Classical group Updated +Created
Guqin piece Updated +Created
Particle accelerator Updated +Created
Times Higher Education Updated +Created
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV series) Updated +Created
  • 1: Jim Prideaux captured. Some ex-colleague invites Smiley to dinner and keeps asking how incompetent people like Alleline climbed to the top of the Circus. Smiley recalled to service to meet Ricki Tarr.
  • 2: Ricki Tarr tells his story to Smiley. Peter Guillam starts stealing material from the Circus, find missing page on the communication officer list. Smiley sets up his investigation operation.
  • 3: Smiley meets Connie who tells that she was fired for suspecting Poliakov. Flashbacks show the ousting of Control and Smiley.
  • 4: Guillam steals more material from the circus. While doing that, he is called by the top officers to inquire about Ricki Tarr being in England, which they suspect because they discovered that his family has come.
  • 5: Jim Prideaux tells his story to Smiley, who cannot easily access the Circus reports about it. When he is returned to England, there was basically no debriefing, and Esterhase already knew about the Tinker Tailor codenames, presumably through Merlin.
  • 6: Smiley hears the story of yet another ousted man, who heard the Russians knew in advance about Jim Prideaux' coming. Toby Esterhase dismissed him for alcoholism.
Torus Updated +Created
Physics Updated +Created
Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.
And predicting the future is the first step towards controlling it, i.e.: engineering.
Ciro Santilli doesn't know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: OurBigBook.com, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful.
Ciro's main intellectual physics fetishes are to learn quantum electrodynamics (understanding the point of Lie groups being a subpart of that) and condensed matter physics.
Every science is Physics in disguise, but the number of objects in the real world is so large that we can't solve the real equations in practice.
Luckily, due to emergence, we can use uglier higher level approximations of the world to solve many problems, with the complex limits of applicability of those approximations.
Therefore, such higher level approximations are highly specialized, and given different names such as:
As of 2019, all known physics can be described by two theories:
Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.
Figure 1.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source. Reductionism comes to mind.
Figure 2.
Physically accurate genie by Psychomic
. Source. This sane square composition from: www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/u08dw3/nice_guy_genie/.
The eye in Ciro Santilli's website banner Updated +Created
Ciro was trying to make his face fit on the banner. But it is hard because faces are square and text is long.
Then at one point, the CSS was a bit broken and the eye stuck out just left of Ciro Santilli.
At this moment, Ciro knew what to do.
This produced a "continuous image symbol to text" effect that felt so right.
The concept, like any other, is not in itself new and has been used by others, Ciro just independently rediscovered it again:
City in Taiwan Updated +Created
Cosmic microwave background anisotropy Updated +Created
There is a slight variation in temperature of CMB across the sky of the order of 200 microKelvin. It is small to the ~2.7 K average temperature, but it can be measured.
If the initial conditions of the Big Bang and the laws of physics were perfectly symmetric, then we could expect the universe to just be one perfectly uniform boring soup.
But instead some asymetry made all the fun weird things we see today happen eventually, like galaxies and life.
And the cosmic microwave background serves as a way for us to look back in time to the early conditions of the universe, as it was set in stone as soon as the universe became transparent to this light during recombination.
Or if you want to get poetic, it is the closest we can ever get to listening to the original word of God when he setup the initial conditions of the universe.
The ansiotropies of CMB is the ultimate astronomical compass we will ever have, as it is the thing with the least proper motion.
Figure 1.
Cosmic microwave background anisotropy measured by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
. Source.
C++ library Updated +Created
Parlour game Updated +Created
Tesla (unit) Updated +Created
Transcendence (2014) Updated +Created
The premise that "we can't make AGI, but we know enough about the human brain to upload on to a computer" is flawed. Edit: after reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), Ciro Santilli was convinced otherwise. What is flawed is of course just the "extracting connectome with macroscopic probes part". A post mortem connectome extraction with microtome is much more believable. But of course they weren't going to show fake slices of Jonny Depp's brain, are they? Famous actor bodies are sacred! What a huge lost opportunity. On the other hand however, the scale of the first connectome extraction would be arguably too huge to be undertaken by a random pair of rogue researchers. The same would also likely apply to any first time human brain connectome. It would much more likely be a huge public effort, much like the Human Genome Project.
But this film does have the merit of exploring how an AGI might act to take over the AGI might act to take over the world once created, notably by creating its own physical research laboratory. Though it doesn't feel likely that it could go under the radar for 2 years given the energetic requirements of the research. Even the terrorists find it before the FBI!
I also wish they had shown the dildo (or more likely, direct stimulation!) computerized Jonny Depp used to use with his wife before he managed to re-synthesized his body. But you know, 18+ would cut too much profits. Ah, what a shame.
Video 1.
Can You Prove You're Self Aware? in the big lab scene from Transcendence (2014)
Source.
Metabolomics Updated +Created
Microplate Updated +Created
Zone of Avoidance Updated +Created

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.