Operating system concept by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
MP3 by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
GCHQ by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Fun fact: you can see they "No photography" signs on GCHQ's gates from Google Street View, but super low resolution, making them unreadable. They must have made a deal: Google gives its Street View data with uncensored plate numbers/faces, and GCGQ allows them to film in front of their building at low resolution! The sign actually shows up on their first Instagram post when they created one in 2018 www.gchq.gov.uk/news/gchq-joins-instagram | inews.co.uk/news/uk/gchq-instagram-puzzles-photography-hobbies-216444 Just passing in front of the damn place with Google Maps on must increase your "interest score"!
Video by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Photography by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Pit (nuclear weapon) by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Production is fully concentrated at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the United States as of 2020. TODO was it ever made anywhere else?
Most British universities are registered as charities by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
No, they are basically not-for-profits, or more precisely in british legal terms, "charities". By taking government funding (directly or indirectly through subsiding enrolment fees?), they have to follow some government rules, and all major ones do it seems: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/49187/in-what-sense-are-uk-universities-public/49188
A similar confusing naming pattern appears to apply to Public school.
In the University of Cambridge for example, all MA degree holders or higher appear to have some voting power: www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/how-the-university-and-colleges-work/governance (archive)
This adds an extra layer of difficulty for the average taxpayer to make changes to university policy, e.g. making universities publish all material with Creative Commons licenses. At most, voters could require this indirectly through the government funding requisites. It is a mess.
Not even the Open University seems to be very open!
Ciro Santilli once attended a round table in the early 2020s where a University of Oxford official from the IP licensing department. The University of Oxford took a 20% equity on spin-off companies, not an uncommon University IP ownership policy at the time. At one point, the officer clearly justified this along the following very official sounding lines (paraphrased):
The university is a charity with the goal of promoting education and research. All money obtained is reinvested in furthering education and research.
While noble sounding, this immediately reminded Ciro of Instrumental convergence, in the field of AGI philosophy. Or in other words, of course the best approach to maximize education and research outcomes of society is to first take over the world, and then implement those goals from there! See also Why Not Just: Think of AGI Like a Corporation? by Robert Miles (2018)
Notably, the University of Oxford was extremely protective of its learning material at that time, which was highly paywalled behind university logins, presumably with the rationale of having unique learning materials to enroll more paying undergrads. How can giving out free information to all not be the optimal way to "promoting education and research" is very hard to envision.
Bibliography:
Braindumper by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Uranium compound by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Plutonium extraction from Uranium by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Weapons-grade nuclear material by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
For nuclear weapons you need a certain level of isotope purity of either plutonium-239 or uranium-235.
And the easiest way by far to achieve this purity is to produce plutonium-239 in a breeder reactor, which allows you to get it out with much cheaper chemical processes rather than costly isotope separation methods.
fissilematerials.org/ summarizes stockpiles and production status. 20224 Archive.
Fission nuclear fuel by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Semi-empirical mass formula by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Image by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Sound by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Copper compound by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Political thriller by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
List of audio file formats by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Nuclear fuel by Ciro Santilli 34 Updated +Created
Pinned article: ourbigbook/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!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
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
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  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:
    • 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
    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.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  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