GitLab  Updated 2025-07-16
See also: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
 Git tips  
git mergetool with meld or kdiff3  Updated 2025-07-16These are good free newbie GUI options:
sudo apt install meld
git mergetool --tool meld
sudo apt install kdiff3
git mergetool --tool kdiff3git-tips-2.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eux
add() (
  rm -f f
  for i in `seq 10`; do
    printf "before $i\n\n" >> f
  done
  printf "conflict 1 $1\n\n" >> f
  for i in `seq 10`; do
    printf "middle $i\n\n" >> f
  done
  printf "conflict 2 $2\n\n" >> f
  for i in `seq 10`; do
    printf "after $i\n\n" >> f
  done
  git add f
)
rm -rf git-tips-2
mkdir git-tips-2
cd git-tips-2
git init
for i in 1 2 3; do
  add $i $i
  git commit -m $i
done
add 3 4
git commit -m 4
add 5 4
git commit -m 5
git checkout HEAD~2
git checkout -b my-feature
add 3 6
git commit -m 6
add 7 6
git commit -m 7 Good targets for amateur astronomy  Updated 2025-07-16
Looking at most astronomical object through a telescope is boring because you only see a white ball or point every time. Such targets would likely only be interesting with spectroscopy analysis.
There are however some objects that you can see the structure of even with an amateur telescope, and that makes them very exciting.
Some good ones:
- The Moon, notably crater detail.
 - Saturn. Clearly visible to the naked eye, but looks like a ball. But under an amateur telescope, you can clearly see that there is a disk. Clearly discerning that the disk is a ring, i.e. seeing the gap, is a bit harder though.
 - Jupiter. Clearly visible to the naked eye, it is quite huge. The four Galilean moons, being Earth-sized, are incredibly clearly visible, tested on Celestron NexStar 4SE 25mm/9mm eyepiece. Colored gas clouds are hard though, you will likely just see it bright white. www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/comments/35xrbb/how_can_i_see_the_color_of_jupiter_with_my/
 - a double star. As mentioned at www.relativelyinteresting.com/10-astronomical-targets-new-telescope/ Albireo are incredibly separated. Also it is is easy to find manually being in a major well known constellation. It is no wonder it is not quite even known if they are gravitationally bound or not!
 - Andromeda Galaxy. This is when things start getting hard. You can see a faint cloud, but it is not super clear that it has a center.One important understanding is that it is not possible to see stars outside of the Milky Way by naked eye.It is at this point that you start to learn that pictures of faint objects require longer term exposure and averaging of the images taken. For this you need:Just looking through the scope to immediately see something is not enough.
- a digital camera attached to the scope
 - a computerized scope that slowly moves to track the point of interest
 - image processing software that does the averaging
 
Video "Andromeda Galaxy with only a Camera, Lens, & Tripod by Nebula Photos (2020)" gives a good notion of expectation adjustment. 
 Good video game to watch  Updated 2025-07-16
 Google X  Updated 2025-07-16
Wikipedia reads:so basically exactly what Ciro Santilli wants to do on OurBigBook.com. Ominous.
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
Like any closed source "failure", everything was deleted. wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Knol
 History of special relativity  Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
- Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter III "Relativity, the special theory" has a good sketch as you may imagine.
 
 History of the United States  Updated 2025-07-16
 History of Wikipedia  Updated 2025-07-16
 Hofstadter's law  Updated 2025-07-16
As "deadlines" approach, feature sets get cut down, then there are delays, and finally a feasible feature set is delivered some time after the deadline.
The only deadlines that can be met are those of tasks which have already been done but not announced.
This is of course Hofstadter's law.
 How can a chemical substance be unstable but not flammable?  Updated 2025-07-16
 How to store data in the Bitcoin blockchain  Updated 2025-07-16
There are apparently two methods:
- in the script, e.g. as in the Genesis block message
 - in output addresses
 
Specific implementations:
- eternitywall.it/ Eternity WallLaunched 2015 www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/eternity-wall-records-1150-documents-blockchain-first-year/Shutdown sometime after 2019, working archive: web.archive.org/web/20190417074034/https://eternitywall.it/ says "Sorry, the service is not properly working at the moment..." and last working message timestamped "April 16, 2019 8:02 PM GMT".
 
 How to teach and learn physics  Updated 2025-07-16
The approach many courses take to physics, specially "modern Physics" is really bad, this is how it should be taught:
- start by describing experiments that the previous best theory did not explain, see also: Section "Physics education needs more focus on understanding experiments and their history"
 - then, give the final formula for the next best theory
 - then, give all the important final implications of that formula, and how it amazingly describes the experiments. In particular this means: doing physics means calculating a number
 - then, give some mathematical intuition on the formulas, and how the main equation could have been derived
 - finally, then and only then, start deriving the outcomes of the main formula in detail
 
This is likely because at some point, experiments get more and more complicated, and so people are tempted to say "this is the truth" instead of "this is why we think this is the truth", which is much harder.
Related:
- settheory.net/learnphysics and www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MKjPYuD60I&list=PLJcTRymdlUQPwx8qU4ln83huPx-6Y3XxH from settheory.net
 - math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html by John Baez. Mentions:Ciro Santilli is trying to change that: OurBigBook.com.
This webpage doesn't have lots of links to websites. Websites just don't have the sort of in-depth material you need to learn technical subjects like advanced math and physics — at least, not yet. To learn this stuff, you need to read lots of books
 - web.archive.org/web/20210324182549/http://jakobschwichtenberg.com/one-thing/ by Jakob Schwichtenberg
 
 How to teach  Explain why the subject is beautiful  Updated 2025-07-16
And if you really can't make money from a subject, there is only one other thing people crave: beauty.
You have to give the beauty motivations upfront, before boring people to death with endless prerequisites, otherwise no one will ever want to learn it.
 PostgreSQL GIST  Updated 2025-07-16
The highly underdocumented built-in module, that supports SQL spatial index and a lot more.
Quite horrendous as it only seems to work on geometric types and not existing columns. But why.
And it uses custom operatores, where standard operators would have been just fine for points...
Minimal runnable example with points:The index creation unfortunately took 100s, so it will not scale to 1B points very well whic his a shame.
set -x
time psql -c 'drop table if exists t'
time psql -c 'create table t(p point)'
time psql -c "insert into t select (point ('(' || generate_series || ',' || generate_series || ')')) from generate_series(1, 10000000)"
time psql -c 'create index on t using gist(p)'
time psql -c "select count(*) from t where p <@ box '(1000000,1000000),(9000000,2000000)'" PostgreSQL serialization failure  Updated 2025-07-16
When using SQL REPEATABLE READ isolation level and SQL SERIALIZABLE isolation level, concurrent transactions may fail with a serialization failure, and then you might need to retry them. You server code or your ORM must always account for that.
Related questions:
- stackoverflow.com/questions/7705273/what-are-the-conditions-for-encountering-a-serialization-failure
 - stackoverflow.com/questions/59351109/error-could-not-serialize-access-due-to-concurrent-update
 - stackoverflow.com/questions/50797097/postgres-could-not-serialize-access-due-to-concurrent-update/51932824
 
 Human vs computer chess  Updated 2025-07-16
 Hydrogen line  Updated 2025-07-16
 Hypercube  Updated 2025-07-16
Convex hull of all  (Cartesian product power) D-tuples, e.g. in 3D:
( 1,  1,  1)
( 1,  1, -1)
( 1, -1,  1)
( 1, -1, -1)
(-1,  1,  1)
(-1,  1, -1)
(-1, -1,  1)
(-1, -1, -1) Hyperfine structure  Updated 2025-07-16
Small splits present in all levels due to interaction between the electron spin and the nuclear spin if it is present, i.e. the nucleus has an even number of nucleons.
As the name suggests, this energy split is very small, since the influence of the nucleus spin on the electron spin is relatively small compared to other fine structure.
The most important examples:
- hydrogen line useful in astronomy, and also the simplest possible case between 1s
 - caesium standard, which is used to define the second in the International System of Units since 1967.
 
 Kudos  Updated 2025-07-16
Ahh, Ciro Santilli was certain this was some slang neologism, but it is actually Greek! So funny. Introduced into English in the 19th century according to: www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kudo.
 There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.

