymity, then what you really have to fight for is to change government itself, perhaps with a DAO-like approach, or pushing for a more direct democracy.
The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:
- how do transaction fees/guarantees/times compare to centralized systems such as credit cards:Obviously, decentralized currencies cannot be cheaper to maintain than centralized ones, since with decentralization you still have to send network messages at all times, and instead of one party carrying out computations, multiple parties have to carry out computations.
- bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1261/is-it-possible-to-send-bitcoins-without-paying-a-fee "The Blockchain Scalability Problem & the Race for Visa-Like Transaction Speed" (2019)
- towardsdatascience.com/the-blockchain-scalability-problem-the-race-for-visa-like-transaction-speed-5cce48f9d44
Crypto could however be close enough in price to centralized systems that it becomes viable, this can be considered. - how can governments tax cryptocurrency. Notably, because:See also globalization reduces the power of governments.
- taxation has to be progressive, e.g. we have to tax the rich more than the poor, and anonymity in transactions would weaken that
- it would be even easier to move money into fiscal paradises, and then just say, oops, lost my passwords, those coins are actually gone
If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will still only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), since downloading full blockchains is unfeasible, so the outcome would be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.
For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.
Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.
In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.
One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.
TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?
Convergent series Updated 2025-07-16
Creative Commons license Updated 2025-07-16
GDB Dashboard Updated 2025-07-16
Training and inference Updated 2025-07-16
This is the first thing you have to know about supervised learning:Both of those already have hardware acceleration available as of the 2010s.
- training is when you learn model parameters from input. This literally means learning the best value we can for a bunch of number input numbers of the model. This can easily be on the hundreds of thousands.
- inference is when we take a trained model (i.e. with the parameters determined), and apply it to new inputs
Strategic nuclear weapon Updated 2025-07-16
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake Updated 2025-07-16
Key quote that names the chapter:
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake.
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System of linear equations algorithm Updated 2025-07-16
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