The first working one in 1947 by John Bardeen and walter Brattain in Bell Labs Murray Hill.
People had already patented a lot of stuff before without being able to make them work. Nonsense.
As the name suggests, this is not very sturdy, and was quickly replaced by bipolar junction transistor.
  • 1: Jim Prideaux captured. Some ex-colleague invites Smiley to dinner and keeps asking how incompetent people like Alleline climbed to the top of the Circus. Smiley recalled to service to meet Ricki Tarr.
  • 2: Ricki Tarr tells his story to Smiley. Peter Guillam starts stealing material from the Circus, find missing page on the communication officer list. Smiley sets up his investigation operation.
  • 3: Smiley meets Connie who tells that she was fired for suspecting Poliakov. Flashbacks show the ousting of Control and Smiley.
  • 4: Guillam steals more material from the circus. While doing that, he is called by the top officers to inquire about Ricki Tarr being in England, which they suspect because they discovered that his family has come.
  • 5: Jim Prideaux tells his story to Smiley, who cannot easily access the Circus reports about it. When he is returned to England, there was basically no debriefing, and Esterhase already knew about the Tinker Tailor codenames, presumably through Merlin.
  • 6: Smiley hears the story of yet another ousted man, who heard the Russians knew in advance about Jim Prideaux' coming. Toby Esterhase dismissed him for alcoholism.
Grand Unified Theory by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Appears to be an unsolved physics problem. TODO why? Don't they all fit into the Standard Model already? So why is strong force less unified with electroweak, than electromagnetic + weak is unified in electroweak?
Nobel disease by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-09-11
The Eighth Day of Creation has a related quote:
In a conversation a few weeks earlier at the faculty club of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a couple of biologists had speculated whether Pauling, whose recent popular book on the benefits to health and sanity of massive doses of vitamin C was stacked in display near the entrance of the M.I.T. bookstore, was showing signs of what one of the men called "old scientist's disease" - which they defined as what happens to great men when they grow beyond the psychological reach of the salutary system by which scientists blow the whistle on one another's mistakes.
Video 1.
The Nobel Prize Winners With Crazy Theories by Qxir
. Source.
Gilberto Gil by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Gilberto is definitely the most psychedelic/tribal one of the The Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music, though he also has a boyish quality to his soul.
He is also perhaps the one that impresses Ciro Santilli the most, at times he can't help but feel:
OMG how the hell did he come up with that?!
Figure 2.
Gilberto Gil in the cover of his 1977 album Refavela
. Source.
Ciro's word of caution for 2019 aspiring system programmers: Should you waste your life with systems programming?
This is basically a direct consequence of backward design.
The higher the level you can operate at, the better.
C is better than assembly, userland better than kernelland.
The ideal level to operate at, and one of humankind's greatest ambitions is "AGI, make me money", the highest possible level.
Only go down a level when it seems necessary.
Type-II superconductor by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Figure 1.
Sketch of the typical superconducting phase diagram of a Type-II superconductor
. Source.
Ciro also really likes the following users, a bit less like Gods, and bit more like friends:

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