A Chinese Ghost Story Updated +Created
OK, the Good film tag might imply that you are a Sinophile.
The adaptation is very loose.
Figure 1.
Poster of A Chinese Ghost Story
.
Excessive encapsulation is the root of much evil Updated +Created
Some anecdotes.
Ciro Santilli never splits up functions unless there is more than one calling point. If you split early, the chances that the interface will be wrong are huge, and a much larger refactoring follows.
If you just want to separate variables, just use a scope e.g.:
int cross_block_var;

// First step.
{
    int myvar;
}

// Second step.
{
    int myvar;
}
Ciro has seen and had to deal with in his lifetime with two projects that had like 3 to 10 git separate Git repositories, all created and maintained by the same small group of developers of the same organization, even though one could not build without the other. Keeping everything in sync was Hell! Why not just have three directories inside a single repository with a single source of truth?
Another important case: Linux should have at least a C standard library, init system, and shell in-tree, like BSD Operating Systems, as mentioned at: Section "Linux".
Finite special general linear group Updated +Created
Just like for the finite general linear group, the definition of special also works for finite fields, where 1 is the multiplicative identity!
Note that the definition of orthogonal group may not have such a clear finite analogue on the other hand.
How to develop Ciro Santilli's website before the OurBigBook migration Updated +Created
The website moved from AsciiDoctor to OurBigBook Markup in 2020, making this section mostly useless. But hey, history!
Ciro's website is powered by GitHub Pages and Jekyll Asciidoc.
Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
cd cirosantilli.github.io
bundle install
npm install
./run
Source: ./run.
The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.
Tested on the latest Ubuntu.
Publish changes to GitHub Pages:
git add -u
git commit -m 'make yourself look sillier'
./publish
Source: ./publish.
GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output... so the actual source is in the branch dev.
Update the gems with:
bundle update
git add Gemfile.lock
git commit -m 'update gems'
His website was originally written in markdown, however those were deprecated in favour of AsciiDoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: markdown-style-guideuse-asciidoc
How to mine Monero Updated +Created
Ubuntu 20.10 as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/build/ubuntu:
sudo apt install git build-essential cmake libuv1-dev libssl-dev libhwloc-dev
git clone https://github.com/xmrig/xmrig.git
mkdir xmrig/build && cd xmrig/build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)
At minexmr.com/#getting_started we see that all you then need is a single CLI command:
xmrig -o pool.minexmr.com:4444 -u <your-monero-address>
Seems simple, well done devs!
Benchmark on Lenovo ThinkPad P51 (2017) as per xmrig.com/docs/miner/benchmark:
./xmrig --bench=1M
gives:
948.1 h/s
which according to the minexmr.com mining pool would generate 0.0005 XMR/day, which at the February 2021 rate of 140 USD/XMR is 0.07 USD/day. The minimum payout in that pool is 0.004 XMR so it would take 8 days to reach that.
So clearly, application-specific integrated circuit mining is the only viable way of doing this.
www.makeuseof.com/cryptos-you-can-mine-at-home/ is a completely full of bullshit article that says otherwise. How can someone publish that!
Mathematics illustration software Updated +Created
Many plotting software can be used to create mathematics illustrations. They just tend to have more data-oriented rather than explanatory-oriented output.
E91 Updated +Created
Requires entangled particles, unlike BB84 which does not.
Bill Nye Updated +Created
Maybe we need these people, maybe we do.
The problem as with many well known science communicators is that he falls too much on the basic side of the the missing link between basic and advanced.
Video 1.
Bill Nye isn't really a Scientist (& why that shouldn't matter) by BobbyBroccoli (2017)
Source. Bobby's personal overview of Bill's carrier.
Mathy Magic: The Gathering thoughts Updated +Created
In 2019, a paper proved that MTG is Turing complete with a legacy legal deck. Live demo with some hand waving: Video "I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering by Because Science (2019)". As Ciro Santilli comments at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/issues/42 this was an interest addition to the previous "indefinite infinite loop" e.g. as found in a Four Horsemen combo deck
SPARQL tutorial Updated +Created
In this tutorial, we will use the Jena SPARQL hello world as a starting point. Tested on Apache Jena 4.10.0.
Basic query on rdf/vcard.ttl RDF Turtle data to find the person with full name "John Smith":
sparql --data=rdf/vcard.ttl --query=<( printf '%s\n' 'SELECT ?x WHERE { ?x <http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#FN> "John Smith" }')
Output:
---------------------------------
| x                             |
=================================
| <http://somewhere/JohnSmith/> |
---------------------------------
To avoid writing http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0# a billion times as queries grow larger, we can use the PREFIX syntax:
sparql --data=rdf/vcard.ttl --query=<( printf '%s\n' '
PREFIX vc: <http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#>
SELECT ?x
WHERE { ?x vc:FN "John Smith" }
')
Output:
---------------------------------
| x                             |
=================================
| <http://somewhere/JohnSmith/> |
---------------------------------
Bibliography:
Special orthogonal group Updated +Created
Like orthogonal group but without reflections. So it is a "special case" of the orthogonal group.
This is a subgroup of both the orthogonal group and the special linear group.
Apple Inc. person Updated +Created
Asian fetish Updated +Created
All interests are based on fetishes.
The fetish of beauty. The fetish if intelligence. The fetish of kindness.
What's wrong with the fetish of Asianess?
Whenever Ciro's wife starts with "the Asian fetish talk", Ciro reminds her of her own claimed "tall person fetish", and they call it quits.
Asian fetish is much more than sex. It is about the culture, the history, the language. It is the same fetish that makes great mathematicians an Artists do what they do.
When Ciro Santilli was at École Polytechnique, he had to do a presentation for his stupid English courses that all students were forced to take, no matter how good their English was.
The topic was likely something like "pick a country", and Ciro was delighted when he managed to pick "China", after it had gone around a table with many many people before him.
The PowerPoint presentation Ciro made over the weekend was so amazing (and making it was actually fun to make, Ciro actually remembers it a bit!), drawing partly from stuff his wife then girlfriend showed him, that at the end the one of the other students asked him if he had lived in China.
It is a shame Ciro couldn't find the presentation when he wrote this line many many years later. Anything that is not in a BLOB-free monorepo, will disappear, heed my words. But he's certain about two things which it contained:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#History_of_origins
In the United States, women of East and Southeast Asian descent are sometimes stereotyped as subservient, passive, mysterious, villainous in nature, and hyper-sexual.
subservient, passive, mysterious are understandable. But Hyper-sexual and villainous? OMG have these people never seen real Asians?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_fetish#Pornography:
Several studies have implied that Asian women are over-represented in the American pornography industry. Asian women make up perhaps 20% of all female performers, despite being roughly 2.5% of the U.S. population. Asian men also appear to be considerably over-represented, at 10% of male actors.
Video 1.
How my boyfriend CHEATED with another Asian girl by Jenny Tian
. Source.
Matrix ring Updated +Created
Pivot (strategy) Updated +Created
Specific values of the Busy beaver function Updated +Created
The following things come to mind when you look into research in this area, especially the search for BB(5) which was hard but doable:
Spectral line Updated +Created
A single line in the emission spectrum.
So precise, so discrete, which makes no sense in classical mechanics!
Has been the leading motivation of the development of quantum mechanics, all the way from the:

There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.