Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed since the 1st edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published, and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions. Some say that even Darwin lessened the power of his arguments in the Origin of Species through his multiple revisions, in which he dealt with criticisms and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction. I prefer my original to speak for itself, even if it turns out to be wrong.

This is partly addressed in the preface of the second edition from 2018.

Central thesis:

there are two sexes because of mitochondria
the acquisition of mitochondria was one of the most important steps in the evolution of eukaryotes.
There are no known eukaryotes which never had mitochondria. Having mitochondria appears to be a requisite for being an eukaryote.
Contrast this for example with multicellularity, which is highly polyphyletic.
Apoptosis is largely regulated by mitochondria
there are two main theories for how the mitochondria endosymbiosis started:
- parsitic hypothesis of mitochondrial endosymbiosis: a parasitic option rather than cooperative
- hydrogen hypothesis: a cooperative option rather than parasitic

Smaller points:

10% of our body weight (dry presumably?) is mitochondria. Also quoted at: www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/mighty_mitochondria. TODO confirm.
eukaryotes can do phatocytosis due to their cytoskeleton
paints a colorful picture of Peter Mitchell. Some Wikipedia edits are warranted!
it is hard for complex organisms to evolve because longer DNA means longer replication time
cancer is natural selection gone wrong
multicellular organisms are not utopias where every cell lives happily. Rather, they are dictatorships, where any dissident is forced to commit seppuku. Lu Xun's petition quote comes to mind.

Nitpicks:

the book calls ATP synthase "ATPase" in several points, which is confusing because -ase means "something that breaks", and in 2020 parlance, there are ATPases which actually break ATP: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPase. The book itself acknowledges that on page 135:
The ATPase is freely reversible. Under some circumstances it can go into reverse, whereupon it splits ATP, and uses the energy released to pump protons up the drive shaft, back across the membrane against the pressure of the reservoir. In fact the very name ATPase (rather than ATP synthase) signifies this action, which was discovered first. This bizarre trait hides a deep secret of life, and we’ll return to it in a moment.

Some criticisms:

some of the later chapters are a bit more boring, like the stuff about warm-blooded animals. Perhaps is it that Ciro Santilli is more interested in the molecular aspects than macro
the author talks about some very recent research at the time. While this does highlight his expertise, some of the points mentioned might still be in a state of flow. This is acknowledged by the author himself on the 2018 updated preface however.

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SoundFont Updated 2025-07-16

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Contains instructions on how to synthesize MIDI.

Extension: sf2.

Can be imported for example by:

vmpk
Csound with sfload: www.csounds.com/manual/html/sfload.html

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Uniqueness theorem for Poisson's equation Updated 2025-07-16

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Why can't you send voice without modulation? Updated 2025-07-16

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www.quora.com/Why-cant-an-audio-signal-to-be-fed-or-transmitted-to-the-antenna-without-modulation

Basically, the antenna has to be very, very large, more comparable to wavelength. E.g. even for the higher pitches, we fall in very low frequency, so have a look at the size of some of the submarine VLF antennas! They are like football pitch sized.

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Electronic voting Updated 2025-07-16

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This is a must if the people want to regain control of their society from apathetic politicians.

I would also increase voter percentage due to convenience, and reduce the weight of voting fraud cases, as everyone would be able to check that their own vote was counted correctly.

And then, we would be able to have referendums for basically any important decision being made. No need to go out on the streets and waste your time in a mass protest! Just vote!

It is possible to implement anonymous electronic voting with ring signatures, an algorithm also used by Monero, an anonymity focused cryptocurrency, as mentioned e.g. on this 2004 paper eprint.iacr.org/2004/281.pdf. The system can be set in a way such that you can only deanonymize someone if everyone else, or a very large number of people, conspire against that person.

The same system could also be used to setup forums where only citizens of the country could comment and propose changes and vote on them.

With electronic voting, we could have a system where you can let someone you trust vote for you automatically, or vote automatically for certain subjects alone, a bit like we do by electing senators. But then you would also be able to override specific votes if you wanted to.

In this system therefore, anyone who can proxy vote has to have their vote public, and placed in a decent website that shows clearly who voted for what.

www.vote-coin.com/ allows you to delegate your voting power to someone else, that's perfect!

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Elementary particle Updated 2025-07-16

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The opposite of quasiparticle, see notaby: quasiparticles vs elementary particles.

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Zen of Python Updated 2025-07-16

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Chart type Updated 2025-07-16

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ELF Hello World Tutorial / .data section Updated 2025-07-16

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.data is section 1:

00000080  01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000090  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
000000a0  0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
000000b0  04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|

80 0: sh_name = 01 00 00 00: index 1 in the .shstrtab string table
Here, 1 says the name of this section starts at the first character of that section, and ends at the first NUL character, making up the string .data.
.data is one of the section names which has a predefined meaning according to www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch4.strtab.html:
These sections hold initialized data that contribute to the program's memory image.

80 4: sh_type = 01 00 00 00: SHT_PROGBITS: the section content is not specified by ELF, only by how the program interprets it. Normal since a .data section.
80 8: sh_flags = 03 7x 00: SHF_WRITE and SHF_ALLOC: www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch4.sheader.html#sh_flags, as required from a .data section
90 0: sh_addr = 8x 00: TODO: standard says:
If the section will appear in the memory image of a process, this member gives the address at which the section's first byte should reside. Otherwise, the member contains 0.
but I don't understand it very well yet.
90 8: sh_offset = 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 = 0x200: number of bytes from the start of the program to the first byte in this section
a0 0: sh_size = 0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
If we take 0xD bytes starting at sh_offset 200, we see:
```
00000200  48 65 6c 6c 6f 20 77 6f  72 6c 64 21 0a 00        |Hello world!..  |
```
AHA! So our "Hello world!" string is in the data section like we told it to be on the NASM.
Once we graduate from hd, we will look this up like:
```
readelf -x .data hello_world.o
```
which outputs:
```
Hex dump of section '.data':
  0x00000000 48656c6c 6f20776f 726c6421 0a       Hello world!.
```
NASM sets decent properties for that section because it treats .data magically: www.nasm.us/doc/nasmdoc7.html#section-7.9.2
Also note that this was a bad section choice: a good C compiler would put the string in .rodata instead, because it is read-only and it would allow for further OS optimizations.
- a0 8: sh_link and sh_info = 8x 0: do not apply to this section type. www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch4.sheader.html#special_sections
- b0 0: sh_addralign = 04 = TODO: why is this alignment necessary? Is it only for sh_addr, or also for symbols inside sh_addr?
- b0 8: sh_entsize = 00 = the section does not contain a table. If != 0, it means that the section contains a table of fixed size entries. In this file, we see from the readelf output that this is the case for the .symtab and .rela.text sections.