Photon spin Updated 2025-07-16
Original 1931 experiment by Raman and Bhagavantam: dspace.rri.res.in/bitstream/2289/2123/1/1931%20IJP%20V6%20p353.pdf
Radiation pressure Updated 2025-07-16
Rooting for sport teams is stupid Updated 2025-07-16
And rightly so, since soccer in particular is truly ridiculously popular in Brazil, where "what is your local soccer team?" is just as valid a conversation starter as "Which city are you from?".
The ironic reason is simple: maybe is Brazil loses more on this useless art, then maybe people will get tired of it, and instead invest on more useful and beautiful arts.
Notably, what Ciro really wants people to root for are:
- the number of Brazilian Nobel Prizes, which is zero, yes, zero, as of 2020, despite a population of 210 million people. But thank God for our one Field Medal, what an epic start, even though Mathematics is useless.
- the number of high tech companies that have a global impact, which is likely extremely low as of 2020, and must contain only a few mammoths that dominate some local commodity market and therefore got enough money from that to expand a bit of technology worldwide. But they were mostly not classic tech startups that did world innovation from the start.
- how low your country's Gini coefficient is
Don't get Ciro wrong.
Observing professionals who do it amazingly can be beautiful.
But why the F do you have to root for a team unless your wife or children are playing in it (and even then..., how will that help?)?
What will you get from that?
Even if it is your national team, why does it matter if they win or lose?
Hooliganism just takes that uselessness to a hole new level.
Now some confessions.
A five year old Ciro will never forget when the feeling of Brazil won the 1994 World Cup on the penalties and everyone went mad that evening.
A nine year old Ciro stopped watching the 1998 World Cup Final of Brazil vs France half way during the 3-0 massacre and went to his front garden to kick his soccer ball on the metallic fence gate which represented a goal.
After that, Ciro went through puberty he guesses, and noticed that the natural sciences are just cooler than this soccer watching bullshit.
Interview by Web of Stories. His thesis is that football is the sport that looks most like a hunt, the scoring of a goal being the kill of the prey, and thus appeals to people's Paleolithic hunting habits the most. He feels it is more like hunting than war, and that the opposing team is just there to add some difficulty to scoring. He mentions that soccer has all the fundamental aspects of hunting: running after something, aiming, and hunting in a pack of allies. Ciro agrees with this dude. Ciro also adds that the fact that each soccer match has few goals, e.g. as opposed to basketball, makes it much more like a hunt, where you score few large kills per hunt.
The artist and the politician Updated 2025-07-16
Once upon a time in the 2010's, Ciro Santilli went to an artsy theatre venue in the suburbia of Paris, dragged by his wife then girlfriend of course.
In the venue, there was a politician, who was doing his best to show how much they supported the arts, and there were of course the artists, involved in the play.
The politician would see a political power score on top of every person's head, and would spend an amount of time talking to each person exactly proportional to that score. This meant basically one sentence to us. The words themselves didn't really matter of course, only the time spent, they just have to produce nice sounds.
Theories of Quantum Matter by Austen Lamacraft Updated 2025-07-16
As mentioned on the introduction, the main objective of the course is to try predict qualitative properties of materials, notably the existence of certain phase transitions, starting from first principle toy models.
Key phenomena covered include:
There is value in tutorials written by early pioneers of the field Updated 2025-07-16
Everyone is beginner when the field is new, and there is value in tutorials written by beginners.
For example, Ciro Santilli felt it shocking how direct and satisfying Richard Feynman's scientific vulgarization of quantum electrodynamics were, e.g. at: Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979), and that if he had just assumed minimal knowledge of mathematics, he was about to give a full satisfactory picture in just a few hours.
Other supporters of this:
- Ron Maimon: the same also applies to early original papers of the field, not just tutorials
- Dean Kamen: quick mention at: fi.edu/en/awards/laureates/dean-kamen, but a better longer mention on Dreamer (2020), nearby section from trailer: youtu.be/Cj2VKVJKf1I?t=16
Stack Overflow Updated 2025-07-16
The best place to get answers to programming questions as of 2019. Google into Stack Overflow is always the best bet.
An overview of Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contribution can be found at: Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Stack Overflow in a nutshell
. Source. As the "WTF look at my points" guy, Ciro Santilli approves of this meme. A few more elements could be added, notably deletion of the last link-only answer, but good enough.
By the profile image, the "Grammar Nazi" editor is actually appropriately the notorious serial editor Peter Mortensen. Ciro Santilli welcomes grammar fixes, but more subjective style fixes can be a bit annoying.
Catching mice by Nakanoart
. Possible non-canonical source: twitter.com/nixcraft/status/1376023938749190147
The best Chinese traditional instrumental music Updated 2025-07-16
Wang Jin beats Gao Qiu theme music from The Water Margin featuring a suona solo
. Source. The Social Network Updated 2025-07-16
Thiel Fellowship Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli approves of this one, related: Section "Free gifted education".
The downside of the Thiel Fellowship is that it is realistically impossible for its fellows to do anything in deep tech, only information science startups would be possible, as they would not have the labs, or lab skills required for any deep tech if they drop out before a PhD. Related: Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories".
The only solution is the harder process of actually remodelling our very broken educational system.
Eliezer Yudkowsky Updated 2025-07-16
Endofunction Updated 2025-07-16
ENIAC Updated 2025-07-16
Equity (finance) Updated 2025-07-16
Eric W. Weisstein Updated 2025-07-16
Ahh, this dude is just like Ciro Santilli, trying to create the ultimate natural sciences encyclopedia!
Essential fatty acid Updated 2025-07-16
Eta (letter) Updated 2025-07-16
torchvision ResNet Updated 2025-07-16
pytorch.org/vision/0.13/models.html has a minimal runnable example adapted to python/pytorch/resnet_demo.py.
That example uses a ResNet pre-trained on the COCO dataset to do some inference, tested on Ubuntu 22.10:This first downloads the model, which is currently 167 MB.
cd python/pytorch
wget -O resnet_demo_in.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Rooster_portrait2.jpg/400px-Rooster_portrait2.jpg
./resnet_demo.py resnet_demo_in.jpg resnet_demo_out.jpgWe know it is COCO because of the docs: pytorch.org/vision/0.13/models/generated/torchvision.models.detection.fasterrcnn_resnet50_fpn_v2.html which explains that is an alias for:
FasterRCNN_ResNet50_FPN_V2_Weights.DEFAULTFasterRCNN_ResNet50_FPN_V2_Weights.COCO_V1After it finishes, the program prints the recognized classes:so we get the expected
['bird', 'banana']bird, but also the more intriguing banana.
Evergreen notes Updated 2025-07-16
Sample usage by Andy Matuschak (possible coiner): notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
Experimental particle physics Updated 2025-07-16
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