Metallurgical Laboratory Updated 2025-07-16
The lab that made Chicago Pile-1, located in the University of Chicago. Metallurgical in this context basically as in "working with the metals uranium and plutonium".
Given their experience, they also designed the important X-10 Graphite Reactor and the B Reactor which were built in other locations.
Meteor (web framework) Updated 2025-07-16
The idea is cool. It really unifies front-and back end.
But Ciro Santilli feels the approach proposed by FeathersJS of being a glue between bigger third-party Front-end web frameworks like React and backend (object-relational mapping) is more promising and flexible.
Minkowski space Updated 2025-07-16
Because the Minkowski inner product product is not positive definite, the norm induced by an inner product is a norm, and the space is not a metric space strictly speaking.
Mitochondria have DNA because they need to be controlled individually Updated 2025-07-16
Argued at Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) page 212.
Basically, energy supply has to be modulated rather quickly, because we spend a lot sometimes, and very little other times.
Even not turning it off quickly enough is a problem, as it starts to generate free radicals which fuck you up.
If control came from the nucleus, it has no way to address different mitochondria. But it might be that only one of the mitochondria needs the change. If the nucleus tells all mitochondria to stop producing when only one is full, the others are going to say: "nope, I'm not full, continue producing!" and the one that need to stop will have its signal overridden by the others.
Mitochondrial protein import Updated 2025-07-16
The process that imports proteins encoded in the nuclear DNA and made in the cytosol into the mitochondria.
Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) suggests that proteins are somehow tagged with extra amino acids for this.
MNIST database Updated 2025-07-16
70,000 28x28 grayscale (1 byte per pixel) images of hand-written digits 0-9, i.e. 10 categories. 60k are considered training data, 10k are considered for test data.
This is THE "OG" computer vision dataset.
Playing with it is the de-facto computer vision hello world.
It was on this dataset that Yann LeCun made great progress with the LeNet model. Running LeNet on MNIST has to be the most classic computer vision thing ever. See e.g. activatedgeek/LeNet-5 for a minimal and modern PyTorch educational implementation.
But it is important to note that as of the 2010's, the benchmark had become too easy for many applications. It is perhaps fair to say that the next big dataset revolution of the same importance was with ImageNet.
The dataset could be downloaded from yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/ but as of March 2025 it was down and seems to have broken from time to time randomly, so Wayback Machine to the rescue:but doing so is kind of pointless as both files use some crazy single-file custom binary format to store all images and labels. OMG!
wget \
https://web.archive.org/web/20120828222752/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/train-images-idx3-ubyte.gz \
https://web.archive.org/web/20120828182504/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/train-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz \
https://web.archive.org/web/20240323235739/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/t10k-images-idx3-ubyte.gz \
https://web.archive.org/web/20240328174015/http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/mnist/t10k-labels-idx1-ubyte.gz
OK-ish data explorer: knowyourdata-tfds.withgoogle.com/#tab=STATS&dataset=mnist
Momentum operator Updated 2025-07-16
In three dimensions In position representation, we define it by using the gradient, and so we see that
Monotreme Updated 2025-07-16
Moon Updated 2025-07-16
Most important superconductor material Updated 2025-07-16
As of 2023 the most important ones economicaly were:The main application is magnetic resonance imaging. Both of these are have to be Liquid helium, i.e. they are not "high-temperature superconductor" which is a pain. One big strength they have is that they are metallic, and therefore can made into wires, which is crucial to be able to make electromagnetic coils out of them.
- Nb-Ti: the most widely used one. Used e.g. to create the magnetic fields of the Large Hadron Collider Up to 15 T.
- Nb-Sn: more expensive than Nb-Ti, but can reach up to 30 T.
Music teenager Ciro Santilli liked to listen to Updated 2025-07-16
Lower teens, before discovering more hardcore stuff that is more genial and adult-venerable:So a base mix of what you migth expect from a regular male teenager born in 1989 Brazil.
The following are also adult venerable though :-)
And no, the opening sentence "Some of those that work forces" is not understandable: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/262444/what-is-the-meaning-of-the-phrase-that-work-forces-in-rage-against-the-machine
MySQL Updated 2025-07-16
Login without password: askubuntu.com/questions/915585/how-to-login-mysql-shell-when-mysql-have-no-passwordworks on Ubuntu 20.10.
sudo mysqlCreate user for further logins without
sudo askubuntu.com/questions/915585/how-to-login-mysql-shell-when-mysql-have-no-password/1325689#1325689:sudo mysql -e "CREATE USER $USER"Run command from CLI stackoverflow.com/questions/1602904/how-do-you-run-a-single-query-through-mysql-from-the-command-line
mysql -e 'SHOW DATABASES'Create test user with password:and login as that user:Login with password given on the command line:The
sudo mysql -e 'CREATE USER user0 IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY "a"'
sudo mysql -e 'GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON database_name.* TO "user0"'mysql -u user0 -pmysql -u user0 -pmypasswordIDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password part is to overcome "Client does not support authentication protocol requested by server" when connecting from Node.js.List users:
sudo mysql -e 'SELECT * FROM mysql.user'View permissions for each user on each DB: serverfault.com/questions/263868/how-to-know-all-the-users-that-can-access-a-database-mysql
sudo mysql -e 'SELECT * FROM mysql.db'List databases:
sudo mysql -e 'SHOW DATABASES'Create database:
sudo mysql -e 'CREATE DATABASE mydb0'Destroy database:
sudo mysql -e 'DROP DATABASE mydb0' Neil Fernandez Updated 2025-07-16
Article likely written by him: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/home-schooling-register-families
“Especially my father. He was doing most of it and he is a savoury, strong character. He has strong beliefs about the world and in himself, and he was helping me a lot, even when I was at university as an undergraduate.”An only child, Arran was born in 1995 in Glasgow, where his parents were studying at the time. His father has Spanish lineage, having a great grandfather who was a sailor who moved from Spain to St Vincent in the Carribean. A son later left the islands for the UK where he married an English woman. Arran’s mother is Norwegian.
One of the articles says his father has a PhD. TODO where did he work? What's his PhD on? Photo: www.topfoto.co.uk/asset/1357880/
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-everyday-genius-pxsq5c50kt9:
Network switch Updated 2025-07-16
A switch is a box with a bunch of Ethernet wires coming into it:Except that it doesn't have to be Ethernet, e.g. it would also be a Wi-Fi.
+--------------------+
| +-+ +-+ +-+ +-+ |
| |1| |2| |3| |4| |
| +-+ +-+ +-+ +-+ |
+--------------------+What the switch does is:
After the destination is found, a confirmation is somehow sent back to the switch, which then learns which wire to send each MAC address to.
A switch is a bit like a router but it is a bit dumber/operates at a lower level: it basically operates only on MAC addresses, not on IP addresses.
The Internet service provider boxes most people have at home combines a switch for the local network and a router for the ISP communication.
Never trust an experiment that is not supported by a good theory Updated 2025-07-16
Not the usual bullshit you were expecting from the philosophy of Science, right?
Some notable quoters:
- Jacques Monod has the exact quote as presented here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22042272/, though presumably it was in French, TODO find the French version
- youtu.be/AYC5lE0b8os?t=41 A Computational Whole-Cell Model Predicts Genotype From Phenotype- Markus Covert by "Calit2ube" (2013), see also: Section "Whole cell simulation"
- the book Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions a few incidents of this involving Feynman, see e.g. chapter "New Particles, New Language" where he and fellow theorist Hans Bethe immediately spot problems with experimentalists' data in suspicious results
Nick Leeson Updated 2025-07-16
Good documentary about it: Nick Leeson and the Fall of the House of Barings by Adam Curtis (1996).
One is reminded of Annie Dookhan.
One-form Updated 2025-07-16
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tq7sb3toTww&list=PLxBAVPVHJPcrNrcEBKbqC_ykiVqfxZgNl&index=19 mentions that it is a bit like a dot product but for a tangent vector to a manifold: it measures how much that vector derives along a given direction.
One page to rule them all Updated 2025-07-16
It is true that one image is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately it is also true that one image takes up at least as much bytes as a thousand words!
Having one single page to rule them all is of course the ideal setup for a website, as you can Ctrl + F one ToC and quickly find what you want.
And, with Linux Kernel Module Cheat Ciro noticed that it is very hard to write so much intelligent prose that becomes larger than reasonable to load on a single webpage.
He then started using this technique for everything he writes, including this page and Chinese government.
However, if there are too many images on the page, the loading of the last images would take forever in case users want to view the last sections.
There are two solutions to that:
- be traditional and create separate web pages
- be bold and load images as they appear on the viewport: stackoverflow.com/questions/2321907/how-do-you-make-images-load-only-when-they-are-in-the-viewport/57389607#57389607Edit: OK, it was standardized with
loading=lazy, without need JavaScript!Now the last awesome thing would be a method that loads first images in viewport, then those below, and then those above, that would be the ultimate solution.This question comes close: stackoverflow.com/questions/7906348/change-loading-order-of-images-already-on-page
Ciro is still deciding between those two. The traditional approach works for sure but loses the one page to rule them all benefits.
The innovative approach will work for interactive viewing, but archive.org will fail to load the images for example, and there may be other unforseen consequences.
Wikimedia Commons is awesome and automatically converts and serves smaller versions of images, so always choose the smallest images size needed by the output document. Readers can then find the higher resolution versions by following the page source.
This also comes to mind: motherfuckingwebsite.com
zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/ from zettelkasten:
How many Zettelkästen should I have? The answer is, most likely, only one for the duration of your life. But there are exceptions to this rule.
Onion service Updated 2025-07-16
This is a way to host a server that actually hide the IP of the server from the client, just like Tor hides the IP of the client from the server. Amazing tecnology!
This is why it enables hosting illegal things like the Silk Road: law enforcement is not able find where the server is hosted, and take it down or identify the owner.
Online forums that lock threads after some time Updated 2025-07-16
And of course, 4chan just takes that to a whole new level, usually closing on the same day, and then getting deleted within a week. Why would anyone contribute non-illegal content to that king of system?!
Ridiculous, so when new information comes out, we just duplicate all the old comments on a new thread again?
Remember, Ciro Santilli is the Necromancer God.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.