Decimal day by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Predecimal Currency: The Nightmare in Your Pocket by BritMonkey (2021)
Source.
Video 2.
Saltburn's Halfpenny Toll Bridge by BBC (1971)
Source. What they mean is one penny return, good clickbait though. Also the presenter is hot, that Nouvelle Vague feel.
Parallel evolution by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The cool thing about parallel evolution is that it shows how complex phenotype can evolve from very different initial genetic conditions, highlighting the great power of evolution.
We list some cool ones at: polyphyly.
Polonium-210 by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The only isotope found on Earth because it occurs as part of the uranium 238 decay chain, i.e., it is not a primordial nuclide.
Interestingly it is a bit less stable than other isotopesL such as Polonium-208 (3 y) and Polonium-209 (124 y), but those aren't in any Earthly radioactive chain so they don't show up on Earth.
Ah, Ciro Santilli was not expecting this. What a unique mixture of humour, technology, politics and bravery. No wonder it was a box flop, there's something good about this film.
Ł by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Exploring! the Special Letters of the Polish Alphabet: L by Polish Girl Next Door (2021)
Source.
Lorentz group by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Subgroup of the Poincaré group without translations. Therefore, in those, the spacetime origin is always fixed.
Or in other words, it is as if two observers had their space and time origins at the exact same place. However, their space axes may be rotated, and one may be at a relative speed to the other to create a Lorentz boost. Note however that if they are at relative speeds to one another, then their axes will immediately stop being at the same location in the next moment of time, so things are only valid infinitesimally in that case.
This group is made up of matrix multiplication alone, no need to add the offset vector: space rotations and Lorentz boost only spin around and bend things around the origin.
One definition: set of all 4x4 matrices that keep the Minkowski inner product, mentioned at Physics from Symmetry by Jakob Schwichtenberg (2015) page 63. This then implies:
Planck constant by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Proportionality factor in the Planck-Einstein relation between light energy and frequency.
And analogously for matter, appears in the de Broglie relations relating momentum and frequency. Also appears in the Schrödinger equation, basically as a consequence/cause of the de Broglie relations most likely.
Intuitively, the Planck constant determines at what length scale do quantum effects start to show up for a given energy scale. It is because the Plank constant is very small that we don't perceive quantum effects on everyday energy/length/time scales. On the , quantum mechanics disappears entirely.
A very direct way of thinking about it is to think about what would happen in a double-slit experiment. TODO think more clearly what happens there.
Defined exactly in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units to:
Jumper (computing) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Allows you to connect two adjacent pins of a pin header. Sometimes used as a hardware configuration interface!
The more familiar transitions we are familiar with like liquid water into solid water happen at constant temperature.
However, other types of phase transitions we are less familiar in our daily lives happen across a continuum of such "state variables", notably:

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact