James Somers Updated 2025-07-16
Huge interest overlap with Ciro Santilli, e.g. he's into
- molecular biology in general: I should have loved biology by James Somers
- JCVI-syn3.0: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
- cryo-EM: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
- David Goodsell: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/a-journey-to-the-center-of-our-cells
- History of Google: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/10/the-friendship-that-made-google-huge
Ising model Updated 2025-07-16
Toy model of matter that exhibits phase transition in dimension 2 and greater. It does not provide numerically exact results by itself, but can serve as a tool to theorize existing and new phase transitions.
As mentioned at: stanford.edu/~jeffjar/statmech/intro4.html some systems which can be seen as modelled by it include:
- the spins direction (up or down) of atoms in a magnet, which can undergo phase transitions depending on temperature as that characterized by the Curie temperature and an externally applied magnetic fieldNeighboring spins like to align, which lowers the total system energy.
- the type of atom at a lattice point in a 2-metal alloy, e.g. Fe-C (e.g. steel). TODO: intuition for the neighbor interaction? What likes to be with what? And aren't different phases in different crystal structures?
Also has some funky relations to renormalization TODO.
Bibliography:
The Ising Model in Python by Mr. P Solver
. Source. The dude is crushing it on a Jupyter Notebook. Islam character Updated 2025-07-16
Islam has some really nice things in it.
Ciro Santilli especially appreciates the ideas of
Isomers suggest that atoms exist Updated 2025-07-16
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 85:so it is quite cool to see that organic chemistry is one of the things that pushed atomic theory forward. Because when you start to observe that isomers has different characteristics, despite identical proportions of atoms, this is really hard to explain without talking about the relative positions of the atoms within molecules!
However, it became increasingly difficult in chemical circles to deny the reality of molecules after 1874, the year in which Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel independently explained the isomerism of certain organic substances in terms of stereochemical properties of carbon compounds.
Isometry group Updated 2025-07-16
The group of all transformations that preserve some bilinear form, notable examples:
- orthogonal group preserves the inner product
- unitary group preserves a Hermitian form
- Lorentz group preserves the Minkowski inner product
ISO SQL TRIGGER syntax Updated 2025-07-16
PostgreSQL requires you to define a SQL stored procedure: stackoverflow.com/questions/28149494/is-it-possible-to-create-trigger-without-execute-procedure-in-postgresql Their syntax may be standard compliant, not sure about the
EXECUTE part. Their docs: www.postgresql.org/docs/current/sql-createtrigger.htmlSQLite does not support SQL stored procedures at all, so maybe that's why they can't be standard compliant here: stackoverflow.com/questions/3335162/creating-stored-procedure-in-sqlite
SQL:1999 11.38 covers "Trigger definition". The Abstract syntax tree starts with the
CREATE TRIGGER and ends in:<triggered SQL statement> ::=
<SQL procedure statement>This is defined at 13.5 "SQL procedure statement", but that is humongous and I'm not sure what it is at all.
Isothermal DNA amplification techniques Updated 2025-07-16
Isothermal means "at fixed temperature".
This is to contrast with the more well established polymerase chain reaction, which requires heating and cooling the sample several times.
Italian (language) Updated 2025-07-16
Iterative in-order Updated 2025-07-16
This is a bit harder than iterative pre-order: now we have to check if there is a left or right element or not:
- (START) push current
- if there is left:
- move left
- else:
- (ELSE) pop
- visit
- if there is right
- move right
- GOTO START
- else:
- GOTO ELSE
The control flow can be slightly simplified if we allow NULLs: www.geeksforgeeks.org/inorder-tree-traversal-without-recursion/
Iterative post-order Updated 2025-07-16
This is the hardest one to do iteratively.
Jami (software) Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli worked on it for a brief time in 2016, when it was still called Ring, before he got fired. :-)
The people were quite nice and the project idea is fine, Ciro hopes they succeed.
Jan Hendrik Schön Updated 2025-07-16
Japanese Brazilians Updated 2025-07-16
Japanese Brazilians are either model children, or they're good for nothings. There is no intermediate.
It is hard to do something useful with a devboard Updated 2025-07-27
In the 2010's/2020's, many people got excited about getting children in to electronics with cheap devboards, notably with Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
While there is some potential in that, Ciro Santilli always felt that this is very difficult to do, while also keeping his sacred principle of backward design in mind.
The reason for this is that "everyone" already has much more powerful computers at hand: their laptops/desktops and even mobile phones as of the 2020s. Except perhaps if you are thing specifically about poor countries.
Therefore, the advantage using such devboards for doing something that could useful must come from either:
- their low cost. This would be an important consideration if you were to mass produce your product, but that is not going to be the case for learners, at least initially.
- their portability, and closely linked their ability to act as sensors
- their ability to act as actuators, which is often missing from regular computers
- them having hardware accelerators that are not normally present in regular computers, e.g. FPGAs or AI accelerators. And then the demo project must demonstrate that the project is able to do something significantly faster/cheaper on the devboard than on a desktop computer.
It is OK to treat things as black boxes Updated 2025-07-16
And most important of all: you should not start learning phenomena by reading the from first principles derivation.
Instead, you should see what happens in experiments, and how matches some known formula (which hopefully has been derived from first principles).
Only open the boxes (understand from first principles derivation) if the need is felt!
E.g.:
- you don't need to understand everything about why SQUID devices have their specific I-V curve curve. You have to first of all learn what the I-V curve would be in an experiment!
- you don't need to understand the fine details of how cavity magnetrons work. What you need to understand first is what kind of microwave you get from what kind of input (DC current), and how that compares to other sources of microwaves
- lasers: same
Physics is all about predicting the future. If you can predict the future with an end result, that's already predicting the future, and valid.
It's Popular Now It Sucks Updated 2025-07-16
This is true: high budget movies are shit. Just TV Trops can articular it infinitely better than Ciro Santilli can.
Related:
Jáchymov Updated 2025-07-16
"Joachimsthal" is the German for it. Note how it is just near the modern frontier between Germany and the Czech Republic.
en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Uranium&oldid=1243907294#Pre-discovery_use:
In the early 19th century, the world's only known sources of uranium ore were these mines.
Apparently the region was a silver mining center:
Starting in the late Middle Ages, pitchblende was extracted from the Habsburg silver mines in Joachimsthal, Bohemia (now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic), and was used as a coloring agent in the local glassmaking industry
Jackdaw Playing With Water Updated 2025-07-16
Bibliography:
Jackdaw Playing With Water performed by Xu Lingzi on the guzheng at the Wiener Musikverein
. Source. Jackdaw Playing With Water performed by Lin Shicheng on the pipa
. Source. Jack Hidary Updated 2025-07-16
Do A Moonshot by Jack Hidary (2016)
Source. Jacquard machine Updated 2025-07-16
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