Function (mathematics) Updated 2025-07-16
Set of ordered pairs. That's it! This is illustrated at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/1480651/is-fx-x-1-x-2-a-function/1481099#1481099
Freedom of speech Updated 2025-07-16
For Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China: Section "github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship".
Ciro has the radical opinion that absolute freedom of speech must be guaranteed by law for anyone to talk about absolutely anything, anonymously if they wish, with the exception only of copyright-related infringement.
And Ciro believes that there should be no age restriction of access to any information.
People should be only be punished for actions that they actually do in the real world. Not even purportedly planning those actions must be punished. Access and ability to publish information must be completely and totally free.
If you don't like someone, you should just block them, or start your own campaign to prepare a counter for whatever it is that they are want to do.
This freedom does not need to apply to citizens and organizations of other countries, only to citizens of the country in question, since foreign governments can create influence campaigns to affect the rights of your citizens. More info at: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/mark-government-controlled-social-media
Limiting foreign influence therefore requires some kind of nationality check, which could harm anonymity. But Ciro believes that almost certainly such checks can be carried out in anonymous blockchain consensus based mechanisms. Governments would issues nationality tokens, and tokens are used for anonymous confirmations of rights in a way that only the token owner, not even the government, can determine who used the token. E.g. something a bit like what Monero does. Rights could be checked on a once per account basis, or yearly basis, so transaction costs should not be a big issue. Maybe expensive proof-of-work systems can be completely bypassed to the existence of this central token authority?
Some people believe that freedom of speech means "freedom of speech that I agree with". Those people should move to China or some other dictatorship.
FreeFem Updated 2025-07-16
Started in 1987 and written in Pascal, by the French from Pierre and Marie Curie University, the French are really strong in numerical analysis.
The fact that French wrote it can be seen in the documentation, for example doc.freefem.org/tutorials/index.html uses file extension
mycode.edp instead of mycode.pde where dep stands for "Équation aux dérivées partielles".Besides the painful build, using FreeFem is relatively simple, as can be seen from the examples on the website.
They do use a domain-specific language on the examples, which appears to be the main/only interface, which is a bad thing, Ciro would rather have a Python API as the "main API", which is more the approach taken by the FEniCS Project, but so be it. This domain-specific language business means that you always stumble upon basic stuff you want to do but can't, and then you have to think about how to share data between the simulation and the plotting. The plotting notably is super complex and they can't implement all of what people want, upstream examples often offload that to gnuplot. This is potentially a big advantage of FEniCS Project.
It nice though that they do have some graphics out of the box, as that allows to quickly debug common problems.
Uses variational formulation of a partial differential equation, which is not immediately obvious to beginners? The introduction doc.freefem.org/tutorials/poisson.html gives an ultra quick example, but your are mostly on your own with that.
On Ubuntu 20.04, the
freefem is a bit out-of-date (3.5.8, there isn't even a tag for that in the GitHub repo, and refs/tags/release_3_10 is from 2010!) and fails to run the examples from the website. It did work with the example package though, but the output does not have color, which makes me sad :-)sudo apt install freefem freefem-examples
freefem /usr/share/doc/freefem-examples/heat.pdeSo let's just compile the latest v4.6 it from source, on Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt build-dep freefem
git clone https://github.com/FreeFem/FreeFem-sources
cd FreeFem-sources
# Post v4.6 with some fixes.
git checkout 3df0e2370d9752801ac744b11307b14e16743a44
# Won't apply automatically due to tab hell.
# https://superuser.com/questions/607410/how-to-copy-paste-tab-characters-via-the-clipboard-into-terminal-session-on-gnom
git apply <<'EOS'
diff --git a/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile b/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile
index dc62ab06..13cd3253 100644
--- a/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile
+++ b/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile
@@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ $(SRCDIR)/tag-make-real:$(SRCDIR)/tag-conf-real
$(SRCDIR)/tag-install-real :$(SRCDIR)/tag-make-real
cd $(SRCDIR) && $(MAKE) PETSC_DIR=$(PETSC_DIR) PETSC_ARCH=fr install
-test -x "`type -p otool`" && make changer
- cd $(SRCDIR) && $(MAKE) PETSC_DIR=$(PETSC_DIR) PETSC_ARCH=fr check
+ #cd $(SRCDIR) && $(MAKE) PETSC_DIR=$(PETSC_DIR) PETSC_ARCH=fr check
test -e $(DIR_INSTALL_REAL)/include/petsc.h
test -e $(DIR_INSTALL_REAL)/lib/petsc/conf/petscvariables
touch $@
@@ -293,7 +293,6 @@ $(SRCDIR)/tag-tar:$(PACKAGE)
-tar xzf $(PACKAGE)
patch -p1 < petsc-hpddm.patch
ifeq ($(WIN32DLLTARGET),)
- patch -p1 < petsc-metis.patch
endif
touch $@
$(PACKAGE):
EOS
autoreconf -i
./configure --enable-download --enable-optim --prefix="$(pwd)/../FreeFem-install"
./3rdparty/getall -a
cd 3rdparty/ff-petsc
make petsc-slepc
cd -
./reconfigure
make -j`nproc`
make install
cd ../FreeFem-install
PATH="${PATH}:$(pwd)/bin" ./bin/FreeFem++ ../FreeFem-sources/examples/tutorial/Ciro's initial build experience was a bit painful, possibly because it was done on a relatively new Ubuntu 20.04 as of June 2020, but in the end it worked: github.com/FreeFem/FreeFem-sources/issues/141
Freeman Dyson Updated 2025-09-09
Ciro Santilli's admiration for Dyson goes beyond his "unify all the things approach", which Ciro loves, but also extends to the way he talks and the things he says. Dyson is one of Ciro's favorite physicist.
Besides this, he was also very idealistic compassionate, and supported a peaceful resolution until World War II with United Kingdom was basically inevitable. Note that this was a strategic mistake.
Dyson is "hawk nosed" as mentioned in Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) chapter "Dyson". But he wasn't when he was young, see e.g. i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/freemandyson_child-1.jpg?resize=768%2C1064&ssl=1 It seems that his nose just never stopped growing after puberty.
He also has some fun stories, like him practicing night climbing while at Cambridge University, and having walked from Cambridge to London (~86km!) in a day with his wheelchair bound friend.
Ciro Santilli feels that the label child prodigy applies even more so to him than to Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
Bibliography:
- QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 9 Freeman Dyson and the Structure of Quantum Field Theory
Freeman Dyson Web of Stories interview (1998) Updated 2025-07-16
Shot by Web of Stories.
The amount of detail in which he remembers all that happened is astounding. Not too different from the Murray Gell-Mann interview in that aspect.
Free music Updated 2025-07-16
Free radical theory of aging Updated 2025-07-16
Free university Updated 2025-07-16
Related projects:
- freeuniversitybrighton.org/
Free University Brighton has been working since 2012 to provide an alternative and for the last five years we’ve been running ‘freegrees’. These are University level courses, open to all regardless of qualification. Our courses range from 4 week long introductory courses aimed at First Years (people who have never been to University before) to 12-week long Humanities, Social Sciences and Philosophy courses that rival anything in a ‘traditional’ University. We do this all with no money exchanged anywhere - no fees, no debt.
Shut up and show us the courses.
French university Updated 2025-07-16
Fresnel diffraction Updated 2025-07-16
Near field approximation to Kirchhoff's diffraction formula, i.e. when the plane of observation is near the object diffracting.
Fullerene Updated 2025-07-16
Buckyballs (C60) by Periodic Videos (2010)
Source. Actually shows them in a lab!- youtu.be/ljF5QhD5hnI?t=167 has a photo of the first effective production method, which passes a large current between two carbon rods
- youtu.be/ljF5QhD5hnI?t=245 and forward cuts (their editing is very annoying) shows how fullerene dissolves in an organic solvent TODO name, sounds like thodium? and produces a violet solution, while graphite doesn't. A Ultrasonic bath is needed for the solution to form however.
- youtu.be/ljF5QhD5hnI?t=501 fullerene is not a good lubricant despite being a little ball, because it is reactive and polymerises under pressure
Functional programming Updated 2025-07-16
Even if we cannot do everything in functional, we should at least strive to clearly extract functional substes in what we do.
Fundação Estudar Updated 2025-07-16
You don't learn the Harvard experience, you absorb it.
- This one does have bias danger though. But detecting greatness, is as type of bias arguably.
Being amongst excellent people makes you learn what excelent people are like, just like only by tasting many different types of wine can you know what good wine is like.
Fundamental interaction Updated 2025-07-16
Fusion energy gain factor Updated 2025-09-09
FutureAI Updated 2025-07-16
It is a bit hard to decide if those people are serious or not. Sometimes it feels scammy, but sometimes it feels fun and right!
Particularly concerning is the fact that they are not a not-for-profit entity, and it is hard to understand how they might make money.
Charles Simon, the founder, is pretty focused in how natural neurons work vs artificial neural network models. He has some good explanations of that, and one major focus of the project is their semi open source spiking neuron simulator BrainSimII. While Ciro Santilli believes that there might be insight in that, he also has doubts if certain modules of the brain wouldn't be more suitable coded directly in regular programming languages with greater ease and performance.
FutureAI appears to be Charles' retirement for fun project, he is likely independently wealthy. Well done.
- www.aitimejournal.com/interview-with-charles-simon-ceo-and-founder-futureai
- 2022 raised 2 million USD:
- youtu.be/ivbGbSx0K8k?t=856 general structure of the human brain 86B total, matching number of neurons in the human brain, with:
- 14B: brainstem
- 16B: neocortex
- 56B: cerebelum
- www.youtube.com/watch?t=1433 some sequencing ideas/conjectures
G Updated 2025-07-16
Galaxies nearest the Milky Way Updated 2025-07-16
The first proper galaxy near the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. Everything else in the middle is a satellite of either of of those.
Galaxy Updated 2025-07-16
Galaxy in the Virgo cluster Updated 2025-07-16
Some major ones:noirlab.edu/public/images/noao-m49/?nocache=true also lists: M58, M59, M60, M61, M84, M85, M86, M87, M88, M89, M90, M91, M98, M99, and M100 so lots of large and easily observable galaxies in the area.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.