Physics Travel Guide Updated +Created
DokuWiki about physics, mostly/fully written by Jakob Schwichtenberg and therefore focusing on particle physics, although registration might be open to all.
Gridworld Updated +Created
This is analogous to many traditional board games such as chess, the concept is very natural and maps well into computer.
The downsides of gridworld games are:
  • it is hard to model speed in discrete worlds. When you 10x faster, when do you collide with something else that is also crossing your path?
  • they tend to not use vector representations of objects. So to have an object be 10x longer than another one, the naive implementation has to add 10 smaller objects. This becomes untenable as the number of objects increases.
Semidirect product Updated +Created
As per en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semidirect_product&oldid=1040813965#Properties, unlike the Direct product, the semidirect product of two goups is neither unique, nor does it always exist, and there is no known algorithmic way way to tell if one exists or not.
This is because reaching the "output" of the semidirect produt of two groups requires extra non-obvious information that might not exist. This is because the semi-direct product is based on the product of group subsets. So you start with two small and completely independent groups, and it is not obvious how to join them up, i.e. how to define the group operation of the product group that is compatible with that of the two smaller input groups. Contrast this with the Direct product, where the composition is simple: just use the group operation of each group on either side.
Product of group subsets
So in other words, it is not a function like the Direct product. The semidiret product is therefore more like a property of three groups.
The semidirect product is more general than the direct product of groups when thinking about the group extension problem, because with the direct product of groups, both subgroups of the larger group are necessarily also normal (trivial projection group homomorphism on either side), while for the semidirect product, only one of them does.
Conversely, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semidirect_product&oldid=1040813965 explains that if , and besides the implied requirement that N is normal, H is also normal, then .
Smallest example: where is a dihedral group and are cyclic groups. (the rotation) is a normal subgroup of , but (the flip) is not.
Note that with the Direct product instead we get and not , i.e. as per the direct product of two cyclic groups of coprime order is another cyclic group.
TODO:
  • why does one of the groups have to be normal in the definition?
  • what is the smallest example of a non-simple group that is neither a direct nor a semi-direct product of any two other groups?
Education as a system of indoctrination Updated +Created
Whenever Ciro Santilli walks in front of a school and sees the tall gates it makes him sad. Maybe 8 year olds need gates. But do we need to protect 15 year olds like that? Students should be going out to see the world, both good and evil not hiding from it! We should instead be guiding them to the world. But instead, we are locking them up in brainwashing centers.
Video "The Purpose of Education by Noam Chomsky (2012)" puts it well, education can be either be:
He has spoken about that infinitely, e.g. from when he was thin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo
Bibliography:
Four-terminal sensing Updated +Created
Allotrope Updated +Created
Single chemical element, single phase (usually solid), but different 3D structures.
The prototypical examples are the allotropes of carbon such as diamond vs graphite.
Organization developing trapped ion quantum computer Updated +Created
Time dependent boundary condition Updated +Created
Most commonly, boundary conditions such as the Dirichlet boundary condition are taken to be fixed values in time.
But it also makes sense to think about cases where those values vary in time.
CoinGeek Updated +Created
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14691623
CoinGeek is either run by or paid for by Craig Wright. You can see that all of the articles are either strongly in his favor or in line with his recent opinions.
ISO_8859-1 Updated +Created
Normalized DFT Updated +Created
There are actually two possible definitions for the DFT:
The is nicer mathematically as the inverse becomse more symmetric, and power is conserved between time and frequency domains.
Available battery voltages Updated +Created
Only certain battery voltages exist, because this voltage depends intrinsically on the battery's chemical composition.
learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/battery-technologies/all (CC BY-SA) has a very good summary list, reordered from lowest to highest voltage:
Battery ShapeChemistryNominal VoltageRechargeable?
AA, AAA, C, D (Rechargeable)NiMH or NiCd1.2VYes
AA, AAA, C, and DAlkaline or Zinc-carbon1.5VNo
Coin CellLithium3VNo
Silver Flat PackLithium Polymer (LiPo)3.7VYes
9VAlkaline or Zinc-carbon9VNo
Car BatterySix-cell lead acid12.6VYes
Laplace's equation Updated +Created
Like a heat equation but for functions without time dependence, space-only.
TODO confirm: does the solution of the heat equation always converge to the solution of the Laplace equation as time tends to infinity?
In one dimension, the Laplace equation is boring as it is just a straight line since the second derivative must be 0. That also matches our intuition of the limit solution of the heat equation.
OurBigBook topic feature Updated +Created
Superconductivity Updated +Created
Experiments:
  • "An introduction to superconductivity" by Alfred Leitner originally published in 1965, source: www.alfredleitner.com/
  • Isotope effect on the critical temperature. hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Solids/coop.html mentions that:
    If electrical conduction in mercury were purely electronic, there should be no dependence upon the nuclear masses. This dependence of the critical temperature for superconductivity upon isotopic mass was the first direct evidence for interaction between the electrons and the lattice. This supported the BCS Theory of lattice coupling of electron pairs.
Video 1.
20. Fermi gases, BEC-BCS crossover by Wolfgang Ketterle (2014)
Source. Part of the "Atomic and Optical Physics" series, uploaded by MIT OpenCourseWare.
Actually goes into the equations.
Notably, youtu.be/O_zjGYvP4Ps?t=3278 describes extremely briefly an experimental setup that more directly observes pair condensation.
Video 2.
Superconductivity and Quantum Mechanics at the Macro-Scale - 1 of 2 by Steven Kivelson (2016)
Source. For the Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics. Gives a reasonable basis overview, but does not go into the meat of BCS it at the end.
Video 3. . Source. Lacking as usual, but this one is particularly good as the author used to work on the area as he mentions in the video.
Media:
  • Cool CNRS video showing the condensed wave function, and mentioning that "every pair moves at the same speed". To change the speed of one pair, you need to change the speed of all others. That's why there's not energy loss.
Transition into superconductivity can be seen as a phase transition, which happens to be a second-order phase transition.
Wikipedia Updated +Created
Why Wikipedia sucks: Section "Wikipedia".
The most important page of Wikipedia is undoubtedly: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources which lists the accepted and non accepted sources. Basically, the decision of what is true in this world.
Wikipedia is incredibly picky about copyright. E.g.: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_of_all_fair_use_images_of_living_people because "such portrait could be created". Yes, with a time machine, no problem! This does more harm than good... excessive!
Citing in Wikipedia is painful. Partly because of they have a billion different templates that you have to navigate. They should really have a system where you can easily reuse existing sources across articles! Section "How to use a single source multiple times in a Wikipedia article?"
Video 1.
What Happened To Wikipedia's Founders?
Source.
Video 2.
Inside the Wikimedia Foundation offices by Wikimedia Foundation (2008)
Source.
Computational complexity of modular exponentiation Updated +Created
math.stackexchange.com/questions/2382011/computational-complexity-of-modular-exponentiation-from-rosens-discrete-mathem mentions:
can be calculated in:
Remember that and are the lengths in bits of and , so in terms of the length in bits and we'd get:
Water Margin Updated +Created
Talks about rebellion of the oppressed (and bandits), and therefore has been controversial throughout the many Chinese dictatorships.
The book is based on real events surrounding 12th century rebel leader Song Jiang during the Song dynasty.
It is also interesting that Mao Zedong was apparently a fan of the novel, although he had to hide that to some extent due to the controversial nature of the material, which could be said to instigate rebellion.
The incredible popularity of the novel can also be seen by the large number of paintings of it found in the Summer Palace.
This is a good novel. It appeals to Ciro Santilli's sensibilities of rebelling against unfairness, and in particular about people who are at the margin of society (at the river margin) doing so. Tax the rich BTW.
It also has always made Ciro quite curious how such novels are not used as a way to inspire people to rebel against the Chinese Communist Party.
Full text uploads of Chinese versions:
Water Margin English translation Updated +Created
Inscription (blockchain) Updated +Created
Data that is inscribed in a blockchain as a way to perpetuate the data, rather than to follow the main intended purpose of the given blockchain, e.g. ASCII art instead of financial transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

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