Computable number Updated +Created
There are only boring exampes of taking an uncomputable language and converting it into a number?
Computer manufacturer Updated +Created
This section is about companies that integrate parts and software from various other companies to make up fully working computer systems.
Computer science course of the University of Oxford Updated +Created
Course lists: www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/ True to form, courses appear to have identifiers, e.g. qi for the Quantum Information course of the University of Oxford rather than more arbitrary A1/A2/A3, B1/B2/B3, naming convention used by the Mathematics course of the University of Oxford and the Physics course of the University of Oxford, and URLs can either have years or not:
The "course materials" section of each course leads to courses.cs.ox.ac.uk/ which is paywalled by IP (accessible via Eduroam): TODO which system does it use? Some courses place their materials directly on "www.cs.ox.ac.uk", and when that is the case they are publicly accessible. So it is very much hit and miss. E.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/quantum/index.html from Quantum Processes and Computation course of the University of Oxford has the assignments such as www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/aleks.kissinger/courses/qpc2022/assignment1.pdf publicly visible, but e.g. www.cs.ox.ac.uk/teaching/courses/2022-2023/modelsofcomputation/ has nothing.
Handbook:
Computer science course of the University of Oxford variant Updated +Created
Condenser microphone Updated +Created
Dilbert Updated +Created
Dipole antenna Updated +Created
Video 1.
Radio Wave Properties: Electric and Magnetic Dipole Antennae by Harvard Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations (2020)
Source. The dude lights bulbs on an antenna made of a single piece of copper, powered with EM radiation. Amazing.
Semidirect product Updated +Created
As per en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semidirect_product&oldid=1040813965#Properties, unlike the Direct product, the semidirect product of two goups is neither unique, nor does it always exist, and there is no known algorithmic way way to tell if one exists or not.
This is because reaching the "output" of the semidirect produt of two groups requires extra non-obvious information that might not exist. This is because the semi-direct product is based on the product of group subsets. So you start with two small and completely independent groups, and it is not obvious how to join them up, i.e. how to define the group operation of the product group that is compatible with that of the two smaller input groups. Contrast this with the Direct product, where the composition is simple: just use the group operation of each group on either side.
Product of group subsets
So in other words, it is not a function like the Direct product. The semidiret product is therefore more like a property of three groups.
The semidirect product is more general than the direct product of groups when thinking about the group extension problem, because with the direct product of groups, both subgroups of the larger group are necessarily also normal (trivial projection group homomorphism on either side), while for the semidirect product, only one of them does.
Conversely, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Semidirect_product&oldid=1040813965 explains that if , and besides the implied requirement that N is normal, H is also normal, then .
Smallest example: where is a dihedral group and are cyclic groups. (the rotation) is a normal subgroup of , but (the flip) is not.
Note that with the Direct product instead we get and not , i.e. as per the direct product of two cyclic groups of coprime order is another cyclic group.
TODO:
  • why does one of the groups have to be normal in the definition?
  • what is the smallest example of a non-simple group that is neither a direct nor a semi-direct product of any two other groups?
AI game by DeepMind Updated +Created
Video 2.
Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents by DeepMind (2021)
Short name: XLand. Whitepaper: www.deepmind.com/blog/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play.
Congruent matrix Updated +Created
Two symmetric matrices and are defined to be congruent if there exists an in such that:
Conjugate gradient method Updated +Created
TODO application.
TODO speedup over algorithm for general matrices.
www.studentclustercompetition.us/ comments:
The HPCG benchmark uses a preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm to measure the performance of HPC platforms with respect to frequently observed but challenging patterns of computing, communication, and memory access. While HPL provides an optimistic performance target for applications, HPCG can be considered as a lower bound on performance. Many of the top 500 supercomputers also provide their HPCG performance as a reference.
Con of superconducting qubits Updated +Created
Continent Updated +Created
Continuous-variable quantum information Updated +Created
TODO synonym to analog quantum computer?
It is also possible to carry out quantum computing without qubits using processes with a continuous spectrum of measurement.
As of 2020, these approaches seem less developed/promising, but who knows.
These computers can be seen as analogous to classical non-quantum analog computers.
Taxation in the United Kingdom Updated +Created
cryptograffiti.info Updated +Created
twitter.com/cryptograffiti (marked as joined March 2014)
Bitcoin blockchain image indexer and uploader. Uses fake P2PKH address.
At some point it stopped using Bitcoin mainline and moved to Bitcoin Cash instead: www.newsbtc.com/news/bitcoin/cryptograffiti-rejects-bitcoin-core-bch-now-available-payment-method/ and therefore became useless. Existing indexes seem to have been broken as well.
Also, based on the timing of Figure "Erich Erstu", this service may be responsible for a large part of the raw JPEG images present in the blockchain from block 416527 (2016) onwards. This is also suggested by the comments at Figure "Tank Man".
A Quantitative Analysis of the Impact of Arbitrary Blockchain Content on Bitcoin gives the interesting insight that all its transactions seem to return change/fees to one or two given addresses, thus making it very easy to list all their uploads if they were consistent! So all we need are some starting points, which we have mostly due to ASCII mentions of the site on known inscriptions, all of which have a few common spent addresses at the very end:
so we just have to solve get all Bitcoin transactions from and to a given address and we are done. Blockchair shows about 800 entries as of February 2024, between 4f94f97eb156b8563a213bb292314a0bd9c95b39afc521fc5965d050daab2a78 (2014-03-02) and ac5f4ea03597b43a72fb8ab42bd5384629f87f4f4abc534f38b8c15148ccaf9f (2017-10-12): blockchair.com/bitcoin/outputs?s=time(desc)&q=recipient(1MVpQJA7FtcDrwKC6zATkZvZcxqma4JixS)
Other related transactions:
TODO understand what these are:
  • ae92dc4c31943955ad6e3e45a4eb0067f488fdd9aecca65c946460dd2a85488d
  • 3020dbd7c850bf8c19ebacf670a2830fe50999a8b2560a202af21d536760eea4
  • d65384a21cb1c327cc42416a0b1e2a78ad0296cb7a15312bdcd67ef169ecb309
  • a3e3100d2b9a86e310430945c001df97a70626220a9e151208aecbb613f1f152
  • a9c82ebc47fabd1eed7eeea7760d0a3c99288af3c3a17e396ec790fc280698a2
  • 92bfd5c0fb0f24efa6ca568c4475f44e94dfc8d0d4d5da04dfafc6261bf17f45
  • 73c22adb21b93f9220d00d2614a50350824be95b8ea966349e6f35fe5ac5537b
  • 099c0fd06d18953c886121ff143ea0a20d0baf29999f424fa1ac707a81cf4987
  • 3ad6677303fb6f700a4f2f977fe86e5324e0ddb0d3b33a649e513d7e88904e85
  • 31a2ddaf4b146e021246e1f82e28121f5c9c8729620978309004515c7e559910
  • adaae897fd286aefb64a69e88a53e9af17ee98611ea595c3c92d038f3274d723
  • d8bf48e9ad3de62c695ff34a96e340912bd62e0a0282b94da6386b837c31a30d
Early AtomSea & EMBII uploads Updated +Created
These are of course likely all made by AtomSea & EMBII themselves while developing/testing their upload system.
They are also artsy peoeple themselves, and as pointed at twitter.com/AllenVandever/status/1563964396656812034 what they were doing was basicaly non-fungible token art, which became much much more popular a few years later around 2021.
The first upload that we could find at github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/tree/3f53e152ec9bb0d070dbcb8f9249d92f89effa70#atomsea-index was tx 44e80475dc363de2c7ee17b286f8cd49eb146165a79968a62c1c2c4cf80772c9 on block 272573 (2013-12-01) but it does not show on Bitfossil: bitfossil.org/44e80475dc363de2c7ee17b286f8cd49eb146165a79968a62c1c2c4cf80772c9/. This is was due to an upload bug explained by the following entry. By looking at the ASCII data at github.com/cirosantilli/bitcoin-inscription-indexer/blob/master/data/out/0272.txt#L449 that this is meant to contain the same content as the following message: a quote from the Bhagavad Gita, so this is definitely a bugged version of the following one.
The next one is bitfossil.org/c9d1363ea517cd463950f83168ce8242ef917d99cd6518995bd1af927d335828/ on block 272577 (2013-12-02). It actually shows on bifossil and it reads:
I WONDER WHAT HISTORY WILL THINK ABOUT THESE FIRST FEW BUGS...HA HA HA. NOBODY IS PERFECT.
followed by:
He who regards
With an eye that is equal
Friends and comrades,
The foe and the kinsman,
The vile, the wicked,
The men who judge him,
And those who belong
To neither faction:
He is the greatest.
The bug message is definitely a reference to the previous non-visible bugged upload bitfossil.org/4b72a223007eab8a951d43edc171befeabc7b5dca4213770c88e09ba5b936e17/, TODO understand exactly how they fucked up. This illustrates the beauty of the blockchain very well: unlike with version control, you don't just see selected snapshots: you see actual debug logs!!!
Figure 1.
WeAreStarStuff.jpg
. Source.
The third AtomSea & EMBII upload, and the first actual image.
Message:
Photo etchin' test. #AtomSea #embii (photo by Travis Ehrich)
The image shows showingAtomSea and EMBII together, presumably photographed by this dude.
The filename is of course a reference to the quote/idea: We Are Made of Star-Stuff that was much popularized by Carl Sagan.
bitfossil.org/fac0b9a4f90414710b806fd286e020aea2404498946845ef3783f305dd4cd3a7 (2024-01-13) contains a crapped version with only AtomSea persent.
Figure 2.
HugPuddle.jpg
. Source.
The fourth AtomSea & EMBII upload, and the second image. Message:
HugPuddle Testing Apertus Disk Drive
And then finally we meet Chiharu, EMBII's partner, with her hair painted blond (she's Japanese): ILoveYouMore.jpg.
Then there's an approximation of pi as ASCII decimal fraction bitfossil.org/70fd289901bae0409f27237506c330588d917716944c6359a8711b0ad6b4ce76/ from block 273522 (2013-12-07):
3.1415926535897932384626433832795028841971693993751058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644288109756659334461284756482337867831652712019091456485669234603486104543266482133936072602491412737245870066063155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113305305488204665213841469519415116094330572703657595919530921861173819326117931051185480744623799627495673518857527248912279381830119491298336733624406566430860213949463952247371907021798609437027705392171762931767523846748184676694051320005681271452635608277857713427577896091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922796892589235420199561121290219608640344181598136297747713099605187072113499999983729780499510597317328160963185950244594553469083026425223082533446850352619311881710100031378387528865875332083814206171776691473035982534904287554687311595628638823537875937519577818577805321712268066130019278766111959092164201989
tx b8b9f50a354166c46b69ecd47a0fbd20ee78c3471d2557bf275aff1b4cf4752d (2013-12-07) contains Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. TODO find on bitfossil.org, toplevel, tx seemed like a likely toplevel, but not working: bitfossil.org/b8b9f50a354166c46b69ecd47a0fbd20ee78c3471d2557bf275aff1b4cf4752d
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrowls go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
tx 56768b30dec33bd284223d85c23087975e2360b3391d20d505aa59a5675e5379 (2013-12-13) TODO find on bitfossil.org has the cutest message:
Dear Aliens,
Hey.
Sincerely,
EMBII & AtomSeaMBII
bitfossil.org/73ca50321147bac9010bec43d63f7f76857fe9ede240cc89710e28723fdb242f/ (2013-12-14) has message:
MULTIFILE SUPPORT TEST
and links to 3 .txt files 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt containing single characters 1, 2, and 3.
Figure 3.
CompressedLogo.png
. Source.
2013-12-20. Message:
Colby Nelson and myself burnt the midnight oils designing the APERTUS imagery last night....
Thanks Colby for all your help.
Possibly www.linkedin.com/in/colby-nelson-59b538207/.
Contains an Apertus logo which is used on bitfossil.org/ itself, presumably they were designing that logo.
Hidden surprises in the Bitcoin blockchain by Ken Shirriff (2014) Updated +Created
Ken Shirriff is a cool dude, he's done some collabs with Marc Verdiell in electronics restoration.
Ordinal ruleset inscriptions Updated +Created

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