Nuclear reactor Updated +Created
Some of the most notable ones:
Physics engine Updated +Created
There is no clear distinction between "serious simulations" and "physics engines", it's just that "physics engine" have a "for video game" connotation.
And especially, in the context of gaming, it usually means "rigid body dynamics simulation" in particular.
The correlation between software engineers and Buddhism Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli believes that there is a positive correlation between being a software engineer and liking Buddhist-like things.
Maybe it is linked to minimalism and DRY, which software engineers value so greatly.
Even Ciro had to try an unoriginal Buddhist joke intro in one of this Stack Overflow answers.
Ciro also feels that his "minimal reproducible example" scientific language/concept learning method obsession of breaking things into tiny sub-problems has a strong link with Koans.
Some notable Buddhism/programmer examples:
Another thing that points the correlation out is the existence of wattsalan.github.io/ on a github.io about Alan Watts.
Ubuntu 21.10 Updated +Created
GDM crashes sometimes when switching windows right after opening a new window: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+bug/1956299
Human mitochondrial DNA haplogroup Updated +Created
LC circuit Updated +Created
When Ciro Santilli was studying electronics at the University of São Paulo, the courses, which were heavily inspired from the USA 50's were obsessed by this one! Thinking about it, it is kind of a cool thing though.
Video 1.
Tutorial on LC resonant circuits by w2aew (2012)
Source.
Video 2.
LC circuit dampened oscillations on an oscilloscope by Queuerious Guy (2014)
Source. Finally a video that shows the oscillations without a driving AC source. The dude just move wires around on his breadboard manually, first charging the capacitor and then closing the LC circuit, and is able to see damped oscillations on the oscilloscope.
Video 3.
Introduction to LC Oscillators by USAF (1974)
Source.
Video 4.
LC circuit by Eugene Khutoryansky (2016)
Source. Exactly what you would expect from an Eugene Khutoryansky video. The key insight is that the inductor resists to changes in current. So when current is zero, it slows down the current. And when current is high, it tries to keep it going, which recharges the other side of the capacitor.
Electric battery Updated +Created
Inductor Updated +Created
Power supply Updated +Created
Light-emitting diode Updated +Created
Video 1.
How LEDs work by VirtualBrain
. Source. 2021. Good 3d schematics clearly explaining part of the LED electronic package.
Luboš Motl Updated +Created
Argument from authority Updated +Created
Project to explain each Nobel Prize better Updated +Created
Understand and explain amazingly every single Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry and biology. Since in particular the Nobel Foundation is unable to do that for any at all, especially of the key old ones, e.g. www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1965/summary/. Hopeless.
To be fair, those in theoretical physics at least basically come down to reading a bunch of books. But perhaps anything slightly more experimental could have
Carbon-14 Updated +Created
Histone Updated +Created
These are apparenty an important part of transcriptional regulation given the number of modifications they can undergo! Quite exciting.
The derivative is the generator of the translation group Updated +Created
Take the group of all Translation in .
Let's see how the generator of this group is the derivative operator:
The way to think about this is:
So let's take the exponential map:
and we notice that this is exactly the Taylor series of around the identity element of the translation group, which is 0! Therefore, if behaves nicely enough, within some radius of convergence around the origin we have for finite :
This example shows clearly how the exponential map applied to a (differential) operator can generate finite (non-infinitesimal) Translation!
The development cycle time is your God Updated +Created
A slow development test cycle will kill your software.
New developers won't want to learn your project, because they would rather shoot themselves.
This means that build time, and the time to run tests, must be short.
5 seconds to rebuild is the maximum upper limit.
Of course, at some point software gets large enough that things won't fit anymore in 5 seconds. But then you must have either some kind of build caching, or options to do partial builds/tests that will bring things down to that 5 second mark.
You also have to spend some time profiling execution and build from scratch times.
A slow build from scratch will mean that your continuous integration costs a lot, money that could be invested in a new developer!
It also means that people won't bother to reproduce bugs on given commits, or bisect stuff.
One anecdote comes to mind. Ciro Santilli was trying to debug something, and more experience colleague came over.
To reproduce a problem, ciro was running one command, wait 5 seconds, run a second command, wait 5 seconds, run a third command:
cmd1
# wait 5 seconds
cmd2
# wait 5 seconds
cmd3
The first thing the colleague said: join those three commands into one:
cmd1;cmd2;cmd3
And so, Ciro was enlightened.
Figure 1.
xkcd 303: Compiling
. Source. They should be benchmarking and fixing their shitty build system instead.

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