Personal finance Updated +Created
  • the American stock market gives 10% / year, which is about 2x over 10 years. It has been the sure-fire best investment on a 10 year horizon for many decades, and should serve as your benchmark.
  • risky diversified investments (e.g. ETFs that track a market index) are basically the best investment if you can keep your money in them in the long term (10 years)
  • risky investments can gown down for a while, and you cannot take your money out then. This effectively means risk is a form of illiquidity
  • investment funds have taxes, which eat into your profit. The best investments are dumb index tracking investments (like an ETF that tracks the stock market) that are simply brainless to manage, and therefore have lowest taxes. No fund has managed to beat the market long term essentially.
  • when you are young, ideally you should invest everything into riskier higher yielding assets like stock. And as you get older, you should move part of it to less risky (and therefore more liquid, but lower yielding) assets like bonds
    The desire to buy a house however complicates this for many people.
Loop-mediated isothermal amplification Updated +Created
Like PCR, but does not require thermal cycling. Thus the "isothermal" in the name: iso means same, so "same temperature".
Not needing the thermo cycling means that the equipment needed is much smaller and cheaper it seems.
Video 1.
Loop Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) Tutorial by New England Biolabs (2015)
Source. Explains the basic LAMP concept well.
Theory of everything Updated +Created
As of 2019, the Standard Model and general relativity are incompatible. Once those are unified, we will have one equation to describe the entirety of physics.
There are also however also unsolved problems in electroweak interaction + strong interaction, which if achieved is referred to as a Grand Unified Theory. Reaching a GUT is considered a sensible intermediate step before TOE.
The current state of Physics has been the result of several previous unifications as shown at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything#Conventional_sequence_of_theories so it is expected that this last missing unification is likely to happen one day, potentially conditional on humanity having enough energy to observe new phenomena.
CC BY-NC-SA Updated +Created
Too restrictive. People should be able to make money from stuff.
The definition of "commercial" could also be taken in extremely broad senses, making serious reuse risky in many applications.
Notably, many university courses use it, notably MIT OpenCourseWare. Ciro wonders if it is because academics are wary of industry, or if they want to make money from it themselves. This reminds Ciro of a documentary he watched about the origins of one an early web browsers in some American university. And then that university wanted to retain copyright to make money from it. But the PhDs made a separate company nonetheless. And someone from the company rightly said something along the lines of:
The goal of universities is to help create companies and to give back to society like that. Not to try and make money from inventions.
TODO source.
The GNU project does not like it either www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#CC-BY-NC:
This license does not qualify as free, because there are restrictions on charging money for copies. Thus, we recommend you do not use this license for documentation.
In addition, it has a drawback for any sort of work: when a modified version has many authors, in practice getting permission for commercial use from all of them would become infeasible.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Commons_NonCommercial_license#Defining_%22Noncommercial%22 also talks about the obvious confusion this generates: nobody can agree what counts as commercial or not!
In September 2009 Creative Commons published a report titled, "Defining 'Noncommercial'". The report featured survey data, analysis, and expert opinions on what "noncommercial" means, how it applied to contemporary media, and how people who share media interpret the term. The report found that in some aspects there was public agreement on the meaning of "noncommercial", but for other aspects, there is wide variation in expectation of what the term means.
The main function of university is sexual selection Updated +Created
This is the actual main function of university for many people as of the 2020s. And it fulfills it quite well. A breeding ground.
In a closely related sense, university is simply a symbol of personal status. Not a place where you go to learn. And especially in the Anglophone world of fancy colleges, university also doubles down as a form of long term luxury hotel. Even if it ends up meaning debt.
There's nothing wrong with sexual selection. This type of natural eugenics is an important part of humankind. It is however just sad that any type of learning falls so much behind. A close second would be fine. But as it stands, it is just too far off.
Charles Bukowski Updated +Created
Video 1.
Something for the touts
. Source.
We have everything and we have nothing
And some men do it in churches
And some men do it by tearing butterflies in half
and some men do it in Palm Springs
Laying it into butter-blondes with Cadillac souls
This stuck to Ciro's mind for some reason. His brain just keeps completing the sentence, over and over:
Ciro Santilli does it in his computers and in his labs!
The most awesome systems programmers Updated +Created
Notable mentions:
Other notable people that are likely also awesome but Ciro has less familiarity with their contributions:
Eli Benderski Updated +Created
Amazing systems programming tutorials. Whenever you Google a hard topic, his blog comes up.
Also has many great contributions on Stack Overflow: stackoverflow.com/users/8206/eli-bendersky
As of 2016, Eli worked at Google (reference). TODO before that, I had found his earlier info previously but lost it.
Eli focuses mostly on compiler toolchains.
C. elegans cell lineage Updated +Created
Exactly 1033 somatic cells on male, 959 on hermaphrodite, every time, counted as of 2020. A beauty.
Exactly 131 commit apoptosis in the hermaphrodite.
www.wormatlas.org/celllineages.html contains the full lineage as some huge and impossible to view images. This image was taken directly from The embryonic cell lineage of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans where it is split across many pages, it is a thing of beauty on the PDF.
www.wormatlas.org/celllistsulston.htm contains a non-hierarchical table with the cells and their names.
Children cartoons Ciro Santilli liked to watch Updated +Created
These did not stand the test of time however.
When Ciro was ten years old, he was addicted to 2 cartoons: Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z!
Pokemon had just launched in Brazil in 1999, 2 years after the Japanese launch: br.historyplay.tv/hoje-na-historia/comeca-exibicao-original-do-anime-pokemon (archive) And Dragon Ball, was first aired in 1989 in Japan! My God, those translations took forever back then!
And everyone was playing Pokemon on their Game Boy Color. Ciro was already cheap however, and didn't buy the console despite wanting it, and just played it through his friends handhelds. But maybe this is a good thing. Playing alone sucks.
Chorus effect Updated +Created
Sex-ratio imbalance in China Updated +Created
Neighbourhood (mathematics) Updated +Created
The key concept of topology.

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