Quasiparticles vs elementary particles Updated 2025-07-16
As a phisicist once amazingly put it in a talk Ciro watched:
It all depends on how much energy you have to probe nature with. Previously, we thought protons were elementary particles. But then we used more energy and found that they aren't.If some alien race had even less energy, they might not know about electrons at all, and could think that anyons are actually elementary.Being an "elementary particle" is always a possibly temporary label.
Register transfer level Updated 2025-07-16
Register transfer level is the abstraction level at which computer chips are mostly designed.
The only two truly relevant RTL languages as of 2020 are: Verilog and VHDL. Everything else compiles to those, because that's all that EDA vendors support.
Much like a C compiler abstracts away the CPU assembly to:
- increase portability across ISAs
- do optimizations that programmers can't feasibly do without going crazy
Reinforcement learning Updated 2025-07-16
Representation theory Updated 2025-07-16
Basically, a "representation" means associating each group element as an invertible matrices, i.e. a matrix in (possibly some subset of) , that has the same properties as the group.
Or in other words, associating to the more abstract notion of a group more concrete objects with which we are familiar (e.g. a matrix).
This is basically what everyone does (or should do!) when starting to study Lie groups: we start looking at matrix Lie groups, which are very concrete.
Or more precisely, mapping each group element to a linear map over some vector field (which can be represented by a matrix infinite dimension), in a way that respects the group operations:
As shown at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015)
- page 51, a representation is not unique, we can even use matrices of different dimensions to represent the same group
- 3.6 classifies the representations of . There is only one possibility per dimension!
- 3.7 "The Lorentz Group O(1,3)" mentions that even for a "simple" group such as the Lorentz group, not all representations can be described in terms of matrices, and that we can construct such representations with the help of Lie group theory, and that they have fundamental physical application
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rDzaKASMTM "RT1: Representation Theory Basics" by MathDoctorBob (2011). Too much theory, give me the motivation!
- www.quantamagazine.org/the-useless-perspective-that-transformed-mathematics-20200609 The "Useless" Perspective That Transformed Mathematics by Quanta Magazine (2020). Maybe there is something in there amidst the "the reader might not know what a matrix is" stuff.
Ad hominem Updated 2025-07-16
Design pattern Updated 2025-07-16
Radioactive decay Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli finds it interesting that radioactive decay basically kickstarted the domain of nuclear physics by essentially providing a natural particle accelerator from a chunk of radioactive element.
The discovery process was particularly interesting, including Henri Becquerel's luck while observing phosphorescence, and Marie Curie's observation that the uranium ore were more radioactive than pure uranium, and must therefore contain other even more radioactive substances, which lead to the discovery of polonium (half-life 138 days) and radium (half-life 1600 years).
Radio receiver Updated 2025-07-16
As well put by Wikipedia, a radio receiver has to perform three functions on the signal from the antenna:
- filtering, so you can tune the station you care about. This filters based on the frequency of the carrier wave you want. I.e. you use a bandpass filter.
- amplification: otherwise you won't be able to hear anything if the emitter is too far away
- demodulation: this means decoding the signal based on whatever way it was encoded, notably e.g. AM/FM
Richard Bates (Silk Road advisor and Ross' friend) Updated 2025-07-16
He testified against Ross: arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/01/friend-who-helped-ulbricht-build-silk-road-testifies-against-him/
youtu.be/HBTYVVUBAGs?t=178 claims to contain a photo of him without source. He has no easy to find online profiles.
Variety Jones: IRL, is there anyone with a clue at all? A girlfriend, boyfriend, buddy you talk to, etc?myself: Unfortunately yes, there are two but they think I sold the site and got out, and they're quite convinced of it.
Analects translation by Robert Eno (2015) Updated 2025-07-16
Rich people who create charitable prizes are often crooked Updated 2025-07-16
A friend of mine who's a rich man - he invented some kind of simple digital switch - tells me about these people who contribute money to make prizes or give lectures: "You always look at them carefully to find out what crookery they're trying to absolve their conscience of."
Positive-strand RNA virus Updated 2025-07-16
randyscotsmithey/feathers-realworld-example-app Updated 2025-07-16
FeathersJS entry for gothinkster/realworld.
MongoDB-based.
So once you install MongoDB, run with:
MONGODB_FEATHERS_REALWORLD=mongodb://localhost:27017/mydb npm start
Got it working on Ubuntu 20.10 with both React and Vue.js front-ends at github.com/randyscotsmithey/feathers-realworld-example-app/commit/8bc3a09242285de624c75bb8345630df499a7d07 as mentioned at github.com/randyscotsmithey/feathers-realworld-example-app/issues/2 except for bad error reporting on UI.
Tests can be run with:but there were 10 failures and 55 passes: github.com/randyscotsmithey/feathers-realworld-example-app/issues/3
MONGODB_FEATHERS_REALWORLD=mongodb://localhost:27017/mydb npm run test
Anglo-Saxons Updated 2025-07-16
Audacity profile-based background noise removal Updated 2025-07-16
List of quotes Updated 2025-07-16
Recreational mathematics Updated 2025-07-16
Robin boundary condition Updated 2025-07-16
Linear combination of a Dirichlet boundary condition and Neumann boundary condition at each point of the boundary.
Examples:
- In this case, the normal derivative at the boundary is proportional to the difference between the temperature of the boundary and the fixed temperature of the external environment.The result as time tends to infinity is that the temperature of the plaque tends to that of the environment.
Applied mathematics Updated 2025-07-16
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