From the 2020/2021 Oxford physics course handbooks we can determine the following structure:
Trinity term, the third and final term of each year, contains mostly revision from the previous two terms, after which students take their final exams, which basically account for their entire grade. Trinity is therefore a very tense part of the year for the students. After that they have summer holidays, until coming back for the next year of madness.
The official external course landing page: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing/physics. 2021 archive: web.archive.org/web/20221208212856/https://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing/physics) In those pages we see the rough structure, except that it does not have the course codes "A1" etc., and some courses are missing.
At web.archive.org/web/20221229021312/https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2011-06-03/course_v3_pdf_80151.pdf page 11 we can see the global course structure giving the two options, 3 year BA or 4 year Oxford physics masters:
Year 1
(Prelims)
|
|
v
Year 2
(Part A)
|
+-----------+
|           |
v           v
Year 3 BA   Year 3 (MPhys)
(Part B)    (Part B)
|           |
|           |
v           v
BA          Year 4
            (Part C)
            |
            |
            v
            MPhys
Practical courses notes: www-teaching.physics.ox.ac.uk/
This is a good book. It is rather short, very direct, which is a good thing. At some points it is slightly too direct, but to a large extent it gets it right.
The main goal of the book is to basically to build the Standard Model Lagrangian from only initial symmetry considerations, notably the Poincaré group + internal symmetries.
The book doesn't really show how to extract numbers from that Lagrangian, but perhaps that can be pardoned, do one thing and do it well.
Pin header Updated 2025-07-16
These often come pre-soldered on devboards, e.g. and allow for easy access to GPIO pins. E.g. they're present on the Raspberry Pi 2.
Why would someone ever sell a devboard without them pre-soldered!
Figure 2.
Underside of a Raspberry Pi 2
. Source. At the top of this image we can clearly see how the usually pre-soldered pin header connectors go through the PCB and are soldered on both sides.
Enrico Fermi Updated 2025-07-16
Died of cancer at age 53. Ciro Santilli just can't help but speculate that it is linked to radioactivity exposure.
Paleolithic Updated 2025-07-16
This period is similar to the Quaternary, but it also includes tool usage by close relatives of humans which were not humans yet.
It ends together with the pleistocene.
Parameters of the Standard Model Updated 2025-07-16
The growing number of parameters of the Standard Model is one big source of worry for early 21st century physics, much like the growing number of particles was a worry in the beginning of the 20th (but that one was solved by 2020).
Are cryptocurrencies useful? Updated 2025-07-16
Cryptocurrencies have two applications:
The key difficulties of cryptocurrencies are:
If crypto really takes off, 99.99% of people will still only ever use it through some cryptocurrency exchange (unless scalability problems are solved, and they replace fiat currencies entirely), since downloading full blockchains is unfeasible, so the outcome would be very similar to PayPal, and without "true" decentralization.
For those reasons, Ciro Santilli instead believes that governments should issue electronic money, and maintain an open API that all can access instead. The centralized service will always be cheaper for society to maintain than any distributed service, and it will still allow for proper taxation.
Ciro believes that it is easy for people to be seduced by the idealistic promise that "cryptocurrency will make the world more fair and equal by giving everyone equal opportunities, away from the corruption of Governments". Such optimism that new technologies will solve certain key social problems without the need for constant government intervention and management is not new, as shown e.g. at HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis (2016) when he talks about the cyberspace (when the Internet was just beginning): youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU?t=2375. Technologies can make our lives better. But in general, some of them also have to be managed.
In any case, cryptocurrencies are bullshit, the true currency of the future is going to be Magic: The Gathering cards. And Cirocoin.
One closely related thing that Ciro Santilli does think could be interesting exploring right now however, notably when having Monero-like anonymity in mind, would be anonymous electronic voting, which is a pre-requisite to make direct democracy convenient so people can vote more often.
TODO evaluate the possible application of cryptocurrency for international transfers:Of course, the ideal solution would be for governments to just allow for people from other countries to create accounts in their country, and use the centralized API just like citizens. Having an account of some sort is of course fundamental to avoid money laundering/tax evasion, be it on the API, or when you are going to cash out the crypto into fiat. So then the question becomes: suppose that governments are shit and never make such APIs, are international transfers just because traditional banks are inefficient/greedy? Or is it because of the inevitable cost of auditing transfers? E.g. how does TransferWise compare to Bitcoin these days? And if cryptocurrency is more desirable, why wouldn't TransferWise just use it as their backend, and reach very similar fees?
b-money Updated 2025-07-16
Training and inference Updated 2025-07-16
This is the first thing you have to know about supervised learning:
Both of those already have hardware acceleration available as of the 2010s.
Key quote that names the chapter:
My friend Matt Sands was once going to write a book to be called Alfred Nobel's Other Mistake.

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