Leo Szilard Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Leo Szilard: The Genius Behind the Bomb
. Source. 1992. TODO an external link to the production? Producers credited at end: Helen Weiss and Alain Jehlen. As indicated at: archive.org/details/TheGeniusBehindtheBomb it was apparently produced by WGBH, public radio station from Boston.
Level: Asian Updated 2025-07-16
This is true. The level of competition in university entry exams in Asia in insane in the early 21st century compared to the West.
Life difficulty level meme Updated 2025-07-16
TODO there was one which was relly good, can't find it anymore. One day.
Figure 1.
Life difficulty level meme with West Europe, East Europe, Turkey and Middle east
. Source.
Planned obsolescence Updated 2025-07-16
The first time Ciro Santilli Googled this was when trying to repair his cell phone.
2019 cell phones are glued together with adhesive, which makes them impossible to repair them unless you have a heat gun, spend hours and hours learning and planning, and accept the risk of breaking the screen
If you take a phone less than 300 dollars to a repair shop in the first world, they will say: I've never repaired this crap, and likely for the price of the repair you should just buy a new one, and so to the trash goes the old one, polluting the planet, and in comes a new one, enriching the manufacturer further.
Pleistocene Updated 2025-07-16
Agriculture is not the official definition of the age. But it is good enough. Likely related to the official end of glaciations thing.
Second law of thermodynamics Updated 2025-07-16
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter 4 "Entropy and Probability" mentions well how Boltzmann first thought that the second law was an actual base physical law of the universe while he was calculating numerical stuff for it, including as late as 1872.
But then he saw an argument by Johann Joseph Loschmidt that given the time reversibility of classical mechanics, and because they were thinking of atoms as classical balls as in the kinetic theory of gases, then there always exist a valid physical state where entropy decreases, by just reversing the direction of time and all particle speeds.
So from this he understood that the second law can only be probabilistic, and not a fundamental law of physics, which he published clearly in 1877.
Ytterbium Updated 2025-07-16
Not "Yt" because that is already "Yttrium". God.
Second quantization Updated 2025-07-16
Second quantization also appears to be useful not only for relativistic quantum mechanics, but also for condensed matter physics. The reason is that the basis idea is to use the number occupation basis. This basis is:
Bibliography:
Zatoichi effect Updated 2025-07-16
This is a neologism by Ciro Santilli, it refers to the fact that Zatoichi was not fully blind, but extremely hard of sight, which makes him:
  • too capable for the blind people, who did not trust him
  • too incapable for non-blind people, who despised him
and metaphorically refers to similar situations where a person or group of people are in the middle of two groups and not part of either of them.
A related thing that comes to mind is Aum Shinrikyo's Prophet Shoko Asahara, who was semi blind, and would bully the fully blind people of his school for blind people.
On Ubuntu 20.10, just:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt" output.mp4
To change font size: stackoverflow.com/questions/21363334/how-to-add-font-size-in-subtitles-in-ffmpeg-video-filter
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf "subtitles=subtitle.srt:force_style='Fontsize=64'" output.mp4
The default appears to be 24, so just multiply that by whatever seems like a reasonable factor.
Note howver that .ass subtitle files can contain style information, which ffmpeg respects. Aegisub can produce and preview such styles, making .ass one of the best options.
Physicist Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source.
Shelter Island Conference Updated 2025-07-16
Sponsored by National Academy of Sciences, located in Long Island.
This is where Isidor Rabi exposed experiments carried out on the anomalous magnetic dipole moment and Willis Lamb presented his work on the Lamb shift.
It was a very private and intimate conference, that gathered the best physicists of the area, one is reminded of the style of the Solvay Conference.
Beta decay Updated 2025-07-16
Uranium emits them, you can see their mass to charge ratio under magnetic field and so deduce that they are electrons.
Caused by weak interaction TODO why/how.
The emitted electron kinetic energy is random from zero to a maximum value. The rest goes into a neutrino. This is how the neutrino was first discovered/observed indirectly. This is well illustrated in a decay scheme such as Figure "caesium-137 decay scheme".
better-sqlite3 Node.js package Updated 2025-07-16
As claimed on their README, their operation truly appears to be 10x faster than the node-sqlite package!! It is insane!! How can that other package still exist at all?
The only big problem was the lack of ORM, but people are looking into that by adding it to Sequelize:
Zeeman effect Updated 2025-07-16
Split in the spectral line when a magnetic field is applied.
Non-anomalous: number of splits matches predictions of the Schrödinger equation about the number of possible states with a given angular momentum. TODO does it make numerical predictions?
www.pas.rochester.edu/~blackman/ast104/zeeman-split.html contains the hello world that everyone should know: 2p splits into 3 energy levels, so you see 3 spectral lines from 1s to 2p rather than just one.
p splits into 3, d into 5, f into 7 and so on, i.e. one for each possible azimuthal quantum number.
It also mentions that polarization effects become visible from this: each line is polarized in a different way. TODO more details as in an experiment to observe this.
Video 1.
Experimental physics - IV: 22 - Zeeman effect by Lehrportal Uni Gottingen (2020)
Source.
This one is decent. Uses a cadmium lamp and an etalon on an optical table. They see a more or less clear 3-split in a circular interference pattern,
They filter out all but the transition of interest.
Video 2. Source. Does not appear to achieve a crystal clear split unfortunately.
Google Quantum AI Updated 2025-07-16
Google's quantum hardware/software effort.
The "AI" part is just prerequisite buzzword of the AI boom era for any project and completely bullshit.
According to job postings such as: archive.ph/wip/Fdgsv their center is in Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara. Though Google tends to promote it more as Santa Barbara, see e.g. Daniel's t-shirt at Video "Building a quantum computer with superconducting qubits by Daniel Sank (2019)".
Video 1.
Control of transmon qubits using a cryogenic CMOS integrated circuit (QuantumCasts) by Google (2020)
Source. Fantastic video, good photos of the Google Quantum AI setup!
Zettelkasten Updated 2025-07-16
zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ mentions one page to rule them all:
How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.

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