1926 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
1927 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
1936 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Discovery of:
- the positron by Carl David Anderson
- he cosmic rays by Victor Francis Hess
1914 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Not only did this open the way for X-ray crystallography, it more fundamentally clarified the nature of X-rays as being electromagnetic radiation, and helped further establish the atomic theory.
Photon Updated 2025-07-16
Initially light was though of as a wave because it experienced interference as shown by experiments such as:
But then, some key experiments also start suggesting that light is made up of discrete packets:and in the understanding of the 2020 Standard Model the photon is one of the elementary particles.
- Compton scattering, also suggests that photons carry momentum
- photoelectric effect
- single photon production and detection experiments
This duality is fully described mathematically by quantum electrodynamics, where the photon is modelled as a quantized excitation of the photon field.
1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry Updated 2025-07-16
Tcl Updated 2025-07-16
How to report Ubuntu crashes Updated 2025-07-16
Their crash system does not have an amazing user interface.
Tested on Ubuntu 21.10.
After something crashes, look under
/var/crash for a crash file, which helps to determine which package to report under on Launchpad.E.g. a file
/var/crash/_usr_sbin_gdm3.0.crash makes you want to file the bug under gdm at: bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gdm/+filebugThen, while reporting the bug, you want to give the developpers access to that Ubuntu's crash report system has already uploaded the
.crash file. But you can't publicly upload it because it contains memory dumps and could contain secret information. The way to do it is to look at the ID under:sudo cat /var/crash/_usr_sbin_gdm3.0.uploaded.crash for you, so you just have to confirm it and give the ID on the ticket.You can view a list of all your uploaded errors at:and each of those contain a link to:which you yourself cannot see.
xdg-open https://errors.ubuntu.com/user/$(sudo cat /var/lib/whoopsie/whoopsie-id)https://errors.ubuntu.com/oops/<.uloaded error id>askubuntu.com/questions/434431/how-can-i-read-a-crash-file-from-var-crash asks how to read the
.crash files.Running:splits it up into a few files, but does not make any major improvements.
sudo apport-unpack /var/crash/_usr_sbin_gdm3.0.crash /tmp/appapport-retracesudo apt install apport-retrace
sudo chmod 666 /var/crash/_usr_sbin_gdm3.0.crash
apport-retrace -g /var/crash/_usr_sbin_gdm3.0.crashTried:but then
echo "deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com $(lsb_release -cs) main restricted universe multiverse" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ddebs.list
echo -e "deb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com $(lsb_release -cs)-updates main restricted universe multiverse\ndeb http://ddebs.ubuntu.com $(lsb_release -cs)-proposed main restricted universe multiverse" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ddebs.list
sudo apt install ubuntu-dbgsym-keyringsudo apt update fails with:E: The repository 'http://ddebs.ubuntu.com impish-security Release' does not have a Release file. 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
1965 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
1996 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-07-16
Quick facts:
- Nationalities: Italian and Brazilian
- Grew up in: Brazil
- Relationship status 2017-: married
- Given name pronunciation: take your pick from Ciro Santilli's given name
- Chinese name: 三西猴, means "three western monkeys". Phonetic approximation to SANtilli CIRO. More info at: Ciro Santilli's Chinese name. Semi-unintentionally reminds Chinese people of Sun Wukong (孙悟空). This association is further slightly strengthened by the phonetic choice of 三 San, which Ciro later noticed matches the middle character of Tang Sanzang (唐三藏), the monk in Journey to the West. The given name 西猴 was given by Ciro Santilli's wife, then recent girlfriend, as a semi-joke, and he took it up because the best way to take a joke is to play along with the joker. 三 was chosen by Ciro himself.
- laptop: high end Lenovo ThinkPad
- distro: latest Ubuntu release
- Vim or Emacs: vi/vim. But for The Love, will someone please make an open source C++ integrated development environment that actually just works?
- tabs or spaces: spaces
- Mailing list or Git(Hub|Lab): Git(Hub|Lab), with passion, see Section "Mailing list"
- system or unit tests: system
- programming languages: Python and C++. He'll learn Rust and Haskell once he's rich. As of the 2020s, Rust was picking up some serious steam, so Ciro might end up eating his own words there.
- musical instruments to listen: Chinese Guqin and electric Jazz-fusion guitar
- metric or imperial: metric, for The Love. Science? Standardization? 21st century anyone?
- QWERTY or Dvorak: QWERTY, alas
- birth name: Ciro Duran Santilli
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source. Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a monster of the week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
. The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
. Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
Chill and eat your bread in peace comes to mind. A scribe, in a library, reading and writing the entire day in peace and quiet. The life!
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openness, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many different people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared.
More info at: Figure "Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared". Speed of light experiment Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_light#First_measurement_attempts Rømer and Christiaan Huygens reached 26% accuracy by the observation of Jupiter's moon!
1998 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-10-14
How to teach Exams and homework are useless, only projects matter Updated 2025-07-16
See: Section "Exam".
The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.
Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.
The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.
This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:
Taxonomic rank Updated 2025-07-16
Brady Haran Updated 2025-07-16
How to teach Explain how to make money with the lesson Updated 2025-07-16
People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.
Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.
Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.
This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.
Tank Man Updated 2025-07-16
System of units Updated 2025-07-16
The key thing in a good system of units is to define units in a way that depends only on physical properties of nature.
Ideally (or basically necessarily?) the starting point generally has to be discrete phenomena, e.g.
- number of times some light oscillates per second
- number of steps in a quantum Hall effect or Josephson junction
What we don't want is to have macroscopic measurement artifacts, (or even worse, the size of body parts! Inset dick joke) as you can always make a bar slightly more or less wide. And even metals evaporate over time! Though the mad people of the Avogadro project still attempted otherwise well into the 2010s!
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.