Circa 2023, the feed is an unbearable list of stupid suggestions, never-ending idiotic memes, and you just end up missing posts you actually care about from people you actually follow.
At the time of the experiment, Illumina equipment was cheaper per base pair and dominates the human genome sequencing market, but it required a much higher initial investment for the equipment (TODO how much).
The reusable Nanopore device costs just about 500 dollars, and about 500 dollars (50 unit volume) for the single usage flow cell which can decode up to 30 billion base pairs, which is about 10 human genomes 1x! Note that 1x is basically useless for one of the most important of all applications of sequencing: detection of single-nucleotide polymorphisms, since the error rate would be too high to base clinical decisions on.
Compare that to Illumina which is currently doing about an 1000 dollar human genome at 30x, and a bit less errors per base pair (TODO how much).
Other advantages of the MinION over Illumina which didn't really matter to this particular experiment are:
Human game used for AI training Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about games initially designed for humans, but which ended up being used in AI development as well, e.g.:
Hund's rules Updated 2025-07-16
Allow us to determine with good approximation in a multi-electron atom which electron configuration have more energy. It is a bit like the Aufbau principle, but at a finer resolution.
Note that this is not trivial since there is no explicit solution to the Schrödinger equation for multi-electron atoms like there is for hydrogen.
For example, consider carbon which has electron configuration 1s2 2s2 2p2.
If we were to populate the 3 p-orbitals with two electrons with spins either up or down, which has more energy? E.g. of the following two:
m_L -1  0  1
    u_ u_ __
    u_ __ u_
    __ ud __
HyperCard Updated 2025-07-16
This was the pre-Internet precursor of wikis. This program was likely venerable, shame it predates Ciro Santilli's era.
But the thing was much more bloated it seems, and also included visual programming elements, and WYSISYG UI creation.
Video 1.
Hypercard by The Computer Chronicles (1987)
Source.
Oxford physics course handbook Updated 2025-07-16
The normal navigation to them was paywalled, but the static files are served without login checks if you know their URL. One way to go about it is to search by prefix on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/*/https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/contentblock/2011/06/03/*
The last handbooks we can find are 2020/2021, they might have move to a new more properly paywalled location after that year.
Pageviews Analysis Updated 2025-07-16
Cool tool that allows you to graphically visualize page view counts of specific pages. It offers somewhat similar insights to Google Trends.
The homepage shows views of selected pages, e.g. when Google had their 25th birthday: pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2023-09-11&end=2023-10-01&pages=Cat|Dog|Larry_Page Larry Page briefly beat "Cat" and "Dog".
/topviews shows the most viewed pages for a given month: pageviews.wmcloud.org/topviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&date=2023-08&excludes= It is extremelly epic that XXX: Return of Xander Cage, a 2017 film, is on the top ten of the August 2023 month. The page was around 8th place on a Google search for "xxx": archive.ph/wip/giRY8 at the time. XXXX (beer) was also on the top 20, followed by Sex on 21.
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).
Illumina Updated 2025-07-16
The by far dominating DNA sequencing company of the late 2000's and 2010's due to having the smallest cost per base pair.
Illumina actually bought their 2010's dominating technology from a Cambridge company called Solexa.
To understand how Illumina's technology works basically, watch this video: Video 1. "Illumina Sequencing by Synthesis by Illumina (2016)".
Video 1.
Illumina Sequencing by Synthesis by Illumina (2016)
Source.
The key innovation of this method is the Bridge amplification step, which produces a large amount of identical DNA strands.
ImageMagick Updated 2025-07-16
Crop 20 pixels from the bottom of the image:
convert image.png -gravity East -chop 20x0 result.png
Parasites tend to have smaller DNAs Updated 2025-07-16
If you live in the relatively food abundant environment of another cell, then you don't have to be able to digest every single food source in existence, of defend against a wide range of predators.
And likely you also want to be as small as possible to evade the host's immune system.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) section "Gene loss as an evolutionary trajectory" puts it well:
One of the most extreme examples of gene loss is Rickettsia prowazekii, the cause of typhus. [...] Over evolutionary time Rickettsia has lost most of its genes, and now has a mere  protein-coding genes left. [...] Rickettsia is a tiny bacterium, almost as small as a virus, which lives as a parasite inside other cells. It is so well adapted to this lifestyle that it can no longer survive outside its host cells. [...] It was able to lose most of its genes in this way simply because they were not needed: life inside other cells, if you can survive there at all, is a spoonfed existence.
and also section "How to lose the cell wall without dying" page 184 has some related mentions:
While many types of bacteria do lose their cell wall during parts of their life cycle only two groups of prokaryotes have succeeded in losing their cell walls permanently, yet lived to tell the tale. It's interesting to consider the extenuating circumstances that permitted them to do so.
[...]
One group, the Mycoplasma, comprises mostly parasites, many of which live inside other cells. Mycoplasma cells are tiny, with very small genomes. M. genitalium, discovered in 1981, has the smallest known genome of any bacterial cell, encoding fewer than 500 genes. M. genitalium, discovered in 1981, has the smallest known genome of any bacterial cell, encoding fewer than 500 genes. [...] Like Rickettsia, Mycoplasma have lost virtually all the genes required for making nucleotides, amino acids, and so forth.
Paris Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli lived in Paris for a few years between 2013 and 2016, and he can confirm the uncontroversial fact that "Paris is Magic".
Not just one type of magic though. Every quarter in Paris has its own unique personality that sets it apart and gives it a different mood.
Ciro knows Paris not from its historical facts, but from the raw feeling of endless walks through its streets in different times of the year. Ciro is a walker.
Maybe one day Ciro will expand this section to try and convey into words his feelings of love for the city, but maybe the effort would be pointless. Maybe such feelings can only be felt by other free-roaming walker souls living in the city, and that is both beautiful and a shame.
Ciro had written the following in the past before he lived in smaller cities, started cycling and joined the Street reclamation movement he thought:
Paris is a friendly city to walkers, as it is not too large, and does not have too many extremely busy roads, you can basically cross all of it on foot.
Perhaps compared to São Paulo City, which is what he knew before that was true. But no, his standards have improved since. Paris has way too many cars. The noise of internal combustion engine vehicles is extremely annoying. And because there are too many personal vehicles, cars have to horn a lot to fight for space. Fuck cars. Paris has been making a big cycling push in the early 2020's, and that is great. But it is still far, far from good.
Particle creation and annihilation Updated 2025-07-16
Predicted by the Dirac equation.
We've likely known since forever that photons are created: just turn on a light and see gazillion of them come out!
Photon creation is easy because photons are massless, so there is not minimum energy to create them.
The creation of other particles is much rarer however, and took longer to be discovered, one notable milestone being the discovery of the positron.
In the case of the electron, we need to start with at least enough energy for the mass of the electron positron pair. This requires a photon with wavelength in the picometer range, which is not common in the thermal radiation of daily life.

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