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E.g. in , the underlying field is , the real numbers. And in the underlying field is , the complex numbers.
Any field can be used, including finite field. But the underlying thing has to be a field, because the definitions of a vector need all field properties to hold to make sense.
Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.
It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!
However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".
Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.
- infinite combos
- semi-infinite combos that allow you to likely draw your entire deck or deal 20 damage
- all-in decks that either win or lose on turn two
- and lands
It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.
Here are some cool decks:
- Cheerios, Modern. Meryn MTG, 2019
- Lands, Legacy. Channel Mengucci, 2019
- Belcher, Legacy, Jeff Hoogland, 2019, Channel Mengucci, 2017
- Ops All Spells
- Gyruda Cannon - Legacy - April 18th, 2020 www.youtube.com/watch?v=PefRTsRRi6w
If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.
- reanimator: you have to worry about graveyard hate all the time, worrying is bad
- storm: you have to play too many spells, it's tiring. Ciro would rather put a fattie into play and swing once.
Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.
In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.
ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.
The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=1u5yzmta2oA BoshNRoll (Brian Coval) is basically Ciro Santilli's favorite MTG streamer of the early 2020's very good Legacy focused content, with occasional Modern and Pauper, good spicy deck selection. And he says nice and intelligent things the hole time, it's the type of person Ciro would be good friends with in real life. It sometimes makes Ciro said to see such a person wasting their lives with Magic. Twitter: twitter.com/BoshNRoll
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eKSg5HAfC4 UNDEFEATED BRAIN POWER! Legacy Hive Mind Combo 5-0 Trophy! Sudden Substitution Show and Tell. That's fire!
- Magic Aids
- Squa Chief. He does a lot of cool decks.
- Jeff Hoogland. Not Ciro's favorite personality though, too rambly/matter-of-fact. Also was going too much into MTGA.
- www.youtube.com/channel/UC2hkmJr2x--IiMfozqj6VdQ Meryn MTG. She's too much on the jank side for Ciro's taste, but for that reason she covers some decks of interest that others don't. She's cute, and a Timmy at heart. Which makes you feel really sorry for her as she gets crushed by more competitive decks.
- CalebD. Legacy and Modern. Too much drafting in the middle of actual videos. Sometimes decks slightly too janky/experimental. Amazing channel soundtrack.
- Nikachu has some decent commentary. His endlessly rambly persona is a bit annoying, but the content of the commentary is still good.
Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.
Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.
- www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/disorganized-play-and-the-magic-pro-league
- mtg.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_PT_events
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXUHaXiZ0HI The Moment Professional Magic Came to an End by Nikachu MTG (2021) has a good perspective. Magic is never going to have enough viewers to actually allow pros to make consistent ammounts money. And Magic's variability is just way too high for anyone to consistently win few large prizes on annual contests. Therefore they just killed such contests.
The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:
This shows that viewing electromagnetism as gauge theory does have experimentally observable consequences. TODO understand what that means.
In more understandable terms, it shows that the magnetic vector potential matters where the magnetic field is 0.
Classic theory predicts that the output frequency must be the same as the input one since the electromagnetic wave makes the electron vibrate with same frequency as itself, which then irradiates further waves.
But the output waves are longer because photons are discrete and energy is proportional to frequency:
The formula is exactly that of two relativistic billiard balls colliding.
Compton Scattering by Compton Scattering (2017)
Source. Experiment with a caesium-137 source.No matter how hight the wave intensity, if it the frequency is small, no photons are removed from the material.
This is different from classic waves where energy is proportional to intensity, and coherent with the existence of photons and the Planck-Einstein relation.
cat-v.org/ by Rob Pike, co-creator of Go, looong time Unixer, and some kind of leader of a 9p resurrection cult. That one's spicy. E.g.: harmful.cat-v.org/, Ciro's version: good and evil.
Created by Dr. Rod Nave from Georgia State University, where he worked from 1968 after his post-doc in North Wales on molecular spectroscopy.
While there is value to that website, it always feels like it falls a bit too short as too "encyclopedic" and too little "tutorial-like". Most notably, it has very little on the history of physics/experiments.
Ciro Santilli likes this Rod, he really practices some good braindumping, just look at how he documented his life in the pre-social media Internet dark ages: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/nave.html
The website evolved from a HyperCard stack, as suggested by the website name, mentioned at: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.
Shame he was too old for CC BY-SA, see "Please respect the Copyright" at hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.
exhibits.library.gsu.edu/kell/exhibits/show/nave-kell-hall/capturing-a-career has some good photo selection focused on showing the department, and has an interview.
Kell hall is a building of GSU that was demolished in 2019: atlanta.curbed.com/2020/1/31/21115980/gsu-georgia-state-atlanta-kell-hall-demolition-park-library-north
Bibliography:
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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- 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-calculusArticles 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/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - 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.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.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. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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





