Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Name origin: amnion, a pellicle that covers embryos of both eggs and also during pregnancy.

Includes:

Does not include amphibians. If you include them, you have the tetrapods.

Unit of electric current.

Affected by the ampere in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units.

Starting in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units, the elementary charge is assigned a fixed number, and the Ampere is based on it and on the second, which is beautiful.

This choice is not because we attempt to count individual electrons going through a wire, as it would be far too many to count!

Rather, it is because because there are two crazy quantum mechanical effects that give us macroscopic measures that are directly related to the electron charge. www.nist.gov/si-redefinition/ampere/ampere-quantum-metrology-triangle by the NIST explains that the two effects are:

Those effect work because they also involve dividing by the Planck constant, the fundamental constant of quantum mechanics, which is also tiny, and thus brings values into a much more measurable order of size.

Main implementations: the same as electronic switches: vacuum tubes in the past, and transistors in the second half of the 20th century.

Source: github.com/scientifichackers/ampy

Install on Ubuntu 22.04:

Bibliography:

Some of the earlier computers of the 20th centure were analog computers, not digital.

At some point analog died however, and "computer" basically by default started meaning just "digital computer".

As of the 2010's and forward, with the limit of Moore's law and the rise of machine learning, people have started looking again into analog computing as a possile way forward. A key insight is that huge floating point precision is not that crucial in many deep learning applications, e.g. many new digital designs have tried 16-bit floating point as opposed to the more traditional 32-bit minium. Some papers are even looking into 8-bit: dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3327757.3327866

As an example, the Lightmatter company was trying to implement silicon photonics-based matrix multiplication.

A general intuition behind this type of development is that the human brain, the holy grail of machine learning, is itself an analog computer.

Many/most microcontroller boards have analog-to-digital converters built into them, it is very convenient. E.g. it is the case for the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Too many fun skit videos for Ciro Santilli's taste, but does have some serious derivations in quantum electrodynamics.

However, many, many, many terrible horrors come with it:

Ciro Santilli invented this term, it refers to mechanisms in which you put an animal in a virtual world that the animal can control, and where you can measure the animal's outputs.

First proper nearest galaxy to the Milky Way. Everything in the middle in the Local group is either a satellite of the Milky Way or Andromeda.

Many Andromeda satellite galaxies are simply numbered Andromeda II, Andromeda III and so on.

As described on Wikipedia, the observational history of Andromeda is fascinating. Little by little, people noticed that it had a different nature to many other objects observed on the sky, and the hypothesis that there are other galaxies like ours grew in force.

Part of our fascination with Andromeda is due to how similar in size and shape and close it is to the Milky Way.

It is clearly the only thing so large and so close.

Andromeda is, without a doubt, our sister galaxy.

One can't help but wonder if there is some alien looking back at us when we are looking at them through our telescope.

Andromeda is also the furthest object from Earth that can be seen with the naked eye.^[ref] Not surprising, as it literally shines with the strength of a trillion suns!