Double-slit experiment Updated 2025-07-16
Amazingly confirms the wave particle duality of quantum mechanics.
The effect is even more remarkable when done with individual particles such individual photons or electrons.
Richard Feynman liked to stress how this experiment can illustrate the core ideas of quantum mechanics. Notably, he night have created the infinitely many slits thought experiment which illustrates the path integral formulation.
Nested set model in SQL Updated 2025-07-16
How to implement Nested set model in SQL:
Dulong-Petit law Updated 2025-07-16
Observation that all solids appear to have the same constant heat capacity per mole.
It can be seen as the limit case of an Einstein solid at high temperatures. At lower temperatures, the heat capacity depends on temperature.
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup Updated 2025-07-16
Appears to be the best classic open source roguelike of the 2020's.
This website is really cool! crawl.akrasiac.org:8080/#lobby You can spectate players live and chat! Also has statistics.
Devs of this game are smart, they have one good in-tree tileset, unlike some other text-based games that didn't have an in-tree option...
Build on Ubuntu 21.10:
sudo apt install build-essential libncursesw5-dev bison flex liblua5.1-0-dev \
libsqlite3-dev libz-dev pkg-config python3-yaml binutils-gold python-is-python3 \
libsdl2-image-dev libsdl2-mixer-dev libsdl2-dev libfreetype6-dev libpng-dev \
fonts-dejavu-core advancecomp pngcrush

git clone --depth 1 --branch 0.28.0 https://github.com/crawl/crawl
cd crawl/crawl-ref/source
echo 0.28-a > util/release_ver
make -j`nproc` TILES=y
./crawl
This launches the UI version already for you.
Eat Just Updated 2025-07-16
Neuralink Updated 2025-07-16
Elon Musk's attempt.
Neutron star Updated 2025-10-14
Neutron stars are cool. What weird objects!
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:

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