Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Followup to the Shelter Island Conference, this is where Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman exposed their theories to explain the experiments of the previous conference.

Julian made a formal presentation that took until the afternoon and bored everyone to death, though the mathematics avoided much questioning.

Feynman then presented his revolutionary approach, which he was unable to prove basic properties of, but which gave correct results, and people were not very happy.

They actually abolished the original legal requirement for those institutions to have free scholars as set out by their original charity school beginnings!!! WTF!

But the broadening of scope beyond the Church of England/medieval material was a good thing at least.

Debugging sucks. But there's also nothing quite that "oh fuck, that's why it doesn't work" moment, which happens after you have examined and placed everything that is relevant to the problem into your brain. You just can't see it coming. It just happens. You just learn what you generally have to look at so it happens faster.

Source on GitHub: github.com/stephenjordan/stephenjordan.github.io

The most comprehensive list is the amazing curated and commented list of quantum algorithms as of 2020.

TODO clear example of the computational problem that it solves.

This technique has managed to determine protein 3D structures for proteins that people were not able to crystallize for X-ray crystallography.

It is said however that cryoEM is even fiddlier than X-ray crystallography, so it is mostly attempted if crystallization attempts fail.

By looking at Figure 1. "A cryoEM image", you can easily understand the basics of cryoEM.

We just put a gazillion copies of our molecule of interest in a solution, and then image all of them in the frozen water.

Each one of them appears in the image in a random rotated view, so given enough of those point of view images, we can deduce the entire 3D structure of the molecule.

Ciro Santilli once watched a talk by Richard Henderson about cryoEM circa 2020, where he mentioned that he witnessed some students in the 1980's going to Germany, and coming into contact with early cryoEM. And when they came back, they just told their principal investigator: "I'm going to drop my PhD theme and focus exclusively on cryoEM". That's how hot the cryo thing was! So cool.

proteins also have a half-life, much like RNA. But it tends to be longer.