Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

More important than the monk itself in Chinese culture, it is used as a Budhist Amen. TODO find some usage in some Chinese television series.

Name origin: amnion, a pellicle that covers embryos of both eggs and also during pregnancy.

Includes:

Does not include amphibians. If you include them, you have the tetrapods.

Unit of electric current.

Affected by the ampere in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units.

Starting in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, the elementary charge is assigned a fixed number, and the Ampere is based on it and on the second, which is beautiful.

This choice is not because we attempt to count individual electrons going through a wire, as it would be far too many to count!

Rather, it is because because there are two crazy quantum mechanical effects that give us macroscopic measures that are directly related to the electron charge. www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/ampere/ampere-quantum-metrology-triangle by the NIST explains that the two effects are:

Those effect work because they also involve dividing by the Planck constant, the fundamental constant of quantum mechanics, which is also tiny, and thus brings values into a much more measurable order of size.

Main implementations: the same as electronic switches: vacuum tubes in the past, and transistors in the second half of the 20th century.

Source: github.com/scientifichackers/ampy

Install on Ubuntu 22.04:

Bibliography:

Some of the earlier computers of the 20th centure were analog computers, not digital.

At some point analog died however, and "computer" basically by default started meaning just "digital computer".

As of the 2010's and forward, with the limit of Moore's law and the rise of machine learning, people have started looking again into analog computing as a possile way forward. A key insight is that huge floating point precision is not that crucial in many deep learning applications, e.g. many new digital designs have tried 16-bit floating point as opposed to the more traditional 32-bit minium. Some papers are even looking into 8-bit: dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3327757.3327866

As an example, the Lightmatter company was trying to implement silicon photonics-based matrix multiplication.

A general intuition behind this type of development is that the human brain, the holy grail of machine learning, is itself an analog computer.

Many/most microcontroller boards have analog-to-digital converters built into them, it is very convenient. E.g. it is the case for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Too many fun skit videos for Ciro Santilli's taste, but does have some serious derivations in quantum electrodynamics.