Pion by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Conceptually the simplest mesons. All of them have neutral color charge:
  • charged: down + anti-up or up + anti-down, therefore with net electrical charge electron charge
  • neutral: down + anti-down or up + anti-up, therefore with net electrical charge 0
However, many, many, many terrible horrors come with it:
Optical fiber by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Story of Light by Bell Labs (2015)
Source. Gives some ideas of the history of fiber optics. Features: Herwig Kogelnik.
Video 2.
Fiber optic cables by EngineerGuy
. Source.
Video 3.
Fiber optics fundamentals by Shaoul Ezekiel
. Source. 2008 at MIT. Theory and demonstration.
Solexa by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is one of the prime examples of Europe's decline.
Instead of trying to dominate the sequencing market and gain trillions of dollars from it, they local British early stage investors were more than happy to get a 20x return on their small initial investments, and sold out to the Americans who will then make the real profit.
And now Solexa doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page, while Illumina is set out to be the next Microsoft. What a disgrace.
Cambridge visitors can still visit the Panton Arms pub, which was the location of the legendary "hey we should talk" founders meeting, chosen due to its proximity to the chemistry department of the University of Cambridge.
In 2021 the founders were awarded the Breakthrough Prize. The third person awarded was Pascal Mayer. He was apparently at Serono Pharmaceutical Research Institute at the time of development. They do have a wiki page unlike Solexa: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serono. They paid a 700 million fine in 2005 in the United States, and sold out in 2006 to Merck for 10 billion USD.
Bibliography:
BackRub by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This was the original name of Google Search.
One wonders if this name has some influence from the LGBT culture in San Francisco! The sexual innuendo is palpable.
"Back" is of course a reference to "backlinks", since Google Search relies on incoming links (AKA backlinks) to a webpage to determine its importance.
Google Books by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
They scanned a bunch of books, and then allowed search results to hit them. They then only show a small context around the hit to avoid copyright infringement.
Bibliography:
Google Scholar by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Does this contain any structured data? E.g. can you list all papers by a given author besides just searching and hoping there are no homonyms?
Largey Brage by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The outcome of Larry Page and Sergey Brin performing a Dragon Ball fusion dance.
Both of them attended Montessori education at some point. Interesting! Mentioned in a talk by Sergey and highlighted at The Google Story.
But in 2023 they were somewhat pulled back in by the AI race and competition with ChatGPT.[ref]
As The Google Story puts it about Largey:
Scholarship was not just emphasized in their homes; it was treasured.
Ciro Santilli likes that.
Dots in Gmail address by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This allows you to create multiple non-anonymous accounts on any website that doesn't account for it, as this is not part of the email protocols in general.
tig (git UI) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is good. But it misses some key operations, so much so that makes Ciro not want to learn/use it daily.

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