Number of elements of an elliptic curve over a finite field Updated +Created
E. Coli whole cell simulation Updated +Created
Human essential amino acid Updated +Created
Signaling theory Updated +Created
Exif tag Updated +Created
Wheeler-Feynman absorber theory Updated +Created
What they presented on richard Feynman's first seminar in 1941. Does not include quantum mechanics it seems.
Ethnic minorities in China Updated +Created
As of 2020 (TODO starting when) the Chinese government officially recognizes 55 minorities.
These minorities actually had different legal statuses, e.g. they were exempt from the One Child Policy.
Aggressively filter your social media follows Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli very aggressively aggressively people in social media.
There are basically 3 categories:
  • are you Ciro's parents or children or brothers: OK, keep following, unless you are truly truly very noise.
  • does Ciro really really like or respect you? OK, he can take some useless (i.e. non-technical/scientific) posts
  • otherwise: one bad post and unfollow
OAuth Updated +Created
The fatal flaw of OAuth is that websites have to enable specific providers, they can't just automatically select the correct OAuth for a given email domain. This means that the vast majority of websites will only provide the most widely popular providers such as Google, and the like, which means people won't have decent privacy.
So you are just better off with password logins and a decent password manager.
AGI-complete Updated +Created
Term invented by Ciro Santilli to refer to problems that can only be solved once we have AGI.
It is somewhat of a flawed analogy to NP-complete.
Exponential function differential equation Updated +Created
The differential equation that is solved by the exponential function:
with initial condition:
TODO find better name for it, "linear homogenous differential equation of degree one" almost fully constrainst it except for the exponent constant and initial value.
Gaussian function Updated +Created
Kibble balance Updated +Created
The Kibble balance is so precise and reproducible that it was responsible for the 2019 redefinition of the Kilogram.
Figure 1.
NIST-4 Kibble balance
. Source.
It relies rely on not one, but three macroscopic quantum mechanical effects:
How cool is that! As usual, the advantage of those effects is that they are discrete, and have very fixed values that don't depend either:
  • on the physical dimensions of any apparatus (otherwise fabrication precision would be an issue)
  • small variations of temperature, magnetic field and so on
One downside of using some quantum mechanical effects is that you have to cool everything down to 5K. But that's OK, we've got liquid helium!
The operating principle is something along:
Then, based on all this, you can determine how much the object weights.
Video 1.
How We're Redefining the kg by Veritasium
. Source.
Video 2.
The Kibble Balance, realizing the Kilogram from fundamental constants of nature by Richard Green
. Source. Presented in 2022 for a CENAM seminar, the Mexican metrology institute. The speaker is from the Canadian metrology institute
Video 3.
The Watt balance and redefining the kilogram by National Physical Laboratory
. Source. Nothing much, but fun to hear Kibble talking about his balance in beautiful English before he passed.
AI game with natural language Updated +Created
We define this category as AI games in which agents are able to produce or consume natural language.
It dawned on Ciro Santilli that it would be very difficult to classify an agent as an AGI if tthat agent can't speak to take orders, read existing human generated documentation, explain what it is doing, or ask for clarification.
Video 1.
Human player test of DMLab-30 Select Described Object task by DeepMind (2018)
Source. This is one of the games from DeepMind Lab.
Video 2.
WorldGPT by Nhan Tran (2023)
Source. Not the most amazing demo, but it is a start.
Matrix exponential Updated +Created
Is the solution to a system of linear ordinary differential equations, the exponential function is just a 1-dimensional subcase.
Note that more generally, the matrix exponential can be defined on any ring.
The matrix exponential is of particular interest in the study of Lie groups, because in the case of the Lie algebra of a matrix Lie group, it provides the correct exponential map.
Video 1.
How (and why) to raise e to the power of a matrix by 3Blue1Brown (2021)
Source.
ffplay multiple input files Updated +Created
For synthesized streams like sine we can do it e.g.
ffplay -autoexit -nodisp -f lavfi -i '
sine=frequency=500[a];
sine=frequency=1000[b];
[a][b]amerge, atrim=end=2
'
but it does not seem to accept multiple -i for some reason. So is there a way to open a file from some filter? E.g.:
ffplay -i tmp.wav -i tmp.mkv -filter_complex "[0:a]atrim=end=2[a];[1:v]trim=end=2[v]" -map '[a]' -map '[v]'
fails with:
Argument 'tmp.mkv' provided as input filename, but 'tmp.wav' was already specified.
Fractional quantum Hall effect for Updated +Created

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