These often come pre-soldered on devboards, e.g. and allow for easy access to GPIO pins. E.g. they're present on the Raspberry Pi 2.
Why would someone ever sell a devboard without them pre-soldered!
Underside of a Raspberry Pi 2
. Source. At the top of this image we can clearly see how the usually pre-soldered pin header connectors go through the PCB and are soldered on both sides.The steps are sorted in roughly chronological order. The project might fail at any point, and some steps may be carried in parallel:
- make OurBigBook Markup good enough, to the point that it allows to create a static version of the website, which is used to prototype certain ideas, and for Ciro to start writing test content.Status March 2022: reached a point that it is already highly usable. The following website may continue.
- create a basic implementation of the website, without advanced features like PageRank sorting and WYSIWYG. This is not much more than a blog with some extra metadata, so it is definitely achievable with constrained resources.
- find a university teacher would would like to try it out.Ciro would like to volunteer to work for free for this teacher and students to help the students learn.He would like act like a "super student" who has a lot of free time and motivation.Ciro would start by mapping the headers of the lecture notes onto the website, and then slowly adding content as he feels the need to improve certain explanations.Finding teachers willing to allow this will be a major roadblock: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA.If such enlightened teacher is found, it will allow for the initial validation of the website, to decide what kind of tweaking the idea might need, and start uploading quality technical content to the site.
- once some level of validation as been done, Ciro will start looking for charitable charitable grant opportunities more aggressively
- if things seem to be working, start adding more advance features: PageRank-like ranking sorting and WYSIWYG editingThe recommendation algorithms notably is left for a second stage because it needs real world data to be tested. And at the beginning, before Eternal September kicks in, there would be few posts written by well educated university students, so a simple sort by upvote would likely be good enough.
Ciro decided to start with a decent markup language with a decent implementation: OurBigBook Markup. Once that gets reasonable, he will move on to another attempt at the website itself.
The project description was originally at: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website but being migrated here. The original working project name was "Write free books to get famous website", until Ciro decided to settle for
OurBigBook.com and fixed the domain name.Ciro is looking for:
- university teachers who might be interested in trying it out as described at Section "Action plan", especially those who already use open licenses for their lecture notes
- funding possibilities for this project, including donations as mentioned at Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com" and contracts
The initial incentive for the creators is to make them famous and allow them to get more fulfilling jobs more easily, although Ciro also wants to add money transfer mechanisms to it later on.
We can't rely on teachers writing materials, because they simply don't have enough incentive: publication count is all that matters to their careers. The students however, are desperate to prove themselves to the world, and becoming famous for amazing educational content is something that some of them might want to spend their times on, besides grinding for useless grade.
There is value in tutorials written by early pioneers of the field Updated 2025-04-05 +Created 1970-01-01
Everyone is beginner when the field is new, and there is value in tutorials written by beginners.
For example, Ciro Santilli felt it shocking how direct and satisfying Richard Feynman's scientific vulgarization of quantum electrodynamics were, e.g. at: Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979), and that if he had just assumed minimal knowledge of mathematics, he was about to give a full satisfactory picture in just a few hours.
Other supporters of this:
- Ron Maimon: the same also applies to early original papers of the field, not just tutorials
- Dean Kamen: quick mention at: fi.edu/en/awards/laureates/dean-kamen, but a better longer mention on Dreamer (2020), nearby section from trailer: youtu.be/Cj2VKVJKf1I?t=16
Quantum superposition is really weird because it is fundamentally different than "either definite state but I don't know which", because the superposition state leads to different measurements than the non-superposition state.
Examples:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt8gVXDsh7Q "Interference in quantum mechanics" by Looking Glass Universe (2015) shows how a left-right spin measurement has a defined value for a superposed half up half down state, but not for a pure up state.TODO can this be conducted? As mentioned in the video, this is closely linked to the fact that you can describe the wave function in multiple different bases (up/down or left/right), which is also at the root of the uncertainty principle.
- Video "Quantum Mechanics 9b - Photon Spin and Schrodinger's Cat II by ViaScience (2013)" gives a similar photon version
- it seems that the single particle double slit experiment can also be thought of as in terms of a superposition of "the particle goes through the right" and "the particle goes through the right", although it is a bit harder to thing about as it is not a discrete process
~8GB,
lsblk reports 7796176 * 1KB = 7983284224 bytes.We got a handful of those from École Polytechnique at the end of studies I think.
They are shaped like bicornes, which is super cool, but also super impractical!
Markings: "AX ÉCOLE POLYTECHNIQUE PROMOTION X2009"
20.04
gnome-disks program reports it as: "SMI USB DISK".From Ubuntu 20.04 on an ext4 formatted one:With Linux Unified Key Setup + ext4 the results are similar, maybe hdparam bypasses it?
/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 28656 MB in 1.99 seconds = 14421.31 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Timing buffered disk reads: 42 MB in 3.03 seconds = 13.88 MB/sec/dev/sdb:
Timing cached reads: 28326 MB in 1.99 seconds = 14251.55 MB/sec
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0a 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Timing buffered disk reads: 38 MB in 3.11 seconds = 12.23 MB/secgnome-disks LUKS + ext4 benchmark with default params also gives about 14 MB/s.See form.
Analogous to a linear form, a multilinear form is a Multilinear map where the image is the underlying field of the vector space, e.g. .
One of the main children cartoons Ciro Santilli liked to watch. Part of the Pokemon Mania of the 90s of course.
Ciro could not understand why Nintendo won't make a proper 3D MMORPG Pokemon with actually 3D Pokemon roaming the land, which is obviously what everyone wants. There are even fan games getting there!until this explaiend it beautifully Video 1. "The Downfall Of Mainline Pokemon Games by GONZ media (2020)":
- pokemon-mmo-3d.com Interesting concept here, where when you deploy a Pokemon, you start controlling the Pokemon rather than the main character
- www.quora.com/Why-won-t-Nintendo-make-an-open-world-3D-Pokémon-RPG/answer/Ciro-Santilli
- Pokemon became an industrialized yearly game spitting machine, and therefore any new feature is just extra risk
- Pokemon was kept mostly as a handheld exclusive to sell handlhelds, with a few early exceptions such as Pokemon Snap
A weapons-grade ring of electrorefined plutonium, typical of the rings refined at Los Alamos and sent to Rocky Flats for fabrication
. Source. The ring has a purity of 99.96%, weighs 5.3 kg, and is approx 11 cm in diameter. It is enough plutonium for one bomb core. Which city shall we blow up today?
Ciro Santilli is mildly obsessed by nuclear reactions, because they are so quirky. How can a little ball destroy a city? How can putting too much of it together produce criticality and kill people like in the Slotin accident or the Tokaimura criticality accident. It is mind blowing really.
More fun nuclear stuff to watch:
- Dr. Strangelove (1964)
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)
- The World Of Enrico Fermi by Harvard Project Physics (1970)
- Fat Man and Little Boy (1987) shows a possibly reasonably realistic of the history of the development of the Trinity
The Ultimate Guide to Nuclear Weapons by hypohystericalhistory (2022)
Source. Good overall summary. Some interesting points:- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=2946 talks about the difference between tactical and strategic nuclear weapons
- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=3291 mentions variable yield devices, this is the main new thing Ciro Santilli learned from this video
- youtu.be/8uIPQBOCJ64?t=3416 discusses if a strategic nuclear weapon usage would inevitably lead to tactical nuclear weapon escalation. It then mentions one case in which a possibly comparable escalation didn't happen: the abstinence of using chemical weapon during World War II.
Once upon a time, when Ciro worked at a company, one day the company decided to give everyone a 20% raise.
The likely reason was that Apple was coming to town, and was sucking the fuck out of the company's talent.
Nothing ever drove it so clearly into Ciro's heart the obvious fact that even for skilled jobs, companies don't pay you what you're worth. They pay you as little as possible so you won't quit to join someone else. It is pure market forces in play.
The annoying thing is that people are highly non-fungible, so much like painting auctions, you can only estimate your price by putting yourself on auction and seeing what people will pay for you, i.e. interviewing for new jobs.
Another point is that people have all sorts of stupid restrictions such as not wanting to work on certain areas for moral reasons, or not wanting to move away from a certain area they like. Companies will of course readily exploit such weakness to be able to pay less. Silly non-rational beings.
Atoms exist and last for a long time, while in classical electromagnetic theory punctual orbiting electrons should emit radiation quickly and fall into the nucleus: physics.stackexchange.com/questions/20003/why-dont-electrons-crash-into-the-nuclei-they-orbit
In other sections:
- black-body radiation experiment
- Einstein solid experiments, which are analogous to black body radiation experiments
- emission spectrum
- electron diffraction experiments such as:
Bibliography:
- web.mit.edu/course/5/5.73/oldwww/Fall04/notes/Experimental_Evidence_for_Quantum_Mechanics.pdf Experimental Evidence for Quantum Mechanics
Social media feed that forces you to see posts by non-followed Updated 2025-04-05 +Created 1970-01-01
During the early 2020s, many of the idiotic social media platforms started adding a non optional "feature" of suggesting feed posts by people you don't follow:
It must have been some A/B testing overload that made that decision to try and make things more addictive for everyone. Or perhaps as a way to drive revenue with people paying to cheat the algorithm and boost their posts.
European Union we need you.
OK, can someone please just stop the philosophy and give numerical predictions of how entropy helps you predict the future?
The original notion of entropy, and the first one you should study, is the Clausius entropy.
For entropy in chemistry see: entropy of a chemical reaction.
The Biggest Ideas in the Universe | 20. Entropy and Information by Sean Carroll (2020)
Source. In usual Sean Carroll fashion, it glosses over the subject. This one might be worth watching. It mentions 4 possible definitions of entropy: Boltzmann, Gibbs, Shannon (information theory) and John von Neumann (quantum mechanics).- www.quantamagazine.org/what-is-entropy-a-measure-of-just-how-little-we-really-know-20241213/ What Is Entropy? A Measure of Just How Little We Really Know. on Quanta Magazine attempts to make the point that entropy is observer dependant. TODO details on that.
Set of all decision problems solvable by a Turing machine, i.e. that decide if a string belongs to a recursive language.
Converts RNA to DNA, i.e. the inverse of transcription. Found in viruses such as Retrovirus, which includes e.g. HIV.
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