Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (TV series) Updated 2025-07-16
- 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.
Topological Quantum Course of the University of Oxford Updated 2025-07-16
2010- professor: Steven H. Simon
Lecture notes/book: www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/SteveSimon/topological2021/TopoBook-Sep28-2021.pdf
Course page index: www-thphys.physics.ox.ac.uk/people/SteveSimon/
Torus Updated 2025-07-16
Physics Updated 2025-07-16
Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.
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:
Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source. Reductionism comes to mind.
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 2025-07-16
The Hundred Greatest Theorems by Paul and Jack Abad (1999) Updated 2025-07-16
City in Taiwan Updated 2025-07-16
Cosmic microwave background anisotropy Updated 2025-07-16
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.
C++ library Updated 2025-07-16
Parlour game Updated 2025-07-16
Tesla (unit) Updated 2025-07-16
Transcendence (2014) Updated 2025-07-16
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!
Metabolomics Updated 2025-07-16
Study of the metabolome.
Microplate Updated 2025-07-16
Zone of Avoidance Updated 2025-07-16
Schrödinger picture Updated 2025-07-16
To better understand the discussion below, the best thing to do is to read it in parallel with the simplest possible example: Schrödinger picture example: quantum harmonic oscillator.
"Making a measurement" for an observable means applying a self-adjoint operator to the state, and after a measurement is done:Those last two rules are also known as the Born rule.
- the state collapses to an eigenvector of the self adjoint operator
- the result of the measurement is the eigenvalue of the self adjoint operator
- the probability of a given result happening when the spectrum is discrete is proportional to the modulus of the projection on that eigenvector.For continuous spectra such as that of the position operator in most systems, e.g. Schrödinger equation for a free one dimensional particle, the projection on each individual eigenvalue is zero, i.e. the probability of one absolutely exact position is zero. To get a non-zero result, measurement has to be done on a continuous range of eigenvectors (e.g. for position: "is the particle present between x=0 and x=1?"), and you have to integrate the probability over the projection on a continuous range of eigenvalues.In such continuous cases, the probability collapses to an uniform distribution on the range after measurement.The continuous position operator case is well illustrated at: Video "Visualization of Quantum Physics (Quantum Mechanics) by udiprod (2017)"
Self adjoint operators are chosen because they have the following key properties:
- their eigenvalues form an orthonormal basis
- they are diagonalizable
Perhaps the easiest case to understand this for is that of spin, which has only a finite number of eigenvalues. Although it is a shame that fully understanding that requires a relativistic quantum theory such as the Dirac equation.
The next steps are to look at simple 1D bound states such as particle in a box and quantum harmonic oscillator.
This naturally generalizes to Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom.
The solution to the Schrödinger equation for a free one dimensional particle is a bit harder since the possible energies do not make up a countable set.
This formulation was apparently called more precisely Dirac-von Neumann axioms, but it because so dominant we just call it "the" formulation.
Quantum Field Theory lecture notes by David Tong (2007) mentions that:
if you were to write the wavefunction in quantum field theory, it would be a functional, that is a function of every possible configuration of the field .
TransferWise Updated 2025-07-16
This is a good company, first they truly helped reduce international transfer fees. They they continued to morph into a decent challenger bank.
Their Wise Interest account was amazing as of late 2023: wise.com/gb/interest/
Brick and mortar banks were way way behind in that regard!
E.g. October 2023, Wise was doing 4.87% interest after fees, while Barclay's best option was 1.16% above 5k pounds on the Rainy Day Saver (5% below). Ridiculous!
Transversal time dilation Updated 2025-07-16
Light watch transverse to direction of motion. This case is interesting because it separates length contraction from time dilation completely.
Of course, as usual in special relativity, calling something "time dilation" leads us to mind boggling ideas of "symmetry breaking": if both frames have a light watch, how can both possibly observe the other to be time dilated?
And the answer to this, is the usual: in special relativity time and space are interwoven in a fucked up way, everything is just a spacetime event.
In this case, there are three spacetime events of interest: both clocks start at same position, your beam hits up at x=0, moving frame hits up at x>0.
Those two mentioned events are spacelike-separated events, and therefore even though they seem simultaneous to you, they are not going to be simultaneous to the moving observer!
If little clock one meter away from you tells you that at the time of some event (your light beam hit up) the moving light watch was only 50% up, this is just a number given by your one meter away watch!
Common Crawl Updated 2025-07-16
Amazing project, that basically makes a more searchable Wayback Machine.
A bit hard to use their data though, partly due to size, but also lack of free to use querrying mechanisms, and how obtuse Amazon S3 is to use.
Notably, aws-cli with an account is the only reliable way, everything else is way too broken, e.g. trying the to check the an index index.commoncrawl.org/CC-MAIN-2023-06/ very often 500s.
But still, their projct is amazing.
The only out-of-the-box search they seem to have is: urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/ for domains/URLs. It is good, but there could be so much more... notably IPs.
Sample sizes can be found at: commoncrawl.org/2023/04/mar-apr-2023-crawl-archive-now-available/
To explore the data, after login:
aws s3 ls s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/Copy the toplevel directory only:
aws s3 cp s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/ . --recursive --exclude "*/*"Copy some wet/wat files:
aws s3 cp s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/wat/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wat.gz .
aws s3 sync s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/wet/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wet.gz .Directory structrure:
- cc-index.paths.gz (1K)
- cc-index-table.paths.gz (1K)
- segment.paths.gz (1.7K) Sample lines:
crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/ crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381630/ - index.html (2.3K)
- wat.paths.gz (98K) Sample lines:
crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/wat/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wat.gz crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/wat/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wat.gz - wet.paths.gz (98K) Sample lines:
crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/wet/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wet.gz crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/wet/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wet.gz - warc.paths.gz (99K)
crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00001-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz - segments: directgory with actual data
- 1368696381249: one of many segments, any meaning of name?
- CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.wet.gz (142M, 334M unzipped)A tiny bit of metadata, and then plaintext content from the website, e.g. the second one:No IP unfortunately.
WARC/1.0 WARC-Type: conversion WARC-Target-URI: http://004eeb5.netsolhost.com/stephensilver.htm WARC-Date: 2013-05-18T08:11:02Z WARC-Record-ID: <urn:uuid:773b31ba-ddc6-47a5-ae24-d08141b9944d> WARC-Refers-To: <urn:uuid:4b1bdbff-4926-4ced-86f6-072f5bb3837a> WARC-Block-Digest: sha1:LQFSCR2LIJQYMPTXRHWU7HAPQTVSYS3A Content-Type: text/plain Content-Length: 12046 Stephen Silver is a journalist and editor who specializes in the areas of politics, pop culture, film and sports. He works as an editor with the North American Publishing Co. and as a film critic with The Trend, a local newspaper in the Philadelphia area. - A lot of JSON metadata and no contents as desired. Contains IP! Some entries however are humongous with a ton of useless data, that's what bloats these so much:Let's beautify one of them to see it better:
WARC/1.0 WARC-Type: metadata WARC-Target-URI: CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz WARC-Date: 2013-11-22T14:51:12Z WARC-Record-ID: <urn:uuid:ec54e493-8965-41be-b344-07596cc30b3a> WARC-Refers-To: <urn:uuid:cfeff436-7c4c-4119-aaa4-ec2ce27ad3e1> Content-Type: application/json Content-Length: 1180 {"Envelope":{"Format":"WARC","WARC-Header-Length":"274","Block-Digest":"sha1:JCZOI4V3UOTXGIRLFMPLW4J2WPLAKGVR","Actual-Content-Length":"372","WARC-Header-Metadata":{"WARC-Type":"warcinfo","WARC-Filename":"CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz","WARC-Date":"2013-11-22T14:51:12Z","Content-Length":"372","WARC-Record-ID":"<urn:uuid:cfeff436-7c4c-4119-aaa4-ec2ce27ad3e1>","Content-Type":"application/warc-fields"},"Payload-Metadata":{"Trailing-Slop-Length":"0","Actual-Content-Type":"application/warc-fields","Actual-Content-Length":"372","Headers-Corrupt":true,"WARC-Info-Metadata":{"robots":"classic","software":"Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0","description":"Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013","hostname":"ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal","format":"WARC File Format 1.0","isPartOf":"CC-MAIN-2013-20","operator":"CommonCrawl Admin","publisher":"CommonCrawl"}}},"Container":{"Compressed":true,"Gzip-Metadata":{"Footer-Length":"8","Deflate-Length":"453","Header-Length":"10","Inflated-CRC":"866052549","Inflated-Length":"650"},"Offset":"0","Filename":"CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz"}} WARC/1.0 WARC-Type: metadata WARC-Target-URI: http://%20jwashington@ap.org/Content/Press-Release/2012/How-AP-reported-in-all-formats-from-tornado-stricken-regions WARC-Date: 2013-05-18T05:48:54Z WARC-Record-ID: <urn:uuid:d519658f-7a63-46c1-849b-4cd92332ddb8> WARC-Refers-To: <urn:uuid:cefd363b-1fec-4590-8305-4c6fab2e095f> Content-Type: application/json Content-Length: 1501 {"Envelope":{"Format":"WARC","WARC-Header-Length":"433","Block-Digest":"sha1:B2B6JDSGWCUQIIUGV54SXEE25RX4SANS","Actual-Content-Length":"302","WARC-Header-Metadata":{"WARC-Type":"request","WARC-Date":"2013-05-18T05:48:54Z","WARC-Warcinfo-ID":"<urn:uuid:cfeff436-7c4c-4119-aaa4-ec2ce27ad3e1>","Content-Length":"302","WARC-Record-ID":"<urn:uuid:cefd363b-1fec-4590-8305-4c6fab2e095f>","WARC-Target-URI":"http://%20jwashington@ap.org/Content/Press-Release/2012/How-AP-reported-in-all-formats-from-tornado-stricken-regions","WARC-IP-Address":"165.1.125.44","Content-Type":"application/http; msgtype=request"},"Payload-Metadata":{"Trailing-Slop-Length":"4","HTTP-Request-Metadata":{"Headers":{"Accept-Language":"en-us,en-gb,en;q=0.7,*;q=0.3","Host":"ap.org","Accept-Encoding":"x-gzip, gzip, deflate","User-Agent":"CCBot/2.0","Accept":"text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8"},"Headers-Length":"300","Entity-Length":"0","Entity-Trailing-Slop-Bytes":"0","Request-Message":{"Method":"GET","Version":"HTTP/1.0","Path":"/Content/Press-Release/2012/How-AP-reported-in-all-formats-from-tornado-stricken-regions"},"Entity-Digest":"sha1:3I42H3S6NNFQ2MSVX7XZKYAYSCX5QBYJ"},"Actual-Content-Type":"application/http; msgtype=request"}},"Container":{"Compressed":true,"Gzip-Metadata":{"Footer-Length":"8","Deflate-Length":"455","Header-Length":"10","Inflated-CRC":"453539965","Inflated-Length":"739"},"Offset":"453","Filename":"CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz"}}Fuck no IP addresses either. But other entries do have it, why not this one?{ "Envelope": { "Format": "WARC", "WARC-Header-Length": "274", "Block-Digest": "sha1:JCZOI4V3UOTXGIRLFMPLW4J2WPLAKGVR", "Actual-Content-Length": "372", "WARC-Header-Metadata": { "WARC-Type": "warcinfo", "WARC-Filename": "CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz", "WARC-Date": "2013-11-22T14:51:12Z", "Content-Length": "372", "WARC-Record-ID": "<urn:uuid:cfeff436-7c4c-4119-aaa4-ec2ce27ad3e1>", "Content-Type": "application/warc-fields" }, "Payload-Metadata": { "Trailing-Slop-Length": "0", "Actual-Content-Type": "application/warc-fields", "Actual-Content-Length": "372", "Headers-Corrupt": true, "WARC-Info-Metadata": { "robots": "classic", "software": "Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0", "description": "Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Spring 2013", "hostname": "ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal", "format": "WARC File Format 1.0", "isPartOf": "CC-MAIN-2013-20", "operator": "CommonCrawl Admin", "publisher": "CommonCrawl" } } }, "Container": { "Compressed": true, "Gzip-Metadata": { "Footer-Length": "8", "Deflate-Length": "453", "Header-Length": "10", "Inflated-CRC": "866052549", "Inflated-Length": "650" }, "Offset": "0", "Filename": "CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz" } }The reason these can be huge is theHTML-Metadatasection which contain all outlinks! gist.github.com/Smerity/e750f0ef0ab9aa366558#file-bbc-pretty-wat-L34 CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz()Obtain:aws s3 cp s3://commoncrawl/crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2013-20/segments/1368696381249/warc/CC-MAIN-20130516092621-00000-ip-10-60-113-184.ec2.internal.warc.gz .
- 1368696381249: one of many segments, any meaning of name?
Computational problem Updated 2025-07-16
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