Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Ciro Santilli has mixed feelings about animal rights.

On one hand, his irrational side wants of course all animals to be happy.

On the other, he does not care about this enough to not kill and eat them, even though he believes that you could live off plants relatively well.

His more rational side says: humans are sacred. Either because you believe in the soul, or because your built-in empathy behaviours. If it is not a human, do whatever you want to it. Killing is already undoubtedly the greatest sin. It is not OK to kill a human painlessly is it? So if torturing it brings humans good, then do it.

Of course, this does get use close and closer to "the what is a human" question, which is more relevant than ever in the awakening of genetics: all species are after all a continuum right?

And Ciro does not have a simple solution to this problem, besides that in 99.9999% the answer is obvious to 99.9999% of the people, and for the others cases, we have to do it like the law and make flawed rules to cover the remaining 0.000099999% cases and let juries decide the rest.

The only other sensible sacredness barrier is the common vegetarian "nervous systems are sacred" one. But how can you believe that if you also follow the religion of physics, where everything is just made of atoms?

Is it evil to take one neuron and torture it? What does that even mean? It will be fun when pain and pleasure are fully understood.

And you are going to have a really hard time when mosquitoes start transmitting deadly diseases that kill your family.

Laws in most 2020 Western modern societies have converged to a hypocritical balance between not offending people too much by hiding the killing and minimizing the pain when possible at low cost. Killing animals painlessly is basically always fine if it brings any "non sadistic" pleasure to humans. And torturing animals is fine with approval e.g. to make medicines.

This has the downside of increasing costs for society. Maybe there are practical benefits besides people feeling bad about animals? Maybe we would have more serial killers if people were free to torture animals? Maybe people in butcher shops would become depressive if their bosses weren't forced to use more expensive painless killing methods? Neither of those seems like huge arguments though.

It eventually comes down to: "how much more is a human life worth than that of an animal" which brings Jesus's Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive) quote to mind:

Non-vegetarian pets owners also baffle Ciro, as most of them basically extend the sacred human line further arbitrarily to certain other cute looking animals like dogs, cats or rabbits, but will gladly kill a cow indirectly by paying someone to pay someone to pay someone to cut it into small pieces. Or they believe that certain specific individuals are sacred. Admittedly, the latter is more rational, and looks a lot of how we treat our own families well, and can accept that other families are not doing so well.

Ciro's even more rational evil side says: the real reason why humans are sacred is a practical one: people have families that love them, and they come to kill you if you kill them, and this starts endless chains of violence that make society unbearable.

While animals feel pain when their children are killed, their memory and logic is just not good enough to fully understand that humans in general have an evil plot to it, and they don't have a method to communicate between themselves and fight back.

For similar reasons, Ciro is pro-abortion.

Futurama's S02E15 "The Problem With Popplers" episode blew Ciro's mind so much.

Ciro should stop discussing topics in which infinite argument has already been had. Sometimes he writes things down so he can stop caring the next time the subject comes up, as there's no need to say it again once it is written.

The Dirac equation can be derived basically "directly" from the Representation theory of the Lorentz group for the spin half representation, this is shown for example at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) 6.3 "Dirac Equation".

The Diract equation is the spacetime symmetry part of the quantum electrodynamics Lagrangian, i.e. is describes how spin half particles behave without interactions. The full quantum electrodynamics Lagrangian can then be reached by adding the $U(1)$ internal symmetry.

As mentioned at spin comes naturally when adding relativity to quantum mechanics, this same method allows us to analogously derive the equations for other spin numbers.

Bibliography:

Their only undergraduate courses that matter:

Like the rest of the Standard Model Lagrangian, this can be split into two parts:

Groups concepts by hyponymy and hypernymy and meronymy and holonymy. That actually makes a lot of sense! TODO: is there a clear separation between hyponymy and meronymy?

Browse: wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn Appears dead as of 2025 lol.

Does not contain intermediat scientific terms, only very common ones, e.g. no mention, of "Josephson effect", "photoelectric effect"

Toy/test/tought experiment algorithm.

Many devborads require a 5V power supply.

This is common on wall transformers and USB, but not in batteries.

For battery power you need a transformer.

OMG those devs are brutes, it's beautiful.

Upside: superconducting above 92K, which is above the 77K of liquid nitrogen, and therefore much much cheaper to obtain and maintain than liquid helium.

Downside: it is brittle, so how do you make wires out of it? Still, can already be used in certain circuits, e.g. high temperature SQUID devices.

Ciro Santilli never did any illegal drugs, because he:so don't expect any amazing stories here.

Like LDS believers, Ciro never drinks coffee nor smokes, and only drinks alcohol and tea sparingly, because they are all addictive drugs and bring no net increase of energy and concentration.

Ciro prefers to only enjoy a glass of tea when going out cycling on a cold day (Earl gray, with milk, no sugar), or get a half pint of beer when going out with friends to a pub.

Ciro only got reasonably drunk twice on his life:

Later in life, around the time of his wedding, there were guests around all the time, and he was drinking beer with them all the time. Then one day, during lunch, Ciro felt a weirdly strong desire to drink one more pint. It was at this point that Ciro realized first-hand what mild, but real, alcohol addiction felt like, and he didn't get that drink, and swore from then on to never drink more than one glass a week, and only with friends at a bar after work. Richard Feynman tells a very similar story on his book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!, see: Section "Richard Feynman's drug use".