Classification of regular polytopes Updated +Created
The 3D regular convex polyhedrons are super famous, have the name: Platonic solid, and have been known since antiquity. In particular, there are only 5 of them.
The counts per dimension are:
DimensionCount
2Infinite
35
46
>43
The cool thing is that the 3 that exist in 5+ dimensions are all of one of the three families:Then, the 2 3D missing ones have 4D analogues and the sixth one in 4D does not have a 3D analogue: the 24-cell. Yes, this is the kind of irregular stuff Ciro Santilli lives for.
Clifford gates Updated +Created
This gate set alone is not a set of universal quantum gates.
Notably, circuits containing those gates alone can be fully simulated by classical computers according to the Gottesman-Knill theorem, so there's no way they could be universal.
This means that if we add any number of Clifford gates to a quantum circuit, we haven't really increased the complexity of the algorithm, which can be useful as a transformational device.
Climate of the United Kingdom Updated +Created
British weather is not as bad as the stereotype, at least not in the southern half of the country.
Notably, it does not rain that much, and when it rains, it is a very light rain, which Brazilians from São Paulo or , at most, a "drizzle".
It feels like the weather forecasts are almost always worse than reality, maybe it is a way to not make people disappointed.
What there is relatively a lot of is wind, and fog. But the wind is generally warm and wet, it is very maritime.
Clinton Engineer Works Updated +Created
Precursor organization to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, name that it took in January 1948.
Produced the enriched uranium used for Little Boy, located in the area/predecessor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Figure 1.
Y-12 shift change photograph
. Source. At the back, a poster reads:
Make C.E.W. count: continue to protect project information
What a fantastic picture!
High budget movies are shit Updated +Created
Movies that are very expensive to make tend to be bad, because they have to make returns and thus appeal to a large amorphous population without any specialization, i.e. the lowest common denominator but in TV Tropes terminology rather than mathematics: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowestCommonDenominator.
Looking down the largest flops of all time list didn't help much, only Heaven's gate appears reasonable from the top 20.
Closed access academic journals are evil Updated +Created
You are nothing but useless leeches in the Internet age.
You must go bankrupt all of you, ASAP.
Fuck Elsevier, fuck Springer, and fuck all the like.
Research paid with taxpayer money must be made available for free.
Researchers and reviewers all work for peanuts, while academic publishers get money for doing the work that an algorithm could do. OurBigBook.com.
When Ciro learned URLs such as www.nature.com/articles/181662a0 log you in automatically by IP, his mind blew! The level of institutionalization of this theft is off the charts! The institutionalization of theft is also clear from article prices, e.g. 32 dollars for a 5 page article.
Key physics papers from the 50's are still copyright encumbered as of 2020, see e.g. Lamb-Retherford experiment. Authors and reviewers got nothing for it. Something is wrong.
Infinite list of other people:
  • blog.machinezoo.com/public-domain-theft by Robert Važan:
    Scientific journals are perhaps one of the most damaging IP rackets. Scientists are funded by governments to do research and publish papers. Reviews of these papers are done by other publicly funded scientists. Even paper selection and formatting for publication is done by scientists. So what do journals actually do? Nearly nothing.
Video 1.
Academic Publishing by Dr. Glaucomflecken (2022)
Source.
Closed standard Updated +Created
ISO is the main culprit of this bullshit, some notable examples related to open source software:
The only low level thing that escaped this was OpenGL via Khronos, what heroes those people are.
How the hell are you supposed to develop an open source implementation of something that has a closed standard?
Not to mention open source test suites, that would be way too much to ask for, those always end up being made by some shady small companies that go bankrupt from time to time, see e.g. .
Closurism Updated +Created
Closurism is a term invented by Ciro Santilli to refer to content moderation policies that lock threads in online forums, preventing people from adding new comments from that point onward.
This is similar to deletionism but a bit less worse, as the pre-existing content is maintained. But new relevant content that comes up cannot be added in the future, so it is still bad.
The outcome of closurism is that new forum posts must then be made about up-to-date aspects of the topic. But then those may fail to reach the same PageRank, so most people never get the new information, or create new posts leading to useless duplication of work.
Cody'sLab Updated +Created
This dude is mind blowing. Big respect.
Some of the most impressive videos are the ones in which he goes and extracts metals from minerals himself all the way.
But God, the typography of the channel name is so insane! Why no space???
Shame the academic system wasn't compatible with him: www.reddit.com/r/codyslab/comments/f5531p/codys_qualifications/ Maybe there were safety issues involved though.
Video 1.
What's Been Going On With Cody'sLab? by Cody'sLab (2019)
Source. Cody opening up about some issues he's having life. Notably: being naughty and creative are correlated.
Coinbase Bitcoin hello world Updated +Created
Test buy 2023-04-10 in the UK:
  • fee: 0.99 pounds, minimum buy: 1.99 pounds
  • bought 10 pounds, minus 0.99 fee, totalled: 0.00039162 BTC (£8.92) presumably after further fees/spread
  • bitcoin price on Google on that day: 22,777.54 GBP / BTC
  • bitcoin transaction fees were about 2.7 BTC on that day
Sending 5 pounds to wallet 12dg2FaiZLp3VzDtLvwPinaKz41TQcEGbs
  • network fee: 0.00001989 BTC
  • total bitcoin cost: -0.00023928 BTC
  • new balance: 15,234 satoshi (39,162 - 23,928).
  • total spent: £5.45
  • time est.: about 30 minutes
This worked and I received 21939 satoshis (23928 - 1989) on Electrum on one of the outputs of transaction 1177268091cbeaacbcaac5dc4f6d1774c4ec11b4bcffafa555cd2775eafb954c.
Sending 1 satoshi back! The lowest fee in Electron is 1120 Satoshis targeting 25 blocks (4 hours). Let's do it. Failed, server forbids dust, minimum is 1000 satoshi. OK, sending 1000 satoshi, at 1139 fee.
ColdQuanta Updated +Created
Not a quantum computing pure-play, they also do sensing.
Collatz conjecture Updated +Created
Given stuff like arxiv.org/pdf/2107.12475.pdf on Erdős' conjecture on powers of 2, it feels like this one will be somewhere close to computer science/Halting problem issues than number theory. Who knows. This is suggested e.g. at The Busy Beaver Competition: a historical survey by Pascal Michel.
Collected Papers On Wave Mechanics by Deans (1928) Updated +Created
Published on Nature at www.nature.com/articles/122990a0 and therefore still paywalled there as of 2023, it's ridiculous.
In 2024 it will fall into the public domain in the US.
Comma-separated values Updated +Created
CommonMark Updated +Created
CommonMark is a good project. But its initial release method was not very nice, they first developed everything behind closed doors with the big adopters like GitHub and Stack Overflow, and only later released the thing read, thus wasting the time of people who were working on alternative in the meanwhile, e.g. github.com/karlcow/markdown-testsuite which Ciro contributed to: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Common Table Expression Updated +Created
rm -f tmp.sqlite
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'create table t(i integer)'
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'insert into t values (1), (2)'
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'with mycte as ( select * from t ) delete from mycte where i = 1'
sqlite3 tmp.sqlite 'select * from t'
Commutative property Updated +Created
Company with a semiconductor fabrication plant Updated +Created
A list of fabs can be seen at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants and basically summarizes all the companies that have fabs.
High-frequency trading as a form of Nirvana Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli once talked to a man who had been working on high-frequency trading for the last six years.
He was quite nice.
Ciro asked him in what way did he feel his job contributed to the benefit of society.
He replied that it didn't contribute at all. It was completely useless. More than that, it so completely useless, that it was even pure. A bit like advanced mathematics, but not even providing beauty for anybody outside of the company, since everything is a closely guarded trade secret, unlike mathematics which is normally published for the vanity recognition.
A great mind can work in the most useless branches of finance, without the desire to improve the world, nor make it worse. Not to compete, nor be afraid, nor anxious. A sand mandala.
Only being. Being, in the exact fraction of a moment where bid meets ask.

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