The Mercier criterion is a concept used in the field of combustion and explosion prevention, particularly related to the safety of handling and processing combustible dusts. It is part of a broader framework used to assess the explosion risk associated with fine powders and solid materials.

A "phase switch" can refer to different concepts depending on the context in which it's used, including electrical engineering, optics, or signal processing. Here are some of the most common interpretations: 1. **Electrical Engineering**: In electrical systems, a phase switch is often used to change the connection of a load between different phases of an electrical supply. This could be particularly relevant in three-phase power systems where loads can be distributed evenly among the phases, improving efficiency and system balance.

A "pole piece" is a term used in various contexts, particularly in the fields of electrical engineering, magnetism, and acoustics. Here are a few key applications of the term: 1. **Magnetism**: In the context of magnets, pole pieces refer to the parts of a magnetic circuit where the magnetic flux exits or enters the magnet.

The anonymity of the donation is mind blowing.

The first sensation Ciro Santilli got was as if God himself had come down from heaven to toy with an unsuspecting human being. God running an experiment. Or perhaps an AGI that had already secretly taken over. Not very different.

Like with God, this was the answer to Ciro's prayers on Twitter. A one way conversation that leaves you uncertain of the details.

Whichever the case, Ciro is going to put on the best show he possibly can for your money, documenting every step along the way in usual fashion!

Besides the awesomeness however, anonymity is a risk.

Ciro ran this over and over in his head, and the only big risk of anonymity is that if this money is ever proven to be from the proceeds of crime, he would have to give it back to the government and "lose one year's salary he would have otherwise gained".

However, that worst case scenario is not bad enough. If anything, it was a great excuse to quit his job for his family and wife is already worth it. Ciro could do it and survive, though situation would deteriorate slowly. But he was a coward previously.

Ciro does however feel that there is good chance that it is legitimate.

Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions are exceptional, he's amazing right! He deserves this! Of course, there is danger in this rationale which scammers could exploit. But bro, if scammers are going to send 100k USD to me, then please continue to do so!

Also which criminal would be stupid enough to donate proceeds of crime to a highly public person who is going to clearly announce it?

Just be warned, if you come with a baseball bat trying to get the money back by force, I will call the police immediately and by God you will not get it!!

Given this, Ciro just keeps thinking about the likely profile of the donor:

But the "why anonymous if not criminal" question remains. Generally rich people want recognition both for:Two options that come to mind:

Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions have, unsurprisingly, centered around the subjects he has worked with: systems programming and web development, and necessary tooling to get those done, such as Git, Python, Bash and Ubuntu.

His best answers are listed at: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".

Stack Overflow has been the initial centerpiece of Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, until Ciro noticed that GitHub might be potentially even more effective for it.

In Stack Overflow Ciro likes to:

In practice it also happens that Ciro:

When he gets an upvote on one of his more obscure answers, Ciro often re-reads it, and often finds improvements to be made and makes them.

He doesn't like to refresh the homepage looking for easy reputation on widely known subjects. See also: online forums that lock threads after some time are evil.

The result is that Ciro ends up getting relatively a lot of reputation without much work! The term passive income, much beloved by fake investment gurus, comes to mind. But now it's "passive reputation"! And it is useless! Yay!

For this reason, Necromancer is Ciro's favorite badge (get 5 upvotes on a question older than 60 days), and as of July 2019, he became the #1 user with the most of this badge. Announcement on Twitter.

The number two at the time was VonC (see also: Section "Epic Stack Overflow users"), who had about 16 times more answers than Ciro in total! From this query: data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1072396?&Date=2019-07-01&UserId=895245 it can be seen that as of July 2019, 1216 out of his 1329 answers were answered 60 days after the questions and constitute potential necromancers! Compare that to VonC's 1643 potential necromancers out of 21767 answers!

VonC eventually took back the lead in 2022, dude's a machine!!! twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/1546389532014247936

Someone at Ciro's work once said something along:and this does ring true in Stack Overflow as well. When you are answering stuff, it means that you either didn't know, or that the information wasn't well available, and so your specific application is progressing slowly because of that. Once the generic prerequisites are well solved and answered, you will spend much more time on your business specific things rather than anything else that can be factored out across projects, and so you will get more "directly useful work" done, and less Stack Overflow answers. Of course, without the prior research in place, you can't get the final product done either.

In terms of per year reputation ranks, Ciro was in the top 100 in of the 2018 ranking with 38,710 reputation gained in that year: stackexchange.com/leagues/1/year/stackoverflow/2018-01-01?sort=reputationchange&page=4 (archive). He reached top 50 in 2022. Note that daily reputation is mostly capped to 200 per day, leading to a maximum 73000 per year. It is possible to overcome this limit either with bounties or accepts, and Ciro finds it amazing that some people actually break the 73k limit by far with accepts, e.g. Gordon Linoff reached 135k in 2018 (archive)! However, this is something that Ciro will never do, because it implies answering thousands and thousands of useless semi duplicate questions as fast as possible to get the accept. Ciro's reputation comes purely from upvotes on important question, and is therefore sustainable without any extra effort once achieved. Interestingly, Ciro appeared on top of the quarter SE rankings around 2019-11: web.archive.org/web/20191112100606/https://stackexchange.com/leagues but it was just a bug ;-)

There is no joy like answering an old question, and watching your better answer go up little by little until it dominates all others.

Stack Overflow reputation is of course, in itself, meaningless. People who contribute to popular subjects like web development will always have infinitely more reputation than those that contribute to low level subjects.

What happens on the specialized topics though is that you end up getting to know all the 5 users who contribute 95% of the content pretty soon as you study those subjects.

Like everything that man does, the majority of Ciro's answers are more or less superficial subjects that many people know but few have the patience to explain well, or they are updates to important questions reflecting upstream developments. But as long as they save 15 minutes from someone's life, that's fine.

There is great beauty when you are involved in a programming problem, and you suddenly remember: wait, I answered something related a few years ago! And especially so when you can go back and improve your old answer with new insight. This has great value, because when you were more newbie, you would have typed different words into Google Search than you would now. So by updating posts from when you were a newbie, you are helping other newbies more, as they are more likely to be also searching for those keywords. It is also very nice to have some head start on the answer's upvote count and not have to bootstrap yet another answer from 0 upvotes and have to go through all the competition!

For example, Ciro's most upvoted answer as of July 2019 is stackoverflow.com/questions/18875674/whats-the-difference-between-dependencies-devdependencies-and-peerdependencies/22004559#22004559 was written when he spent his first week playing with NodeJS (he was having a look at Overleaf, later merged into Overleaf, for education), which he didn't touch again for several years, and still hasn't "mastered" as of 2019! This did teach a concrete life lesson to Ciro however: it is impossible to know what is the most useful thing you can do right now very precisely. The best bet is to follow your instincts and do as much awesome stuff as you can, and then, with some luck, some of those attempts will cover an use case.

Ciro tends to take most pride on his systems programming answers, which is a subject that truly relatively few people know about. He likes it when he goes insanely deep into a subject, way beyond what OP had in mind, exposing full root causes and broader causes, see e.g.:

Ciro also derives great joy from his "media related answers" (3D graphics, audio, video), which are immensely fun to write, and sometimes borderline art, see answers such as those under "OpenGL" and "Media" under the best articles by Ciro Articles or even simpler answers such as:

There is something of greater value in perfectly presented technical knowledge, that goes beyond than simply getting something done. The pleasure of understanding and mastering something, and perhaps of the explanation itself. Sometimes when answering, Ciro feels like a tailor, where ASCII is his cloth. See also: Section "The art of programming", Section "Physics and the illusion of life".

Ciro's deep understanding of Stack Overflow mechanisms and its shortcomings also helped shape his ideas for: OurBigBook.com. So it is a bit funny to think that after all time Ciro spent on the website, he actually wants to destroy it and replace it with something better. There can be no innovation without some damage. It also led to Ciro's creation of Stack Overflow Vote Fraud Script.

After answering so many questions, he ended up converging to a more or less consistent style, which he formalized at:Like any other style guide, this answer style guide, once fully incorporated and memorized, allows Ciro to write answers faster, without thinking about formatting issues.

Ciro also made a question title style guide: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10647/how-do-i-write-a-good-title/311903#311903 but for some reason the Stack Overflow community prefers their semi-defined title meta-language to proper English. Go figure.

Ciro started contributing to Stack Overflow in 2012 when he was at École Polytechnique.

Like all things that end up shaping the course of one's life, Ciro started contributing without thinking too much about it.

His first answer was to the LaTeX question: Standalone diagrams with TikZ?, which reflects the fact that this happened while Ciro was reaching his Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment.

Ciro's first upvote was for his 2012 question: How to run a Python script portably without specifying its full path?

When he started contributing, Ciro was still a newbie. One early event he will never forget was when someone mentioned a "man page", and Ciro commented saying that there was a typo!

When Ciro reached 15 points and gained the ability to upvote, it felt like a major milestone, he even took a screenshot of the browser! 1k, 10k and 100k were also particularly exciting. When the 100k cup (archive) arrived in 2018, Ciro made a show-off Facebook post (archive). At some point though, your brain stops caring, and automatically filters out any upvotes you get except on the answers that you are really proud of and which don't yet have lots of upvotes. The last remaining useless gamed achievement that Ciro looked forward to was legendary (archive), and which he achieved on 2021-02-16.

From the start, Ciro's motivations for contributing to Stack Overflow have been a virtuous circle of:

It is also amazing when you start having a repertoire of answers, and as you are writing a new answer, you remember: "hey, the knowledge of that answer would be so welcome here", and so you link to the other answer as well at the perfect point. This somewhat achieves does what OurBigBook.com aims to do: for each small section of a tutorial, gather the best answers by multiple people.

Ciro feels that his Stack Overflow alter ego is kenorb.

Another one is Aaron Hall, who is also very high on the necromancer list, answers in Python which is a topic Ciro cares about, and states on his profile:so another necromancer.

Way to go.

Ciro also asks some questions on a ratio of about 1 question per 10 answers. But Ciro's questions tend to be about extremely niche that no one knows/cares about, and a high percentage of them ends up getting self answered either at asking time or after later research.

Some fun reactions to Ciro's Stack Overflow activity:

It is unbelievable that you can't find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics/chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.

Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.

School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.

The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.

A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.

It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create. As an extreme example, say, a precise description of the Large Hadron Collider anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "big science"? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.

Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.

Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: the most important physics experiments.

This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.

Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.

Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.

Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro's How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in bacteria for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.

The Applied Science does well in that direction.

This project is one step that could be taken towards improving the replication crisis of science. It's a bit what Hackster.io wants to do really. But that website is useless, just use OurBigBook.com and create videos instead :-)

We're maintaining a list of experiments for which we could not find decent videos at: Section "Physics experiment without a decent modern video".

Ciro Santilli visited the teaching labs of a large European university in the early 2020's. They had a few large rooms filled with mostly ready to run versions of several key experiments, many/most from "modern physics", e.g. Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Hall effect, etc.. These included booklets with detailed descriptions of how to operate the apparatus, what you'd expect to see, and the theory behind them. With a fat copyright notice at the bottom. If only such universities aimed to actually serve the public for free rather than hoarding resources to get more tuition fees, university level education would already have been solved a long time ago!

One thing we can more or less easily do is to search for existing freely licensed videos and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia page where missing. This requires knowing how to search for freely licensed videos:

Related:

Ethopoeia is a rhetorical device that involves the portrayal or characterization of a person, often through the use of speech or narrative. It is aimed at creating a vivid and convincing representation of a character's thoughts, emotions, or personality traits. Ethopoeia can be used in literature, drama, and poetry to develop a character’s identity and to convey their motivations and intentions.

A rigid body is a solid object in which the distance between any two points within the object remains constant regardless of external forces or moments acting on it. In other words, a rigid body does not deform under the influence of forces; it maintains its shape and size. Key characteristics of a rigid body include: 1. **Invariance of Shape and Size**: The distances between points within the body do not change.

FDOA stands for "Frequency Difference of Arrival." It is a technique used in signal processing and localization systems to determine the position of a signal source based on the difference in the frequency of the received signals at multiple receivers. FDOA leverages the Doppler effect, which causes the frequency of a received signal to vary based on the relative motion between the source and the receiver. By measuring the frequency differences at multiple receiving locations, it's possible to triangulate the position of the signal source.

The Journal of Dynamic Behavior of Materials is a scientific publication that focuses on the study of materials and their behavior under dynamic conditions, such as impact, shock, vibration, and other fast-changing scenarios. It covers a wide range of topics related to the dynamic response of materials, including experimental techniques, computational modeling, and theoretical investigations.

Dmitry Chelkak is known as a Russian mathematician and computer scientist, primarily recognized for his contributions to the fields of probability theory and combinatorial optimization. He has worked on various problems in these areas, including random structures and algorithms.

Thomas Henry Havelock (1790–1857) was a British Army officer known for his role during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He was particularly noted for his leadership in the recapture of Delhi and the relief of the besieged British garrison in Lucknow. Havelock's military career spanned several campaigns, but he gained fame for his effective command and quick actions during the uprising, where he successfully navigated difficult circumstances to perform notable military feats.

A modal matrix is often associated with the field of linear algebra and refers to a particular type of matrix used in modal analysis, a technique typically applied in systems analysis, engineering, and physics. In general, a modal matrix can refer to the following contexts: 1. **Modal Analysis in Vibrations**: In structural dynamics, a modal matrix consists of the eigenvectors of a system's mass and stiffness matrices.

The National Prize for Applied Sciences and Technologies in Chile, known as "Premio Nacional de Ciencias Aplicadas y Tecnologías," is an award established to recognize and honor significant contributions to the fields of applied sciences and technology in the country. This award underscores the importance of innovation, research, and development in addressing various challenges and advancing knowledge in applied sciences.