Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
This is really cool. Ciro Santilli would be tempted to participate, but his wife is not a fan, in part due to the loss of privacy of children. Maybe she is right...
Someone should implement a version of that where you can upload your privately sequenced genome and get analytics for free.
This guy just shows up in so many films Ciro Santilli loves. Little by little Ciro started to realize that he is amazing!
Physics (like all well done science) is the art of predicting the future by modelling the world with mathematics.
And predicting the future is the first step towards controlling it, i.e.: engineering.
Ciro Santilli doesn't know physics. He writes about it partly to start playing with some scientific content for: OurBigBook.com, partly because this stuff is just amazingly beautiful.
Ciro's main intellectual physics fetishes are to learn quantum electrodynamics (understanding the point of Lie groups being a subpart of that) and condensed matter physics.
Every science is Physics in disguise, but the number of objects in the real world is so large that we can't solve the real equations in practice.
Luckily, due to emergence, we can use uglier higher level approximations of the world to solve many problems, with the complex limits of applicability of those approximations.
Therefore, such higher level approximations are highly specialized, and given different names such as:
As of 2019, all known physics can be described by two theories:
Unifying those two into the theory of everything one of the major goals of modern physics.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source. Reductionism comes to mind.
Physically accurate genie by Psychomic
. Source. This sane square composition from: www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/u08dw3/nice_guy_genie/.The natural sciences are not just a tool to predict the future.
They are a reminder that the lives that we live daily are mere illusions, religious concepts such as Maya and Samsara come to mind.
We as individuals perceive nothing about the materials that we touch every day really work, nor more importantly how our brain and cell work.
Everything is magic out of our control.
The natural sciences allow us peek, with huge concentrated effort, into tiny little bits a little of those unknowns, and blow our minds as we notice that we don't know anything.
For all practical purposes in life, there is a huge macro micro gap. We are only able to directly perceive and influence the macro events. And through those we try to affect micro events. Because for good or bad, micro events reflect in the macro world.
It is as if we live in a different plane of existence above molecules, and below galaxies. The hierarchy of Figure "xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity" puts that nicely into perspective, shame it only starts at the economical level, not going up to astronomy.
The great beauty of science is that it allows us to puncture through some of the layers of reality, either up or down, away from our daily experience.
And the great beauty of artificial intelligence research is that it allows to peer deeper into exactly our layer of existence.
Every one or two weeks Ciro Santilli remembers that he and everything he touches are just a bunch of atoms, and that is an amazing feeling. This is Ciro's preferred source of Great doubt. Another concept that comes to mind is when you see it, you'll shit bricks.
Perhaps, the feeling of physics and the illusion of life reaches its peak in molecular biology.
Just look at your fucking hand right now.
Do you have any idea of each of the cells in it work? Isn't is at least 100 times more complex than the materials of the table you hand is currently resting on?
This is the non-science fiction version of the lotus-Eater Machine.
Alan Watts's "Philosopher" talk mentions related ideas:
The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
The toddler of a friend of Ciro Santilli's wife asked her mum:Our perception of the macroscopic world is so magic that children have to learn the difference between living and non-living things.
Why doesn't my tiger doll close its eyes when we sleep?
James Somers put it very well as well in his article I should have loved biology by James Somers, this quote was brought to Ciro's attention by Bert Hubert's website[ref].The same applies to other natural sciences.
I should have loved biology but I found it to be a lifeless recitation of names: the Golgi apparatus and the Krebs cycle; mitosis, meiosis; DNA, RNA, mRNA, tRNA.In the textbooks, astonishing facts were presented without astonishment. Someone probably told me that every cell in my body has the same DNA. But no one shook me by the shoulders, saying how crazy that was. I needed Lewis Thomas, who wrote in The Medusa and the Snail:For the real amazement, if you wish to be amazed, is this process. You start out as a single cell derived from the coupling of a sperm and an egg; this divides in two, then four, then eight, and so on, and at a certain stage there emerges a single cell which has as all its progeny the human brain. The mere existence of such a cell should be one of the great astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell.
Alan Watts' "Philosopher" talk (1973)
Source. Lecture given at UCLA on 1973-02-21. Some key quotes from the talk:The origin of a person who is defined as a philosopher, is one who finds that existence itself is exceedingly odd.
A lot of skateboarders hand out there, and it was where Ciro Santilli used to practice Cirodance.
The first time Ciro Santilli Googled this was when trying to repair his cell phone.
2019 cell phones are glued together with adhesive, which makes them impossible to repair them unless you have a heat gun, spend hours and hours learning and planning, and accept the risk of breaking the screen
Repairability scores: www.ifixit.com/smartphone-repairability
If you take a phone less than 300 dollars to a repair shop in the first world, they will say: I've never repaired this crap, and likely for the price of the repair you should just buy a new one, and so to the trash goes the old one, polluting the planet, and in comes a new one, enriching the manufacturer further.
European Union, I need you now.
Oh, there is some 2017 EU action actually: (archive) www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20170629IPR78633/making-consumer-products-more-durable-and-easier-to-repair
Good article: www.androidauthority.com/device-repairability-807585/ (archive).
Ciro Santilli contributed a bit to this, and was even given push rights, see also: see also: Ciro Santilli's minor projects.
Pokemania Comes to America by ABC News (1999)
Source. Ciro Santilli was a part of it! Especially during Ciro Santilli's 10 month stay in Coventry, United Kingdom, in the year 2000!Ciro Santilli learned this expression from Angry Video Game Nerd.
Ciro Santilli believes it generally hurts more than it helps.
Especially when you can't even mention censored things to criticize them. You have to pretend they never existed. So people will forget about them, and do them again in the future.
And when companies do it just to look good, even though it has absolutely no real impact on the lives of those who are discriminated against.
This is an extremely widely used technique as of 2020 and much earlier.
If allows you to amplify "any" sequence of choice (TODO length limitations) between a start and end sequences of interest which you synthesize.
If the sequence of interest is present, it gets amplified exponentially, and you end up with a bunch of DNA at the end.
You can then measure the DNA concentration based on simple light refraction methods to see if there is a lot of DNA or not in the post-processed sample.
Even Ciro Santilli had some contact with it at: Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it", see: PCR!
One common problem that happens with PCR if you don't design your primers right is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primer_dimer
On one hand, yes, we need knowledge at all levels, and it is fine to start top-to-bottom with an overview.
The problem is, however, that there is a huge knowledge gap between the one liner "this is the truth" and the much more important "this is how we know it, these are the experiments" as mentioned at how to teach and learn physics.
Therefore, if you have that extremely rare knowledge, you should be writing that in addition to the dumbed down version with an open knowledge license. It takes time, but that's what really changes the world.
Ciro Santilli has always felt that there is a huge gap between "the very basic" and "the very advanced", as mentioned at: Section "The missing link between basic and advanced", which existing scientific vulgarization is not doing enough to address. In a sense, filling out this "middle path" is the main goal of OurBigBook.com.
Ciro really enjoyed the description of the "Arindam Kumar Chatterjee" youTube channel:
Theoretical/mathematical physics at the graduate level and above. This is NOT a popular science channel. Here you find real theoretical physicists doing real theoretical physics. We think it is important for people to get a taste of the real deal, and for aspiring theoretical physicists to see what they are working towards, i.e., to provide the public with something beyond the ubiquitous Michio Kaku and Brian Cox.
One thing must be said however: there seems to be an actual bias against researchers tho try to create vulgarization material: How To Get Tenure at a Major Research University by Sean Carroll (2011), and that is terrible.
There is often more value in a tutorial by a beginner who is trying to fully learn and explain a subject, than by an expert who is trying to "dumb it down" too much.
This is a porn style defined by Ciro Santilli as:Ciro believes that this is an interesting type of pornography, as it feels more natural and humane than all the horrible trash that comes out of horrendous professional mainstream porn industry.
- content is designed and owned by the actors
- full face reveal
- doing normal vlog things like talking, visiting places, eating, etc., not just fucking
Yes, it could go down the YouTube/Instagram alley, and lead the vloggers to do things they wouldn't normally do because of the audience. But who is to say that Ciro Santilli doesn't do the same on Stack Overflow to some extent?
That type of porn requires some big courage to make. Or balls if you will. Kudos to those creators, as it is so taboo it could greatly impact their future job prospects.
The travel sex vlog appears to be the most popular way to do it. Presuamably the reason being that you would not be able to interact with people in a normal job, so to keep things interesting you need to go to some random places.
Examples:
- lunaokko.com/social-media/ Luna Okko. French sex vlogger, basically a super normal travel vlog with sex scenes with her boyfriend added in, see e.g. the series "Luna's Journey".Perhaps the travel porn vlog is the simplest way to do it. A sex vlog is much like a cooking flog in some way, except it is hard to get new ingredients, so changing the scenery is the easiest way to get some diversity.Some day some nymphomaniac should actually make a sex vlog fucking a different man each time, that would be amazing, even from a scientific point of view, so we can see how different men fuck, a bit like an open version of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_of_Sex.2022 interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGcWrpXXtuQ
- twitter.com/JamesWithLola also a travel sex vlog, also French. Hum.
All pages below are from the second edition from 2018. It seems that there weren't any changes in the text, the updated preface mentions
As it happens, nearly 15 years have passed since the 1st edition of Power, Sex, Suicide was published, and I am resisting the temptation to make any lame revisions. Some say that even Darwin lessened the power of his arguments in the Origin of Species through his multiple revisions, in which he dealt with criticisms and sometimes shifted his views in the wrong direction. I prefer my original to speak for itself, even if it turns out to be wrong.
This is partly addressed in the preface of the second edition from 2018.
Central thesis:
- there are two sexes because of mitochondria
- the acquisition of mitochondria was one of the most important steps in the evolution of eukaryotes.There are no known eukaryotes which never had mitochondria. Having mitochondria appears to be a requisite for being an eukaryote.Contrast this for example with multicellularity, which is highly polyphyletic.
- Apoptosis is largely regulated by mitochondria
- there are two main theories for how the mitochondria endosymbiosis started:
- parsitic hypothesis of mitochondrial endosymbiosis: a parasitic option rather than cooperative
- hydrogen hypothesis: a cooperative option rather than parasitic
Smaller points:
- 10% of our body weight (dry presumably?) is mitochondria. Also quoted at: www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/mighty_mitochondria. TODO confirm.
- eukaryotes can do phatocytosis due to their cytoskeleton
- paints a colorful picture of Peter Mitchell. Some Wikipedia edits are warranted!
- it is hard for complex organisms to evolve because longer DNA means longer replication time
- cancer is natural selection gone wrong
- multicellular organisms are not utopias where every cell lives happily. Rather, they are dictatorships, where any dissident is forced to commit seppuku. Lu Xun's petition quote comes to mind.
Nitpicks:
- the book calls ATP synthase "ATPase" in several points, which is confusing because -ase means "something that breaks", and in 2020 parlance, there are ATPases which actually break ATP: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATPase. The book itself acknowledges that on page 135:
The ATPase is freely reversible. Under some circumstances it can go into reverse, whereupon it splits ATP, and uses the energy released to pump protons up the drive shaft, back across the membrane against the pressure of the reservoir. In fact the very name ATPase (rather than ATP synthase) signifies this action, which was discovered first. This bizarre trait hides a deep secret of life, and we’ll return to it in a moment.
Some criticisms:
- some of the later chapters are a bit more boring, like the stuff about warm-blooded animals. Perhaps is it that Ciro Santilli is more interested in the molecular aspects than macro
- the author talks about some very recent research at the time. While this does highlight his expertise, some of the points mentioned might still be in a state of flow. This is acknowledged by the author himself on the 2018 updated preface however.
Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers Updated 2024-12-15 +Created 2024-07-29
Generally, prizes that pay big lumps of money to well established individuals are a bit useless, it would be better to pay smaller sums to struggling beginners in the field, of which there are aplenty.
The most important part about prizes should not be the money, nor the recognition, but rather explaining better what the laureates did. In this, most prizes fail. Thus Ciro Santilli's project idea: Project to explain each Nobel Prize better.
Ciro Santilli's eulogy: effortless effort
Crazy overlaps with Ciro Santilli's OurBigBook Project, Wikipedia states:
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
The structure seems to be: come every day for 6 weeks, one problem sheet per day. Go.
Strongly against giving answer to problem sets... sad, as of 2024: promys-europe.org/students/faq (archive):and:It does not seem to be the case for the American version however after a quick look: promys.org/programs/promys/for-students/faq/. Sad to see.
When do I get the solutions to the problems on the problem sets?When you discover them for yourself: on your own or collaborating with other students. Returning students and counsellors and faculty will support and encourage you, but not by giving you the answers (hint: they don't even give hints). What PROMYS Europe does is offer you the tools and structure to enable you to be a creative mathematician.
What rules are there at PROMYS Europe?They're mostly the ones you'd expect: don't do anything dangerous or illegal, don't divide by zero, don't even try to skip Friday Fun, and don't give anyone solutions to the problem sets (though collaboration is definitely OK).
Also participants are strongly forbidden from sharing the problem sheets with anyone from outside the program. Ciro Santilli asked a participant face to face if he could take a look, but was told that they are not allowed to share it. So it is a very clear and strict order. Truly sad.