Type of laser Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
Lasers vs other light sources Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
The key advantages of lasers over other light sources are:
One cool thing about lasers is that they rely on one specific atomic energy level transition to produce light. This is why they are able to to be so monchromatic. Compare this to:
As such, lasers manage to largely overcome "temperature distribution-like" effects that create wider wave spectrum
Video 1.
Crazy difference between 5W laser and 5W LED by Brainiac75
. Source. Baseic but good. Uses a laser photometer.
Twisted pair Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
Education of André-Marie Ampère Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Andr%C3%A9-Marie_Amp%C3%A8re&oldid=1211946256:
Jean-Jacques Ampère, a successful merchant, was an admirer of the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose theories of education (as outlined in his treatise Émile) were the basis of Ampère's education. Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling and pursue instead a "direct education from nature." Ampère's father actualized this ideal by allowing his son to educate himself within the walls of his well-stocked library.
TODO find the source for this.
Electrical cable Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
One more more electrical wires surrounded by an insulator.
Oliver Heaviside Created 2024-06-26 Updated 2025-07-16
He participated in the development of the electrical telegraph, and he did some good modeling work that improved the foundations of the field, notably creating the telegrapher's equations.
He was one of those idealists who just want to do some cool work even if they have to starve for it, people had to get a state pension for him for his contributions. Nice guy. en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Oliver_Heaviside&oldid=1230097796#Later_years_and_views:
In 1896, FitzGerald and John Perry obtained a civil list pension of £120 per year for Heaviside, who was now living in Devon, and persuaded him to accept it, after he had rejected other charitable offers from the Royal Society.
He also never married: www.nndb.com/people/627/000204015/
We intersect 2013 DNS Census virtual host cleanup with 2013 DNS census MX records and that leaves 460k hits. We did lose a third on the the MX records as of 260 hits since secureserver.net is only used in 1/3 of sites, but we also concentrate 9x, so it may be worth it.
Then we Wayback Machine CDX scanning. it takes about 5 days, but it is manageale.
We did a full Wayback Machine CDX scanning for JAR, SWF and cgi-bin in those, but only found a single new hit:
Beeching cuts Updated 2025-07-16
A disaster. More cars and less trains...
Bibliograpy:
  • Losing Track by Channel 4 (1984), especially episode 5
  • www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/02/beeching-wrong-about-britains-railways
    Today the makeup of UK transport looks very different from the one envisaged by Dr Beeching. Rail passenger figures have almost doubled over the past 10 years; commuter trains are crammed; young people are deserting the car for the train; and Britain's railway bosses are struggling to meet soaring demands for seats. The legacy of Beeching - dug-up lines, sold-off track beds and demolished bridges - has only hindered plans to revitalise the network, revealing the dangers of having a single, inflexible vision when planning infrastructure.
    "The crucial lesson to take from the Beeching anniversary is that you have to be flexible when planning transport infrastructure. Beeching was not," says Colin Divall, professor of rail history at York University. "Yes, many loss-making lines did need closing down, but nowhere near the number earmarked by Beeching, as we can now see with terrible hindsight."
Ciro Santilli believes that there is a close link between the ability to create disruptive technology, and the desire to find bugs/exploits in systems.
Both of them destabilize society and enterprises.
Some examples:
And yes, this sometimes leads into a fine line between legality and illegality:
Biasing Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro's word of caution for 2019 aspiring system programmers: Should you waste your life with systems programming?
This is basically a direct consequence of backward design.
The higher the level you can operate at, the better.
C is better than assembly, userland better than kernelland.
The ideal level to operate at, and one of humankind's greatest ambitions is "AGI, make me money", the highest possible level.
Only go down a level when it seems necessary.
Bell circuit Updated 2025-07-16
A quantum circuit which when fed with input produces the Bell state.
Figure 1.
Quantum circuit that generates the Bell state
. Source.
The fundamental intuition for this circuit is as follows.
First the Hadamard gate makes the first qubit be in a 50/50 state.
Then, the CNOT gate gets controlled by that 50/50 value, and the controlled qubit also gets 50/50 chance as a result.
However, both qubits are now entangled: the result of the second qubit depends on the result of the first one. Because:
Bell Labs Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli sometimes fantasizes of having worked there in their golden years...
Original headquarters and laboratories: 463 West Street in New York, Manhattan area. On Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman Feynman mentions that in 1941 they could see the construction of the George Washington Bridge, presumably from that building, when William Shockley brought him over to visit to get a job there. However, the actual
Bell state Updated 2025-07-16
One of the four following states:
When unqualified as in "the Bell state", it generally just means .
The Bell states are entangled and non-separable. Intuitively, we can see that when we measure that state, the values of the first and second bit are strictly correlated. This is the hallmark of quantum computation: making up states where qubits are highly correlated to match a specific algorithmic answer, and opposed to uniformly random noise. For example, the Bell state circuit is a common hello world, e.g. it is used in the official Qiskit hello world.
Benchmark Updated 2025-08-08

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