Dirac-von Neumann axioms Updated +Created
This is basically what became the dominant formulation as of 2020 (and much earlier), and so we just call it the "mathematical formulation of quantum mechanics".
Molecular biology laboratory equipment Updated +Created
Symmetric multilinear map Updated +Created
Same value if you swap any input arguments.
The Three Treasures of the Programmer Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli's joke version of the Chinese Four Treasures of the Study!
  • web browser
  • Text editor
  • terminal. Though to be honest, circa 2022, Ciro learned of the ctrl + click to open file (including with file.c:123 line syntax) ability of Visual Studio Code (likely present in other IDEs), and he was starting considering dumping the terminal altogether if some implementation gets it really really right. The main thing is that it can't be a tinny little bar at the bottom, it has to be full window and super easily toggleable!
In the past, Ciro used to use file managers, which would be the fourth tresure. But he stopped doing so for years due to his cd alias... so it became three. He actually had exactly three windows open when he was checking if there was anything else he could not open hand of.
Figure 1.
The three Treasures of the Programmer
. Featuring: Gvim, tmux running in GNOME terminal, and Chromium browser on Ubuntu 22.04. The minimized windows are for demonstration purposes, Cirism mandates that all windows shall be maximized at all times. Splits withing a single program are permitted however.
Gilberto Gil Updated +Created
Gilberto is definitely the most psychedelic/tribal one of the The Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music, though he also has a boyish quality to his soul.
He is also perhaps the one that impresses Ciro Santilli the most, at times he can't help but feel:
OMG how the hell did he come up with that?!
Figure 2.
Gilberto Gil in the cover of his 1977 album Refavela
. Source.
Area of technology Updated +Created
Physics and the illusion of life Updated +Created
The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.
They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, religious concepts such as Maya and Samsara come to mind.
We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our brain and cell work.
Everything is magic out of our control.
The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don't know anything.
For all practical purposes in life, there is a huge macro micro gap. We are only able to directly perceive and influence the macro events. And through those we try to affect micro events. Because for good or bad, micro events reflect in the macro world.
It is as if we live in a different plane of existence above molecules, and below galaxies. The hierarchy of Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" puts that nicely into perspective, shame it only starts at the economical level, not going up to astronomy.
The great beauty of science is that it allows us to puncture through some of the layers of reality, either up or down, away from our daily experience.
And the great beauty of artificial intelligence research is that it allows to peer deeper into exactly our layer of existence.
Every one or two weeks Ciro Santilli remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling. This is Ciro's preferred source of Great doubt. Another concept that comes to mind is when you see it, you'll shit bricks.
Perhaps, the feeling of physics and the illusion of life reaches its peak in molecular biology.
Just look at your fucking hand right now.
Do you have any idea of each of the cells in it work? Isn't is at least 100 times more complex than the materials of the table you hand is currently resting on?
This is the non-science fiction version of the lotus-Eater Machine.
Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
The toddler of a friend of Ciro Santilli's wife asked her mum:
Why doesn't my tiger doll close its eyes when we sleep?
Our perception of the macroscopic world is so magic that children have to learn the difference between living and non-living things.
James Somers put it very well as well in his article I should have loved biology by James Somers, this quote was brought to Ciro's attention by Bert Hubert's website[ref].
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.
In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:
For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
The same applies to other natural sciences.
Video 1.
Alan Watts' "Philosopher" talk (1973)
Source. Lecture given at UCLA on 1973-02-21. Some key quotes from the talk:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
List of e-learning websites Updated +Created
Machine learning Updated +Created
The main reason Ciro Santilli never touched it is that it feels that every public data set has already been fully mined or has already had the most interesting algorithms developed for it, so you can't do much outside of big companies.
This is why Ciro started Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games to generate synthetic data and thus reduce the cost of data.
The other reason is that it is ugly.
Television series Updated +Created
MathWorld Updated +Created
Written mostly by Eric W. Weisstein.
Ciro once saw a printed version of the CRC "concise" encyclopedia of mathematics. It is about 12 cm thick. Imagine if it wasn't concise!!!
Infinite Napkin is the one-person open source replacemente we needed for it! And OurBigBook.com will be the final multi-person replacement.
Magic: The Gathering meta-based deck choice is a bimatrix game Updated +Created
Ciro had initially Googled for the "4-card limit thought experiment" but he reached: www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-if-the-4-card-limit-was-abolished-in-modern/ "What if the 4-Card Limit Was Abolished in Modern?" by Frank Karsten (2018) and was much more pleased with the mathematical result. Like-minded people.
That links to www.channelfireball.com/articles/what-if-the-4-card-limit-was-abolished-in-modern/ the related article: "The Mythic Invitational's Duo Standard Format Game Theory Optimized" by Frank Karsten (2019) which explains well how Nash equilibrium is naturally reached: if there is any imbalance, someone can take advantage of it, and then it rebalances. Therefore once you've calculated the equilibrium, your best course of action is to pick a deck at random from a list of possible winners.
Of course, part of the beauty of Magic is that we can never really know the full matrix since deck choice is basically infinite. But at the very least it could give good archetype results.
StarCraft Updated +Created
Chico Buarque Updated +Created
Within the The Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music, Chico tends to approach the more down to Earth and heavy topics.
Turing machine regex tape notation Updated +Created
Turing machine regex tape notation is Ciro Santilli's made up name for the notation used e.g. at:Most of it is just regular regular expression notation, with a few differences:
  • denotes the right or left edge of the (zero initialized) tape. It is often omitted as we always just assume it is always present on both sides of every regex
  • A, B, C, D and E denotes the current machine state. This is especially common notation in the context of the BB(5) problem
  • < and > next to the state indicate if the head is on top of the left or right element. E.g.:
    11 (01)^n <A 00 (0011)^{n+2}
    indicates that the head A is on top of the last 1 of the last sequence of n 01s to the left of the head.
This notation is very useful, as it helps compress long repeated sequences of Turing machine tape and extract higher level patterns from them, which is how you go about understanding a Turing machin in order to apply Turing machine acceleration.
United States Air Force Updated +Created
E-book viewer Updated +Created
Geiger counter Updated +Created

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