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.
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.
Particle physics Updated 2025-07-16
Currently an informal name for the Standard Model
Chronological outline of the key theories:
ImageNet1k download Updated 2025-07-16
To download from Kaggle, create an API token on kaggle.com, which downloads a kaggle.json file then:
mkdir -p ~/.kaggle
mv ~/down/kaggle.json ~/.kaggle
python3 -m pip install kaggle
kaggle competitions download -c imagenet-object-localization-challenge
The download speed is wildly server/limited and take A LOT of hours. Also, the tool does not seem able to pick up where you stopped last time.
Another download location appears to be: huggingface.co/datasets/imagenet-1k on Hugging Face, but you have to login due to their license terms. Once you login you have a very basic data explorer available: huggingface.co/datasets/imagenet-1k/viewer/default/train.
Impact factor Updated 2025-07-16
This metric is so dumb! It only helps maintain existing closed journals closed! Why not just do a PageRank on the articles themselve instead? Like the h-index does for authors? That would make so much more sense!
Then a specific metric is involved, sometimes we want to automatically add it to products.
E.g., in a context considering the common Minkowski inner product matrix where the 4x4 matrix and is a vector in
which leads to the change of sign of some terms.
Implosion-type fission weapon Updated 2025-07-16
Implosion-type fission weapons are more complicated than gun-type fission weapon because you have to precisely coordinate the detonation of a bunch of explosives.
Indian classical music Updated 2025-07-16
This was Ciro Santilli's main study/work music for several years around 2020. Tabla rules.
Infinity (1996 film) Updated 2025-07-16
Good film, it feels quite realistic.
It is a shame that they tried to include some particularly interesting stories but didn't have the time to develop them, e.g. Feynman explaining to the high school interns what they were actually doing. These are referred to only in passing, and likely won't mean anything to someone who hasn't read the book.
The film settings are particularly good, and give what feels like an authentic view of the times. Particularly memorable are the Indian caves shown the film. TODO name? Possibly Puye Cliff Dwellings. Puye apparently appears prominently up on another film about Los Alamos: The Atomic city (1952). It is relatively close to Los Alamos, about 30 km away.
The title is presumably a reference to infinities in quantum field theory? Or just to the infinity of love etc.? But anyways, the infinities in quantum field theory theory come to mind if you are into this kind of stuff and is sad because that work started after the war.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/46/Infinity_film_poster.jpg
Video 1.
Infinity Trailer (1996)
Source.
Inflation Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
One Million Dollars scene from Austin Powers
. Source.
Video 2.
100 Billion Dollars scene from Austin Powers
. Source.
Injective function Updated 2025-07-16
Mnemonic: in means into. So we are going into a codomain that is large enough so that we can have a different image for every input.
Innovate UK Updated 2025-07-16
In-order depth-first search Updated 2025-07-16
This is the order in which a binary search tree should be traversed for ordered output, i.e.:
This ordering makes sense for binary trees and not k-ary trees in general because if there are more than two nodes it is not clear what the top node should go in the middle of.
This is unlike pre-order depth-first search and post-order depth-first search which generalize obviously to general trees.
Pauli exclusion principle Updated 2025-07-16
Initially a phenomenological guess to explain the periodic table. Later it was apparently proven properly with the spin-statistics theorem, physics.stackexchange.com/questions/360140/theoretical-proof-of-paulis-exclusion-principle.
And it was understood more and more that basically this is what prevents solids from collapsing into a single nucleus, not electrical repulsion: electron degeneracy pressure!
Bibliography:
Video 1.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 17. Matter by Sean Carroll (2020)
Source.

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