Series RC circuit Updated +Created
Ciro's Edict #5 / Misc tech Updated +Created
The real projective plane is not simply connected Updated +Created
To see that the real projective plane is not simply connected space, considering the lines through origin model of the real projective plane, take a loop that starts at and moves along the great circle ends at .
Note that both of those points are the same, so we have a loop.
Now try to shrink it to a point.
There's just no way!
The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997) Updated +Created
Borrow from the Internet Archive for free: archive.org/details/supermenstory00murr
Initial chapters put good clarity on the formation of the military-industrial complex. Being backed by the military, especially just after World War II, was in itself enough credibility to start and foster a company.
It is funny to see how the first computers were very artisanal, made on a one-off basis.
Amazing how Control Data Corporation raised capital IPO style as a startup without a product. The dude was selling shares at dinner parties in his home.
Very interesting mention on page 70 of how Israel bought CDC's UNIVAC 1103 which Cray contributed greatly to design, and everyone knew that it was to make thermonuclear weapons, since that was what the big American labs like this mention should be added to: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel but that's Extended Protected... the horrors of Wikipedia.
Another interesting insight is how "unintegrated" computers were back then. They were literally building computers out of individual vacuum tubes, then individual semiconducting transistors, a gate at a time. Then things got more and more integrated as time went. That is why the now outdated word "microprocessor" existed. When processors start to fit into a single integrated circuit, they were truly micro compared to the monstrosities that existed previously.
Also, because integration was so weak initially, it was important to more manually consider the length of wire signals had to travel, and try to put components closer together to reduce the critical path to be able to increase clock speeds. These constraints are also of course present in modern computer design, but they were just so much more visible in those days.
The book does unfortunately not give much detail in Crays personal life as mentioned on this book review: www.goodreads.com/review/show/1277733185?book_show_action=true. His childhood section is brief, and his wedding is described in one paragraph, and divorce in one sentence. Part of this is because he was very private about his family most likely note how Wikipedia had missed his first wedding, and likely misattribute children to the second wedding; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Seymour_Cray section "Weddings and Children".
Crays work philosophy is is highlighted many times in the book, and it is something worthy to have in mind:
  • if a design is not working, start from scratch
  • don't be the very first pioneer of a technology, let others work out the problems for you first, and then come second and win
Cray's final downfall was when he opted to try to use a promising but hard to work with material gallium arsenide instead of silicon as his way to try and speed up computers, see also: gallium arsenide vs silicon. Also, he went against the extremely current of the late 80's early 90's pointing rather towards using massively parallel systems based on silicon off-the-shelf Intel processors, a current that had DARPA support, and which by far the path that won very dramatically as of 2020, see: Intel supercomputer market share.
VHDL Updated +Created
Examples under vhdl, more details at: GHDL.
Visualizing 4D Updated +Created
Simulate it. Just simulate it.
Video 1.
4D Toys: a box of four-dimensional toys by Miegakure (2017)
Source.
Euler-Lagrange equation Updated +Created
Let's start with the one dimensional case. Let the and a Functional defined by a function of three variables :
Then, the Euler-Lagrange equation gives the maxima and minima of the that type of functional. Note that this type of functional is just one very specific type of functional amongst all possible functionals that one might come up with. However, it turns out to be enough to do most of physics, so we are happy with with it.
Given , the Euler-Lagrange equations are a system of ordinary differential equations constructed from that such that the solutions to that system are the maxima/minima.
In the one dimensional case, the system has a single ordinary differential equation:
By and we simply mean "the partial derivative of with respect to its second and third arguments". The notation is a bit confusing at first, but that's all it means.
Therefore, that expression ends up being at most a second order ordinary differential equation where is the unknown, since:
  • the term is a function of
  • the term is a function of . And so it's derivative with respect to time will contain only up to
Now let's think about the multi-dimensional case. Instead of having , we now have . Think about the Lagrangian mechanics motivation of a double pendulum where for a given time we have two angles.
Let's do the 2-dimensional case then. In that case, is going to be a function of 5 variables rather than 3 as in the one dimensional case, and the functional looks like:
This time, the Euler-Lagrange equations are going to be a system of two ordinary differential equations on two unknown functions and of order up to 2 in both variables:
At this point, notation is getting a bit clunky, so people will often condense the vector
or just omit the arguments of entirely:
Video 1.
Calculus of Variations ft. Flammable Maths by vcubingx (2020)
Source.
Innovative university course Updated +Created
Jack Hidary Updated +Created
Quantum field Updated +Created
Quantum field theory Updated +Created
Theoretical framework on which quantum field theories are based, theories based on framework include:so basically the entire Standard Model
The basic idea is that there is a field for each particle particle type.
And then those fields interact with some Lagrangian.
One way to look at QFT is to split it into two parts:
Then interwined with those two is the part "OK, how to solve the equations, if they are solvable at all", which is an open problem: Yang-Mills existence and mass gap.
There appear to be two main equivalent formulations of quantum field theory:
Video 1.
Quantum Field Theory visualized by ScienceClic English (2020)
Source. Gives one piece of possibly OK intuition: quantum theories kind of model all possible evolutions of the system at the same time, but with different probabilities. QFT is no different in that aspect.
Video 2.
Quantum Fields: The Real Building Blocks of the Universe by David Tong (2017)
Source. Boring, does not give anything except the usual blabla everyone knows from Googling:
Video 3.
Quantum Field Theory: What is a particle? by Physics Explained (2021)
Source. Gives some high level analogies between high level principles of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and special relativity in to suggest that there is a minimum quanta of a relativistic quantum field.
RSA vs Diffie-Hellman Updated +Created
As its name indicates, Diffie-Hellman key exchange is a key exchange algorithm. TODO verify: this means that in order to transmit a message, both parties must first send data to one another to reach a shared secret key. For RSA on the other hand, you can just take the public key of the other party and send encrypted data to them, the receiver does not need to send you any data at any point.
Ciro's Edict #9 / Not work Updated +Created
Tesseract Updated +Created
Addition Updated +Created
Closed access Updated +Created
ELF Hello World Tutorial / .data section Updated +Created
.data is section 1:
00000080  01 00 00 00 01 00 00 00  03 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000090  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
000000a0  0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
000000b0  04 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |................|
  • 80 4: sh_type = 01 00 00 00: SHT_PROGBITS: the section content is not specified by ELF, only by how the program interprets it. Normal since a .data section.
  • 80 8: sh_flags = 03 7x 00: SHF_WRITE and SHF_ALLOC: www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch4.sheader.html#sh_flags, as required from a .data section
  • 90 0: sh_addr = 8x 00: TODO: standard says:
    If the section will appear in the memory image of a process, this member gives the address at which the section's first byte should reside. Otherwise, the member contains 0.
    but I don't understand it very well yet.
  • 90 8: sh_offset = 00 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 = 0x200: number of bytes from the start of the program to the first byte in this section
  • a0 0: sh_size = 0d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
    If we take 0xD bytes starting at sh_offset 200, we see:
    00000200  48 65 6c 6c 6f 20 77 6f  72 6c 64 21 0a 00        |Hello world!..  |
    AHA! So our "Hello world!" string is in the data section like we told it to be on the NASM.
    Once we graduate from hd, we will look this up like:
    readelf -x .data hello_world.o
    which outputs:
    Hex dump of section '.data':
      0x00000000 48656c6c 6f20776f 726c6421 0a       Hello world!.
    NASM sets decent properties for that section because it treats .data magically: www.nasm.us/doc/nasmdoc7.html#section-7.9.2
    Also note that this was a bad section choice: a good C compiler would put the string in .rodata instead, because it is read-only and it would allow for further OS optimizations.
    • a0 8: sh_link and sh_info = 8x 0: do not apply to this section type. www.sco.com/developers/gabi/2003-12-17/ch4.sheader.html#special_sections
    • b0 0: sh_addralign = 04 = TODO: why is this alignment necessary? Is it only for sh_addr, or also for symbols inside sh_addr?
    • b0 8: sh_entsize = 00 = the section does not contain a table. If != 0, it means that the section contains a table of fixed size entries. In this file, we see from the readelf output that this is the case for the .symtab and .rela.text sections.
Film about the semiconductor industry Updated +Created
Semiconductor research institute Updated +Created

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