Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

Talks about rebellion of the oppressed (and bandits), and therefore has been controversial throughout the many Chinese dictatorships.

The book is based on real events surrounding 12th century rebel leader Song Jiang during the Song dynasty.

It is also interesting that Mao Zedong was apparently a fan of the novel, although he had to hide that to some extent due to the controversial nature of the material, which could be said to instigate rebellion.

The incredible popularity of the novel can also be seen by the large number of paintings of it found in the Summer Palace.

This is a good novel. It appeals to Ciro Santilli's sensibilities of rebelling against unfairness, and in particular about people who are at the margin of society (at the river margin) doing so. Tax the rich BTW.

It also has always made Ciro quite curious how such novels are not used as a way to inspire people to rebel against the Chinese Communist Party.

Full text uploads of Chinese versions:

Data that is inscribed in a blockchain as a way to perpetuate the data, rather than to follow the main intended purpose of the given blockchain, e.g. ASCII art instead of financial transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.

A catalogue for Bitcoin can be found at: Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain".

The half-life of radioactive decay, which as discovered a few years before quantum mechanics was discovered and matured, was a major mystery. Why do some nuclei fission in apparently random fashion, while others don't? How is the state of different nuclei different from one another? This is mentioned in Inward Bound by Abraham Pais (1988) Chapter 6.e Why a half-life?

The term also sees use in other areas, notably biology, where e.g. RNAs spontaneously decay as part of the cell's control system, see e.g. mentions in E. Coli Whole Cell Model by Covert Lab.

TODO

The most important ones are:

This model can work well when there is a set of commonly used libraries that some developers often use together, but such that there isn't enough maintenance work for each one individually.

So what people do is to create a group that maintains all those projects, to try and get enough money to survive from the contributions done primarily for each one individually.

Examples:

Setting: you are sending bits through a communication channel, each bit has a random probability of getting flipped, and so you use some error correction code to achieve some minimal error, at the expense of longer messages.

This theorem sets an upper bound on how efficient you can be in your encoding, for any encoding.

The next big question, which the theorem does not cover is how to construct codes that reach or approach the limit. Important such codes include:

But besides this, there is also the practical consideration of if you can encode/decode fast enough to keep up with the coded bandwidth given your hardware capabilities.

news.mit.edu/2010/gallager-codes-0121 explains how turbo codes were first reached without a very good mathematical proof behind them, but were still revolutionary in experimental performance, e.g. turbo codes were used in 3G/4G.

But this motivated researchers to find other such algorithms that they would be able to prove things about, and so they rediscovered the much earlier low-density parity-check code, which had been published in the 60's but was forgotten, partially because it was computationally expensive.

These are the key mathematical ideas to understand!!

There are actually a few formulations out there. By far the dominant one as of 2020 has been the Schrödinger picture, which contrasts notably with the Heisenberg picture.

Another well known one is the de Broglie-Bohm theory, which is deterministic, but non-local.

Because a Git commit can have more than 1 parent due to merge commits when you do:

It can even have more than 2, there's no limit. Although that is not so common (with good reason, 2 is already one too many): softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/314215/can-a-git-commit-have-more-than-2-parents/377903#377903

As mentioned by Craig Venter in 100 Greatest Discoveries by the Discovery Channel (2004-2005), the main outcomes of the project were:

Important predecessors: