History of the Josephson effect Updated 2025-07-16
In 1962 Brian Josephson published his inaugural paper predicting the effect as Section "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling".
Some golden notes can be found at True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen page 224 and around. Philip W. Anderson commented:
We were all - Josephson, Pippard and myself, as well as various other people who also habitually sat at the Mond tea and participated in the discussions of the next few weeks - very much puzzled by the meaning of the fact that the current depends on the phase
As part of the course Anderson had introduced the concept of broken symmetry in superconductors. Josephson "was fascinated by the idea of broken symmetry, and wondered whether there could be any way of observing it experimentally."
History of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
History of Oxford University by Chris Day (2018)
Source. A large part of the video talks about how the insane system of colleges of the University of Oxford came about organically.
History of Wikipedia Updated 2025-07-16
A 2022 clone of phabricator.wikimedia.org/source/mediawiki.git gives first commits from 2003 by:
TODO when was wikipedia open sourced from Nupedia? The early days of Wikipedia are quite obscure due to its transition from Nupedia.
Hofstadter's law Updated 2025-07-16
The trivial takes a few hours.
The easy takes a week.
And what seemed hard takes a few hours.
As "deadlines" approach, feature sets get cut down, then there are delays, and finally a feasible feature set is delivered some time after the deadline.
The only deadlines that can be met are those of tasks which have already been done but not announced.
This is of course Hofstadter's law.
On the other hand, as a colleague of Ciro once mentioned, it is also known that the time it takes for a task to be done expands without limits to match the deadline. And therefore, without deadlines, tasks will take forever and never get done.
And so, in a moment, perceiving this paradox, Ciro was enlightened.
Holocene Updated 2025-07-16
Homotopy Updated 2025-07-16
Java (programming language) Updated 2025-07-16
Java is good.
Its boilerplate requirement is a pain, but the design is otherwise very clean.
But its ecosystem sucks.
The development process is rather closed, the issue tracker obscure.
And above all, Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. killed everybody's trust in it once and for all. Thanks Oracle.
Video 1.
Java for the Haters in 100 Seconds by Fireship (2022)
Source.
How large primes are found for RSA Updated 2025-07-16
Answers suggest hat you basically pick a random large odd number, and add 2 to it until your selected primality test passes.
The prime number theorem tells us that the probability that a number between 1 and is a prime number is .
Therefore, for an N-bit integer, we only have to run the test N times on average to find a prime.
Since say, A 512-bit integer is already humongous and sufficiently large, we would only need to search 512 times on average even for such sizes, and therefore the procedure scales well.
How the telephone works Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Phone Intercom by Make (2014)
Source. This video illustrates will the incredible simplicity of the connection of a telephone system. Compare that to the relative complexity of wireless communication, which requires modulation.
Video 2.
Making a Microphone Work with an Oscilloscope by Environmental Radiation LLC (2012)
Source. Not the most detailed setup, but good.

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