Every vector space is defined over a field.
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.
Elements of the underlying field of a vector space are known as scalar.
Magic: The Gathering by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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:
  • 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
All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.
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:
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:
  • 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.
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.
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:
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.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:
  • obviously wrong card named
  • Dryad arbour camouflaging as a land
  • go to combat
Corollary by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
An easy to prove theorem that follows from a harder to prove theorem.
Aharonov-Bohm effect by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
Video 1.
The Quantum Experiment that ALMOST broke Locality by The Science Asylum (2019)
Source.
Compton scattering by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
The formula is exactly that of two relativistic billiard balls colliding.
Therefore this is evidence that photons exist and have momentum.
Photoelectric effect by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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 Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
HyperPhysics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
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.
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.
A linear map can be seen as a (1,1) tensor because:
is a number, . is a dual vector, and W is a vector. Furthermoe, is linear in both and . All of this makes fullfill the definition of a (1,1) tensor.

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