MAC address Updated 2025-07-16
Hardcoded and unique network addresses for every single device on Earth.
Started with 48 bits (6 bytes), usually given as 01:23:45:67:89:AB but people now encouraged to use 64-bit ones.
How they are assigned: www.quora.com/How-are-MAC-addresses-assigned Basically IEEE gives out the 3 first bytes to device manufacturers that register, this is called the organizationally unique identifier, and then each manufacturer keeps their own devices unique.
Luminiferous aether Updated 2025-07-16
Can you just imagine what if luminiferous aether was one single fixed rigid body? This is apparently what Maxwell believed, Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 111 quoting his entry to Encyclopedia Britannica:
There can be no doubt that the interplanetary and interstellar spaces are not empty but are occupied by a material substance or body, which is certainly the largest, and probably the most uniform, body of which we have any knowledge.
Then it would provide a natural space coordinate for the entire universe!
Apparently Einstein was the first to completely say: let's just screw this aether thing completely then, it's getting too complicated, and we don't really need it. As Wikipedia puts it well, in very unencyclopedic tone[ref]: Aether fell to Occam's razor.
Luke Dashjr Updated 2025-12-25
Author of the prayer side of the Prayer wars.
According to LinkedIn he studied at the Benedictine College in Kansas.
TODO is his real birthname "Luke Dash Jr."?
Apparently he had his coins stolen in January 2023, then worth $3.5m: blog.cryptostars.is/luke-dashjr-an-original-bitcoin-developer-loses-all-his-btc-88421c395ce5p...
www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/4936kw/lukejr_is_a_seriously_a_super_crazy_person_quotes/ "Luke-Jr is a seriously a super crazy person quotes gigathread." (2016) on Reddit. Apparently he has some fun views of life.
Tried a quick port to SQLite to get rid of annoying local databases for development, but failed, at c1c2cc4e448b279ff083272df1ac50d20c3304fa
npm install sqlite3 --save-dev
and
{
  "type": "sqlite",
  "database": "db.sqlite3",
  "entities": ["src/**/**.entity{.ts,.js}"],
  "synchronize": true
}
then:
npm start
fails with:
DataTypeNotSupportedError: Data type "timestamp" in "ArticleEntity.created" is not supported by "sqlite" database.
Attempt to hack it:
--- a/src/article/article.entity.ts
+++ b/src/article/article.entity.ts
@@ -20,10 +20,10 @@ export class ArticleEntity {
   @Column({default: ''})
   body: string;

-  @Column({ type: 'timestamp', default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
+  @Column({ default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
   created: Date;

-  @Column({ type: 'timestamp', default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
+  @Column({ default: () => "CURRENT_TIMESTAMP"})
   updated: Date;
and after that it seems to run.
I can signup and login, terrible error reporting as usual, make sure to use long enough usernames/passwords.
However, article creation fails with:
Unhandled Rejection (TypeError): Cannot read property 'slug' of undefined
Then there are two appraoches:
Proxima Centauri Updated 2025-07-16
It is so close that we can notice its proper motion, and its distance to us will vary significantly across a few tens of thousands of years!
Program the Micro Bit in C Updated 2025-07-27
Official support is abysmal, very focused on MicroPython and their graphical UI.
The setup impossible to achieve as it requires setting up the Yotta, just like the impossible to setup Compile MicroPython code for Micro Bit locally on Ubuntu 22.04 with your own firmware setup.
So we just use github.com/lancaster-university/microbit-samples + github.com/carlosperate/docker-microbit-toolchain:
docker pull ghcr.io/carlosperate/microbit-toolchain:latest
git clone https://github.com/lancaster-university/microbit-samples
cd microbit-samples
git checkout 285f9acfb54fce2381339164b6fe5c1a7ebd39d5

# Select a sample, builds one at a time. The default one is the hello world.
cp source/examples/hello-world/* source

# Build and flash.
docker run -v $(pwd):/home --rm ghcr.io/carlosperate/microbit-toolchain:latest yotta build
cp build/bbc-microbit-classic-gcc/source/microbit-samples-combined.hex "/media/$USER/MICROBIT/"
.hex file size for the hello world was 447 kB, much better than the MicroPython hello world downloaded from the website which was about 1.8 MB!
If you try it again for a second time from a clean tree, it fails with:
warning: github rate limit for anonymous requests exceeded: you must log in
presumably because after Yotta died it started using GitHub as a registry... sad. When will people learn. Apparently we were at 5000 API calls per hour. But if you don't clean the tree, you will be just fine.
Meritocracy Updated 2025-07-16
Point group Updated 2025-07-16
Point-contact transistor Updated 2025-07-16
The first working one in 1947 by John Bardeen and walter Brattain in Bell Labs Murray Hill.
People had already patented a lot of stuff before without being able to make them work. Nonsense.
As the name suggests, this is not very sturdy, and was quickly replaced by bipolar junction transistor.
Poincaré group Updated 2025-07-16
In simple and concrete terms. Suppose you observe N particles following different trajectories in Spacetime.
There are two observers traveling at constant speed relative to each other, and so they see different trajectories for those particles:
Note that the first two types of transformation are exactly the non-relativistic Galilean transformations.
The Poincare group is the set of all matrices such that such a relationship like this exists between two frames of reference.
Pokemon Updated 2025-07-16
One of the main children cartoons Ciro Santilli liked to watch. Part of the Pokemon Mania of the 90s of course.
Ciro could not understand why Nintendo won't make a proper 3D MMORPG Pokemon with actually 3D Pokemon roaming the land, which is obviously what everyone wants. There are even fan games getting there!
until this explaiend it beautifully Video 1. "The Downfall Of Mainline Pokemon Games by GONZ media (2020)":
Figure 1.
Instead of risking anything new, let's play it safe by continuing our slow decline into obsolecense cartoon by Tom Fishburne
. Source.
Video 1.
The Downfall Of Mainline Pokemon Games by GONZ media (2020)
Source. Great video, explains things Ciro had never thought about, e.g. how the Nintendo Switch unified handheld and console for Nintento, this could open the doors for a more ambitious Pokemon release.
Plane wave function Updated 2025-07-16
In this solution of the Schrödinger equation, by the uncertainty principle, position is completely unknown (the particle could be anywhere in space), and momentum (and therefore, energy) is perfectly known.
The plane wave function appears for example in the solution of the Schrödinger equation for a free one dimensional particle. This makes sense, because when solving with the time-independent Schrödinger equation, we do separation of variable on fixed energy levels explicitly, and the plane wave solutions are exactly fixed energy level ones.
Planck's law Updated 2025-07-16
Used to explain the black-body radiation experiment.
The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) page 9 mentions that Planck apparently immediately recognized that Planck constant was a new fundamental physical constant, and could have potential applications in the definition of the system of units (TODO where was that published):
Planck wrote that the constants offered: 'the possibility of establishing units of length, mass, time and temperature which are independent of specific bodies or materials and which necessarily maintain their meaning for all time and for all civilizations, even those which are extraterrestrial and nonhuman, constants which therefore can be called "fundamental physical units of measurement".'
This was a visionary insight, and was finally realized in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units.
Video 1. Source. Contains a good explanation of how discretization + energy increases with frequency explains the black-body radiation experiment curve: you need more and more energy for small wavelengths, each time higher above the average energy available.
Planck-Einstein relation Updated 2025-07-16
Photon energy is proportional to its frequency:
or with common weird variables:
This only makes sense if the photon exists, there is no classical analogue, because the energy of classical waves depends only on their amplitude, not frequency.

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.