Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

It is harder to measure the impact of nonprofits than of for-profits, since you can't just look at their bank balances.

This is one fundamental difficulty of nonprofit work, how to prove that you deserve the investments and not someone else.

One of the key thesis of Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006).

Also mentioned at:

They actually abolished the original legal requirement for those institutions to have free scholars as set out by their original charity school beginnings!!! WTF!

But the broadening of scope beyond the Church of England/medieval material was a good thing at least.

Followup to the Shelter Island Conference, this is where Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman exposed their theories to explain the experiments of the previous conference.

Julian made a formal presentation that took until the afternoon and bored everyone to death, though the mathematics avoided much questioning.

Feynman then presented his revolutionary approach, which he was unable to prove basic properties of, but which gave correct results, and people were not very happy.

In the context of wave-like equations, an open-boundary condition is one that "lets the wave go through without reflection".

This condition is very useful when we want to simulate infinite domains with a numerical method. Ciro Santilli wants to do this all the time when trying to come up with demos for his physics writings.

Here are some resources that cover such boundary conditions:

The first thing we had to do with the sample was to extract the DNA present in the water in a pure form for the PCR.

We did that with a Qiagen DNeasy PowerWater Kit.

As you would expect, this consists of a purification procedure with several steps.

In each step we take a physical or chemical action on the sample, which splits it into two parts: the one with the DNA and the one without.

We then take the part with the DNA, and throw away the one without the DNA.

The first steps are coarser, and finer and finer splits are done as we move forward.

PuntSeq is a side project led by a few University of Cambridge PhDs that aims to determine which bacteria are present in the River Cam.

In July 2019, the PuntSeq team got together with the awesome Cambridge Biomakespace, an awesome biology makerspace open to all, to create a two day science outreach activity showing their procedures.

The data collected in this experiment, together with other collection sessions done by the organizers actually led to a publication on eLife: elifesciences.org/articles/61504 "Freshwater monitoring by nanopore sequencing" by Lara Urban et al. (2021), so it is awesome to see that were are actual being part of "real science".

Ciro knows nothing about biology, but since he is very curious about it, he jumped at this opportunity, and decided to document things as well as his limited knowledge would allow.

All participants chipped in some money to help cover the experiment's costs. Ciro suspects that this activity was done partially to help crowdfund the experiment, but it was a worthy investment!

The impressions you get from the experiment as a software engineer will be:

Looks cool! Ciro Santilli loves simulations!

TRI means Toyota Research Institute BTW.