Public Ivy Updated 2025-07-16
Scorewriter Updated 2025-07-16
Basically a GUI music editor where you can specifically see and export classical music notation instead of tablature-style notation.
Best open source one found so far as of 2020: MuseScore.
Tennessee Updated 2025-07-16
Git command Updated 2025-07-16
GNU package Updated 2025-07-16
Google Street View Updated 2025-07-16
Street View's go into the past mode is the dream of every archaeologist. Ciro can only dream of a magic street view that allows going back to earlier centuries and beyond... isn't it amazing to think that people in the future will have that ability to time travel back to around the year 2006? Ciro wonders how long Google will be able to keep storing data like that.
Thanks, CIA.
History of Google Updated 2025-07-16
The 1997 Wayback Machine archives are just priceless: web.archive.org/web/19971210065425/http://backrub.stanford.edu/backrub.html. I'm so glad that website exists and started so early. It is just another university research project demo website like any other. Priceless.
In August 1998 they had an their first investment of $100,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, Sun Microsystems co-founder. Some sources say September 1998. This was an event of legend, the dude dropped by, tested the website for a few minutes, said I like it, and dropped a 100$ check with no paperwork. Google wasn't even incorporated, they had to incorporate to cash the check. They were apparently introduced by one of the teachers, TODO which. Some sources say he had to rush off to another meeting afterwards:
Tried to sell it for 1 million in early 1999... OMG the way the world is. It would be good to learn more about that story, and when they noticed it was fuckup.
One of Google's most interesting stories is how their startup garage owner became an important figure inside Google, and how Sergei married her sister. These were the best garage tenants ever!
Video 1.
Andy Bechtolsheim's 100.000 check by Discovery UK (2018)
Source. Contains interviews with Andy Bechtolsheim and David Cheriton. The meeting happened in David Cheriton's porch. Andy showed up at 8AM, and he had a meeting at 9AM at Cisco where he worked, so he had to leave early. Andy worked at Cisco after having sold his company Granite Systems, which David co-founded, to Cisco. Particularly cool to see how Andy calculated expected revenue quickly on the back of his mind.
Video 2.
Larry Page interview on the choice of name "Alphabet" by Fortune Magazine (2015)
Source. Shows his voice situation well, poor guy.
Nuclear blues Updated 2025-07-16
Term invented by Ciro Santilli, it refers to Richard Feynman, after helping to build the atomic bomb:
And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
Arcade game Updated 2025-07-16
Git UI Updated 2025-07-16
Perfect Git integration belongs in integrated development environments :-)
Sex (trait) Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about the male/female trait.
For the act, see: sex.
Torah Updated 2025-07-16
Atheism Updated 2025-07-16
When taking a penalty kick in soccer, the kicker must chose left or right.
And before he kicks, the goalkeeper must also decide left or right, because there is no time to see where the ball is going.
Because the kicker is right footed however, he kicker kicks better to one side than the other. So we have four probabilities:
  • goal kick left keeper jumps left
  • goal kick right keeper jumps right
  • goal kick left keeper jumps right. Note that it is possible that this won't be a goal, even though the keeper is nowhere near the ball, as the ball might just miss the goal by a bit.
  • kick right and keeper jumps left. Analogous to above
Atom Updated 2025-07-16
Theory that atoms exist, i.e. matter is not continuous.
Much before atoms were thought to be "experimentally real", chemists from the 19th century already used "conceptual atoms" as units for the proportions observed in macroscopic chemical reactions, e.g. . The thing is, there was still the possibility that those proportions were made up of something continuous that for some reason could only combine in the given proportions, so the atoms could only be strictly consider calculatory devices pending further evidence.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter 5 "The reality of molecules" has some good mentions. Notably, physicists generally came to believe in atoms earlier than chemists, because the phenomena they were most interested in, e.g. pressure in the ideal gas law, and then Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics just scream atoms more loudly than chemical reactions, as they saw that these phenomena could be explained to some degree by traditional mechanics of little balls.
Confusion around the probabilistic nature of the second law of thermodynamics was also used as a physical counterargument by some. Pais mentions that Wilhelm Ostwald notably argued that the time reversibility of classical mechanics + the second law being a fundamental law of physics (and not just probabilistic, which is the correct hypothesis as we now understand) must imply that atoms are not classic billiard balls, otherwise the second law could be broken.
Pais also mentions that a big "chemical" breakthrough was isomers suggest that atoms exist.
Very direct evidence evidence:
Less direct evidence:
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 40 mentions several methods that Einstein used to "prove" that atoms were real. Perhaps the greatest argument of all is that several unrelated methods give the same estimates of atom size/mass:

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