E. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene thrL Updated 2025-07-16
The first gene in the E. Coli K-12 MG1655 genome. Remember however that bacterial chromosome is circular, so being the first doesn't mean much, how the choice was made: Section "E. Coli genome starting point".
At only 65 bp, this gene is quite small and boring. For a more interesting gene, have a look at the next gene, e. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene thrA.
Does something to do with threonine.
This is the first in the sequence thrL, thrA, thrB, thrC. This type of naming convention is quite common on related adjacent proteins, all of which must be getting transcribed into a single RNA by the same promoter. As mentioned in the analysis of the KEGG entry for e. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene thrA, those A, B and C are actually directly functionally linked in a direct metabolic pathway.
We can see that thrL, A, B, and C are in the same transcription unit by browsing the list of promoter at: biocyc.org/group?id=:ALL-PROMOTERS&orgid=ECOLI. By finding the first one by position we reach; biocyc.org/ECOLI/NEW-IMAGE?object=TU0-42486.
E. Coli K-12 MG1655 operon thrLABC Updated 2025-07-16
That page lists several components of the promoter, which we should try to understand!
After the first gene in the codon, thrL, there is a rho-independent termination. By comparing:we understand that the presence of threonine or isoleucine variants, L-threonyl and L-isoleucyl, makes the rho-independent termination become more efficient, so the control loop is quite direct! Not sure why it cares about isoleucine as well though.
TODO which factor is actually specific to that DNA region?
The default run variant, if you don't pass any options, just has the minimal growth conditions set. What this means can be seen at condition.
Notably, this implies a growth medium that includes glucose and salt. It also includes oxygen, which is not strictly required, but greatly benefits cell growth, and is of course easier to have than not have as it is part of the atmosphere!
But the medium does not include amino acids, which the bacteria will have to produce by itself.
This post-quantum cryptography competition by NIST is a huge milestone of the field.
It was mind blowing when in 2022, after several years of selection, one of the 7 finalists was broken on a classical computer, not even in a quantum computer! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466063 | eprint.iacr.org/2022/214 Breaking Rainbow Takes a Weekend on a Laptop by Ward Beullens. Dude announced he had a break a few days before submission: twitter.com/WardBeullens/status/1492780462028300290 On Twitter. He's so young. Epic.
Edit: and then, after the third round, things were a bit unclear, so they made a fourth round with 4 choices out of the 7 from round 3, and in August 2022 one of the four was broken again on a classic CPU!!! OMG: arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/sike-once-a-post-quantum-encryption-contender-is-koed-in-nist-smackdown/
NLab Updated 2025-07-16
Decent encyclopedia of mathematics. Not much motivation, mostly statements though.
Unlike Wikipedia, they have a more sane forum commenting system, e.g. a page/forum pair:
Nobel disease Updated 2025-09-11
The Eighth Day of Creation has a related quote:
In a conversation a few weeks earlier at the faculty club of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a couple of biologists had speculated whether Pauling, whose recent popular book on the benefits to health and sanity of massive doses of vitamin C was stacked in display near the entrance of the M.I.T. bookstore, was showing signs of what one of the men called "old scientist's disease" - which they defined as what happens to great men when they grow beyond the psychological reach of the salutary system by which scientists blow the whistle on one another's mistakes.
Video 1.
The Nobel Prize Winners With Crazy Theories by Qxir
. Source.
Unfortunately, due to lack of one page to rule them all, the on-Git tree publication list is meager, some of the most relevant ones seems to be:
It would be boring if we could only simulate the same condition all the time, so let's have a look at the different boundary conditions that we can apply to the cell!
We are able to alter things like the composition of the external medium, and the genome of the bacteria, which will make the bacteria behave differently.
The variant selection is a bit cumbersome as we have to use indexes instead of names, but one you know what you are doing, it is fine.
Of course, genetic modification is limited only to experimentally known protein interactions due to the intractability of computational protein folding and computational chemistry in general, solving those would bsai.
Edge (graph) Updated 2025-07-16
Edit war Updated 2025-07-16
Education Updated 2025-07-16
One of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
A list of complaints against education: Section "Education is broken".
How to improve education? Simple:
Node.js Updated 2025-07-16
WellSync, if you are gonna useSync this wonky language thing inSync one place, you might as well useSync it everywhereSync and make it more decent. See also: how to convert async to sync in JavaScript.
Hermitian operator Updated 2025-07-16
This is the possibly infinite dimensional version of a Hermitian matrix, since linear operators are the possibly infinite dimensional version of matrices.
There's a catch though: now we don't have explicit matrix indices here however in general, the generalized definition is shown at: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hermitian_adjoint&oldid=1032475701#Definition_for_bounded_operators_between_Hilbert_spaces
Effective field theory Updated 2025-07-16
www.youtube.com/watch?v=WB8r7CU7clk&list=PLUl4u3cNGP60TvpbO5toEWC8y8w51dtvm by Iain Stewart. Basically starts by explaining how quantum field theory is so generic that it is hard to get any numerical results out of it :-)
But in particular, we want to describe those subtheories in a way that we can reach arbitrary precision of the full theory if desired.
Ciro's Edict #5 / Misc OurBigBook.com Updated 2025-07-16
Some smart people just brought up to my attention that OurBigBook.com is a bit like: roamresearch.com/ and other graph knowledges. I feel ashemed for not having seen this software and its alternatives before. I was so focused on the "book aspect" of it that I didn't search much in there. I couldn't find an immediate project killer superset from the options in that area, but maybe one exists. We'll see.
One of the key advances of the previous update was to show include headers on the table of contents.
This was to allow splitting source files freely.
While that goal was in principle achieved in that commit, when I went ahead to split the huge index of cirosantilli.com into multiple files, I notice several bugs that took a week to fix.
After all of these were solved, I finally managed to split the README at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/commit/84c8a6e7fdbe252041accfb7a06d9b7462287131 and keep the previous desired output. You can now see that the README contains just:
\Include[ciro-santilli]
\Include[science]
\Include[mathematics]
\Include[technology]
\Include[art]
This split led to a small positive modification of the output as follows. Previously, a section such as "Quantum Electrodynamics" would have been present in the monolithic README.ciro as:
= Quantum electrodynamics
If you visited cirosantilli.com/quantum-electrodynamics, you would see see a link to the "nosplit" version, which would link you back to cirosantilli.com#quantum-electrodynamics, but that is not great, since this is was a humongous page with all of the README.ciro, and took long to display.
After the split, = Quantum electrodynamics is present under science.ciro, and the nosplit version is the more manageable cirosantilli.com/science#quantum-electrodynamics.
The key changes that were missing for that to happen were:

Unlisted articles are being shown, click here to show only listed articles.