Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

This is a pre-requisite of Section "Students must have a flexible choice of what to learn".

If the choice of what to learn depend on a years long dependency graph of other obligations, which currently are the increasingly interlinked:you end up without much choice at all.

The lock-in periods must be much more fluid and shorter term than those, otherwise it makes the almost inevitable pivots to success impossible.

This is something that Ciro Santilli has heard from several people at the end of their undergrad/PhD degrees. Some online mentions:

Feynman's first wife, previously his local-high school-days darling. Feynman was like an reversed Stephen Hawking: he married his wife knowing that she had a serious illness, while Hawking's wife married him knowing that as well. Except that in Feynman's case, the disease outcome (tuberculosis) was much more uncertain, and she tragically died in 1945 much earlier while Feynman was at Los Alamos Laboratory, while Hawking, despite his decline, lived much longer.

Feynman first noticed Arline on the beaches on the region of his home in Far Rockaway, in the Queens, New York, near Long Beach. She lived a bit further inland in Cedarhurst. Arline was beautiful and boys competed for her, but Richard persisted, stalking her at an after-school social league sponsored by the local Synagogue and joining an art class she went to, until he eventually won it out. The region was highly Jewish, and both were from Jewish families, as also suggested by their family names.

Reading about her death e.g. at Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) is a major tearjerker, it's just too horrible. The book mentions on chapter "The Last Springtime" that at last, during the last months of her life, after much hesitation, they did fuck in the sanatorium Arline where was staying at in Albuquerque, the nearest major city to Los Alamos (154 km), despite the risk of Feynman being infected, which would be particularly serious given that Feynman would be in constant contact with students and possibly infect others as part of his career as a researcher/teacher. Feynman would visit her on weekends by bus, and stay in Los Alamos during the week.

Arline finally died on June 16th 1945, exactly one month before the Trinity nuclear test was carried out. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a little later on 6 and 9 of August 1945.

On one of his last trips to Oak Ridge town late 1945, after her death, Feynman walked past a shop window and saw a pretty dress. He thought to himself, "Arline would have liked that", and the reminder made him cry for the first time after Arline's death.

It is even sadder to think that the first antibiotics for tuberculosis, streptomycin, finished its first major clinical trial at around 1948, not long after her death.

Ciro Santilli considers this tragedy a cause of Feynman was a huge womanizer during a certain period of his life.

Many good albums, Ciro Santilli's favorites:

Mentinoned at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Baggott quoting popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2012/09/jim-baggott-four-way-interview.html

Ciro Santilli and Jim would get along mighty well: there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

Two equations derived from first principles by Brian Josephson that characterize the device, somewhat like an I-V curve:where:

Note how these equations are not a typical I-V curve, as they are not an instantaneous dependency between voltage and current: the history of the voltage matters! Or in other words, the system has an internal state, represented by the Josephson phase at a given point in time.

To understand them better, it is important to look at some important cases separately:

A device that exhibits the Josephson effect.

This is just the most charming of the Four Great Classic Novels.

The definitive television series adaptation is obviously Journey to the West. It just manages to capture all the charms of Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie.

Yet another awk-like domain-specific language to do things from the CLI in a ridiculously short humber of character? Oh yes.

Using de novo DNA synthesis to synthesize a genes to later insert somewhere.

Note that this is a specific application of de novo DNA synthesis, e.g. polymerase chain reaction primers is another major application that does not imply creating genes.

A different and more elegant way to express Maxwell's equations by using the:instead of the:

Free to view draft: web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/ms-qft-DRAFT.pdf Page presenting it: web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/qft.html

Author affiliation: University of California, Santa Barbara.

Number of pages: 616!

Don't redistribute clause, and final version by Cambridge University Press, alas, so corrections will never be merged back: web.physics.ucsb.edu/~mark/qft.html. But at least he's collecing erratas for the published (and therefore draft) versions there.

The book is top-level organized in spin 0, spin half, and spin 1. Quite ominous, really.

The preface states that one of its pedagogical philosophies is to "Illustration of the basic concepts with the simplest examples.", so maybe there is hope after all.