Polymerase chain reaction Updated 2025-07-16
This is an extremely widely used technique as of 2020 and much earlier.
If allows you to amplify "any" sequence of choice (TODO length limitations) between a start and end sequences of interest which you synthesize.
If the sequence of interest is present, it gets amplified exponentially, and you end up with a bunch of DNA at the end.
You can then measure the DNA concentration based on simple light refraction methods to see if there is a lot of DNA or not in the post-processed sample.
Even Ciro Santilli had some contact with it at: Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it", see: PCR!
One common problem that happens with PCR if you don't design your primers right is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_dimer
Sometime it fails: www.reddit.com/r/molecularbiology/comments/1kouomw/when_your_pcr_fails_again_and_you_start/and a comment:
Nothing humbles you faster than a bandless gel. One minute you’re a scientist, the next you’re just a pipette-wielding wizard casting spells that don’t work. Meanwhile, physicists are out there acting like gravity always behaves. Smash that upvote if your reagents have ever gaslit you.
PCR = Pray, Cry, Repeat
Freedom of speech Updated 2025-07-16
For Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China: Section "github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship".
Ciro has the radical opinion that absolute freedom of speech must be guaranteed by law for anyone to talk about absolutely anything, anonymously if they wish, with the exception only of copyright-related infringement.
And Ciro believes that there should be no age restriction of access to any information.
People should be only be punished for actions that they actually do in the real world. Not even purportedly planning those actions must be punished. Access and ability to publish information must be completely and totally free.
If you don't like someone, you should just block them, or start your own campaign to prepare a counter for whatever it is that they are want to do.
This freedom does not need to apply to citizens and organizations of other countries, only to citizens of the country in question, since foreign governments can create influence campaigns to affect the rights of your citizens. More info at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/mark-government-controlled-social-media
Limiting foreign influence therefore requires some kind of nationality check, which could harm anonymity. But Ciro believes that almost certainly such checks can be carried out in anonymous blockchain consensus based mechanisms. Governments would issues nationality tokens, and tokens are used for anonymous confirmations of rights in a way that only the token owner, not even the government, can determine who used the token. E.g. something a bit like what Monero does. Rights could be checked on a once per account basis, or yearly basis, so transaction costs should not be a big issue. Maybe expensive proof-of-work systems can be completely bypassed to the existence of this central token authority?
Some people believe that freedom of speech means "freedom of speech that I agree with". Those people should move to China or some other dictatorship.
Frobenius theorem (real division algebras) Updated 2025-07-16
Notably, the octonions are not associative.
From first principles Updated 2025-07-16
Los Alamos From Below by Richard Feynman (1975) Updated 2025-07-16
Amazing talk by Richard Feynman that describes his experiences at Los Alamos National Laboratory while developing the first nuclear weapons.
Transcript: calteches.library.caltech.edu/34/3/FeynmanLosAlamos.htm Also included full text into Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY-u1qyRM5w&t=2881s describes the computing aspects. Particularly interesting is the quote about how they used the typist secretary pool to emulate the IBM machines and debug their programs before the machines had arrived. This is exactly analogous to what is done in 2020 in the semiconductor industry, where slower models are used to estimate how future algorithms will run in future hardware.
Polynomial over a field Updated 2025-07-16
However, a polynomial can be defined over any other field just as well, the most notable example being that of a polynomial over a finite field.
For example, given the finite field of order 9, and with elements , we can denote polynomials over that ring aswhere is the variable name.
For example, one such polynomial could be:and another one:Note how all the coefficients are members of the finite field we chose.
Polynomial over a ring Updated 2025-07-16
However, there is nothing in the immediate definition that prevents us from having a ring instead, i.e. a field but without the commutative property and inverse elements.
The only thing is that then we would need to differentiate between different orderings of the terms of multivariate polynomial, e.g. the following would all be potentially different terms:while for a field they would all go into a single term:so when considering a polynomial over a ring we end up with a lot more more possible terms.
If the ring is a commutative ring however, polynomials do look like proper polynomials: Section "Polynomial over a commutative ring".
Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling Updated 2025-07-16
The inaugural that predicted the Josephson effect.
Published on Physics Letters, then a new journal, before they split into Physics Letters A and Physics Letters B. True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen mentions that this choice was made rather than the more prestigious Physical Review Letters because they were not yet so confident about the results.
Git design rationale Updated 2025-07-16
The fundamental insight of Git design is: a SHA represents not only current state, but also the full history due to the Merkle tree implementation, see notably:
This makes it so that you will always notice if you are overwriting history on the remote, even if you are developing from two separate local computers (or more commonly, two people in two different local computers) and therefore will never lose any work accidentally.
It is very hard to achieve that without the Merkle tree.
Consider for example the most naive approach possible of marking versions with consecutive numbers:
GitHub's replacement of
master branch with main (2020) Updated 2025-07-16By GitHub around Black Lives Matter, due to a possible ludicrous relationship with slavery of black people:
For the love of God, the word "master" is much more general than black slavery. If you are going to ban it, you might as well ban the word "evil".
GitLab Updated 2025-07-16
See also: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Git tips
git mergetool with meld or kdiff3 Updated 2025-07-16These are good free newbie GUI options:
sudo apt install meld
git mergetool --tool meld
sudo apt install kdiff3
git mergetool --tool kdiff3
git-tips-2.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eux
add() (
rm -f f
for i in `seq 10`; do
printf "before $i\n\n" >> f
done
printf "conflict 1 $1\n\n" >> f
for i in `seq 10`; do
printf "middle $i\n\n" >> f
done
printf "conflict 2 $2\n\n" >> f
for i in `seq 10`; do
printf "after $i\n\n" >> f
done
git add f
)
rm -rf git-tips-2
mkdir git-tips-2
cd git-tips-2
git init
for i in 1 2 3; do
add $i $i
git commit -m $i
done
add 3 4
git commit -m 4
add 5 4
git commit -m 5
git checkout HEAD~2
git checkout -b my-feature
add 3 6
git commit -m 6
add 7 6
git commit -m 7 Good targets for amateur astronomy Updated 2025-07-16
Looking at most astronomical object through a telescope is boring because you only see a white ball or point every time. Such targets would likely only be interesting with spectroscopy analysis.
There are however some objects that you can see the structure of even with an amateur telescope, and that makes them very exciting.
Some good ones:
- The Moon, notably crater detail.
- Saturn. Clearly visible to the naked eye, but looks like a ball. But under an amateur telescope, you can clearly see that there is a disk. Clearly discerning that the disk is a ring, i.e. seeing the gap, is a bit harder though.
- Jupiter. Clearly visible to the naked eye, it is quite huge. The four Galilean moons, being Earth-sized, are incredibly clearly visible, tested on Celestron NexStar 4SE 25mm/9mm eyepiece. Colored gas clouds are hard though, you will likely just see it bright white. www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/35xrbb/how_can_i_see_the_color_of_jupiter_with_my/
- a double star. As mentioned at www.relativelyinteresting.com/10-astronomical-targets-new-telescope/ Albireo are incredibly separated. Also it is is easy to find manually being in a major well known constellation. It is no wonder it is not quite even known if they are gravitationally bound or not!
- Andromeda Galaxy. This is when things start getting hard. You can see a faint cloud, but it is not super clear that it has a center.One important understanding is that it is not possible to see stars outside of the Milky Way by naked eye.It is at this point that you start to learn that pictures of faint objects require longer term exposure and averaging of the images taken. For this you need:Just looking through the scope to immediately see something is not enough.
- a digital camera attached to the scope
- a computerized scope that slowly moves to track the point of interest
- image processing software that does the averaging
Video "Andromeda Galaxy with only a Camera, Lens, & Tripod by Nebula Photos (2020)" gives a good notion of expectation adjustment.
Good video game to watch Updated 2025-07-16
Google X Updated 2025-07-16
Wikipedia reads:so basically exactly what Ciro Santilli wants to do on OurBigBook.com. Ominous.
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
Like any closed source "failure", everything was deleted. wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Knol
History of special relativity Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
- Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" has a good sketch as you may imagine.
History of the United States Updated 2025-07-16
Video codec Updated 2025-11-18
History of Wikipedia Updated 2025-07-16
Hofstadter's law Updated 2025-07-16
As "deadlines" approach, feature sets get cut down, then there are delays, and finally a feasible feature set is delivered some time after the deadline.
The only deadlines that can be met are those of tasks which have already been done but not announced.
This is of course Hofstadter's law.
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