Sometimes you get annoyed to death with your bike not breaking or changing gears perfectly as you would like, and the people at the bike shop never do the job well enough.
The problem with bike shops is that the employees are already swamped with work, and they don't get paid any extra for doing more work.
As a result, paradoxically, they are often happier, and respect you more if you are trying to get them to help you to fix your own bike!
Also, for the same reason, they don't have the time to go for a quick test ride after a fix to ensure that the bug was actually fixed.
So they ignore things that would obviously be huge ridability benefits (although they might not be obvious to newbie customers), for which customers would gladly pay more money for.
But you start to learn how to do stuff yourself and it feel amazing when you finally get there (after infinite trial and error).
Ciro dreams of a bike shop that actually calls you for the appointment and then teaches you how to fix the thing.
So the best strategy is to have a backup bicycle, and when your main one breaks, you just try to to the fix yourself. That means:
  • identifying the broken piece
  • watching YouTube videos of how to do the job
  • buying a replacement and any missing tools on Amazon
  • giving it a shot
Then, if you fail to do the fix, that is OK, just take it to the bike shop, with the piece you've bought, and ask them to do it for you. At least this way you did not waste a golden opportunity to learn!
If you point a light detector to any empty area of the sky, you will still get some light.
The existence of this is quite mind blowing, since "there is nothing there emitting that light".
To make sense of how it is possible to see this light, you can think of the universe as the expanding raisin bread model, but it expands faster than light (thus the existence of the cosmological event horizon), so we are still receiving light form the middle, not the borders.
CMB is basically perfectly black-body radiation at 2.725 48 K, but it has small variations with variations of the order of 200 microKelvin: cosmic microwave background anisotropy.
Greek alphabet by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Unfortunately, physicists and mathematicians keep using Greek letters in their formulas, so we just have to learn them.
A helpful way to remember is to learn a bit of their history/pronunciation: Section "Historical correspondence between Latin and Greek".
To learn the greek letters if you have a base latin alphabet, you must learn the sound of each letter, and which Latin letters they correspond to.
Symbols that look like Greek letters but are not Greek letters:
Is Ciro Santilli crazy (he is, but for this point specifically), or do many/most Greek letters represent the mouth position used in the pronunciation of the letter?

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