Phase transition Updated 2025-07-16
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PhD Comics Updated 2025-07-16
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Each comic page has an "Emergency Button" below it, which redirects to a mock PDF formatted as a research paper, so you can quickly pretend to be working. Epic.
Figure 1.
The evolution of intellectual freedom by PhD Comics (2011)
Source.
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Photoelectric effect Updated 2025-07-16
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No matter how hight the wave intensity, if it the frequency is small, no photons are removed from the material.
This is different from classic waves where energy is proportional to intensity, and coherent with the existence of photons and the Planck-Einstein relation.
Video 1.
Photoelectric effect by UCSB Physics Lecture Demonstrations (2021)
Source.
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Photomultiplier tube Updated 2025-07-16
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Can be used to detect single photons.
It uses the photoelectric effect multiple times to produce a chain reaction. In particular, as mentioned at youtu.be/5V8VCFkAd0A?t=74 from Video 1. "Using a Photomultiplier to Detect single photons by Huygens Optics" this means that the device has a lowest sensitive light frequency, beyond which photons don't have enough energy to eject any electrons.
Figure 1. Source.
Video 1.
Using a Photomultiplier to Detect single photons by Huygens Optics
. Source. 2024. Wow this dude is amazing as usual. Unfortunately he's not using a single photon source, just an LED.
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Bohr model Updated 2025-07-16
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Was the first model to explain the Balmer series, notably linking atomic spectra to the Planck constant and therefore to other initial quantum mechanical observations.
This was one of the first major models that just said:
I give up, I can't tie this to classical physics in any way, let's just roll with it, OK?
It still treats electrons as little points spinning around the nucleus, but it makes the non-classical postulate that only certain angular momentums (and therefore energies) are allowed.
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Boitatech Updated 2025-07-16
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Some people from them contacted Ciro Santilli after Ciro's initial publishing of CIA 2010 covert communication websites.
After a quick Discord chat with them, it was apparent that these people were really cool and knowledgeable.
Also many of them seem to think university is broken and just go hack straigh away.
A perfect example of a dojo learning model.
Also they don't seem to need sleep. Go figure!
With pepole like this, there's hope for Brazil: Section "What poor countries have to do to get richer".
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Boltzmann constant Updated 2025-07-16
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This is not a truly "fundamental" constant of nature like say the speed of light or the Planck constant.
Rather, it is just a definition of our Kelvin temperature scale, linking average microscopic energy to our macroscopic temperature scale.
The way to think about that link is, at 1 Kelvin, each particle has average energy:
(1)
per degree of freedom.
This is why the units of the Boltzmann constant are Joules per Kelvin.
For an ideal monatomic gas, say helium, there are 3 degrees of freedom. so each helium atom has average energy:
(2)
If we have 2 atoms at 1 K, they will have average energy , and so on.
Another conclusion is that this defines temperature as being proportional to the total energy. E.g. if we had 1 helium atom at 2 K then we would have about energy, 3 K and so on.
This energy is of course just an average: some particles have more, and others less, following the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.
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Bookdown Updated 2025-07-16
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Written in R, but also relies on pandoc, so quite bad dependency wise.
Cross files references to IDs: yes. But no check by default for duplicates when doing automatic ID from title. Just automatically disambiguates with -1, -2 suffixes, and links take the last one available.
Source page splitting: splits at h2 by default. If configurable, likely always af fixed level?
Has some nice image generation from inline code from standard R plotting functions.
Hello world on Ubuntu 23.04 after installing R:
sudo R -e 'install.packages("bookdown")'
git clone https://github.com/rstudio/bookdown-demo
cd bookdown-demo
Rscript -e 'bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd")'
xdg-open _book/index.html
The build CLI comes from: stackoverflow.com/questions/50888871/how-to-use-rscript-command-line-tool-to-build-a-book-in-bookdown
The installatoin Rscript -e 'bookdown::render_book("index.Rmd")' takes several minutes, it compiles a bunch of stuff from source apparently. but it did work.
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Cosmological event horizon Updated 2025-07-16
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Kardashev scale Updated 2025-07-16
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Borlotti beans Updated 2025-07-16
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This looks a lot like the beans that Brazilians venerate and can be easily found in the United Kingdom as of 2020.
The more exact type seems to be pinto bean, but this is close enough.
2021-03: same but 2.5 teaspons, seems to be the right ammount.
2021-02-10: attempt 3: 500g 1 hour 30 minutes no pressure, uncontrolled water. Salt with one chorizo: put 3 teaspoons, it was a bit too much, going to do 2 next time and see.
2020-12-14: attempt 3: 250g of beans, 1.5l of water, 30 minutes pressure.
2020-11-30: attempt 2: 275ml of dry beans, about 50% of 500g bag, putting 1650 ml (6x) of water on pressure cooker Still had to throw out some water.
Density dry raw: 216 g/250 ml = 432 g / 500 ml = 500 g / 580 ml = 864 g/L
500 g dry expands to in water after 12 hours: 1200 ml
Therefore 500 g dry = 864 / 2 L = 432 ml expands about 3x.
Therefore, to the maximum 2.5L of the cooker with 8x dry volume water from this recipe I can use:
2500 = volume expanded bean + volume water = 3 volume dry bean + 8 volume dry bean = 11 volume dry bean
and so:
volume dry bean = 2500/11 = 227ml
which is about 227 / 580 = 40% of the 500 g bag.
After first try, I found that 8x volume of water is way, way too much. Going to try 6x next time.
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Ciro Santilli's given name Updated 2025-07-16
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"Ciro" is "Cyrus" from Cyrus the Great in both Portuguese and Italian (although with very different pronunciations), thus doubly appropriate given that Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil, and has Italian ancestry.
After he conquered Babylon in 539 BC from the hands Neo-Babylonian Empire, Cyrus the Great did a great service to the Hebrews by allowing war prisoners that were held in Babylon to back to their home Judea, thus terminating the Babylonian captivity. These Jews were imprisoned because they had previously fought a war or revolted against the Neo-Babylonian Empire and lost. As Wikipedia puts it:
According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity.
He is therefore viewed extremely positively in the good old book. Ciro was quite happy about this name choice by his father, given the human rights connotations of the figure and Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
Particularly fun things related to modern Cyrus are:
Because it belongs to some relatively obscure character of the Bible, the name it has been mostly passed on by writing to every single Christian country, and every single language came up with different way of saying it, because the only place they would possibly hear that name said out loud would be in Church!
As of 2020, the country in which the name is most popular in undoubtedly Italy. In Brazil, it is definitely not common, but also not completely unheard of either, e.g. Ciro Gomes is a notable Brazilian politician.
And Ciro responds to all the versions of the name that he knows of. These include:
  • English:
    • direct English reading of "Ciro" as "See Roll". Not the most cultured, but its what things tend to converge to, especially in highly international environments where it would be impossible to try and learn the origin of everyone's name! So it's fine. Slightly too close to "zero" for comfort.
    • Cyrus, the actual English version of the name. Ciro was so happy when his elderly English neighbour who went to Eton College, upon recognizing what Ciro was, immediately said: "Ah, Cyrus the Great!" He was the cutest, and he had some culture. Many/most English speaking people can't or won't be very sure about the spelling, but the sound of the name has a distinctly exotic feel to it, and the sounds are immediately recognized without sound ambiguity (unlike Ciro vs Zero).
  • French:
    • direct French reading of "Ciro" as "See Rho" with accent on Rho. This sounds exactly like "Sirop", i.e. Syrup in French, which can be good or bad depending on how you look at it.
    • Cyrus, the actual version of the name in French. Similar remarks to those of English apply.
  • Portuguese: "See Ru" with accent on See, and rolling r, and very weak "u". Some people might have some doubt of how to spell it and will ask for confirmation if needed, though many/most will get it right. Not particularly exotic like it is for English speakers.
  • Italian: "Chee Ro" with accent on Chee and rolling r. Widely understood and correctly spelled, more than in any other language. Not exotic at all, could be any random dude from Naples.
  • German: Kyrus. Because Cyrus the Great is known Kyrus II. (Cyrus the Second, his grandfather was also called Cyrus), Ciro once joked to a German friend that he should call him Kyrus III! He liked that.
and glad to add any new ones as they come.
  • Persian (spoken in 2020s Iran): something like Kurush. Likely the closest sound one to the original, though not sure how certain we can be of this.
He is actually quite happy when people use the name in their own language, because that means they understand the origin of the name.
Some Ciro's of interest:
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BQP Updated 2025-07-16
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Heck, we know nothing about this class yet related to non quantum classes!
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Brady Haran Updated 2025-07-16
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Ciro Santilli Updated 2025-07-16
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Quick facts:
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
Figure 1.
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source.
Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a monster of the week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
Figure 2.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
.
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Figure 3.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
.
Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openness, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many different people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Figure 4.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
Figure 5.
Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared.
More info at: Figure "Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared".
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Brain-computer interfaces could be the next big thing Updated 2025-07-16
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This is one of the deep tech bets that Ciro Santilli would put his money in as of 2020.
How hard could it be? You just have to learn the encoding of the neural spine/eyes/ear, add an invasive device that multiplexes it, and then the benefits could be mind blowing.
Interestingly and obviously, the initial advances in the area are happening for people that have hearing or vision difficulties. Since they already have a deficient sense, you don't lose that much by a failed attempt.
Hearing is likely to be the first since it feels the simplest. Ciro heard there are even already clinical applications there. TODO source.
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Photon Updated 2025-07-16
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Initially light was though of as a wave because it experienced interference as shown by experiments such as:
But then, some key experiments also start suggesting that light is made up of discrete packets:
and in the understanding of the 2020 Standard Model the photon is one of the elementary particles.
This duality is fully described mathematically by quantum electrodynamics, where the photon is modelled as a quantized excitation of the photon field.
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1914 Nobel Prize in Physics Updated 2025-07-16
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Not only did this open the way for X-ray crystallography, it more fundamentally clarified the nature of X-rays as being electromagnetic radiation, and helped further establish the atomic theory.
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Crank (person) Updated 2025-07-16
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Crate image with given text in ImageMagick Updated 2025-07-16
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Digits 0 to 9, white on black background:
for i in `seq 0 9`; do convert -size 512x512 xc:black -pointsize 500 -gravity center -fill white -draw "text 0,0 \"$i\"" $i.png; done
Bibliography:
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