42 (school) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
No teachers, no courses, no tuition fees. Yes please!!! By Xavier Niel.
B Reactor by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Reactor of the Hanford site of the produced the plutonium used for Trinity and Fat Man.
This was the first full scale nuclear reactor in the world, and was brought up slowly to test it out.
Video 1.
Hanford B Reactor tour by Studio McGraw
. Source. 2016.
University by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-09-09
One major issue is that teachers don't have the right incentive to, nor are selected to, teach well. Thus the existence of Rate My Professors! But we can do better...
Which is why Ciro Santilli wants to destroy its current format with OurBigBook.com. He believes that we can find a more efficient organization to achieve both the social and research functions of university, by first doing as much as possible online
The ideal university by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This is a version of free gifted education but more focused on university.
This is Ciro Santilli's ideal university system. It is a system that actually lives up to the name "Open University":
Related:
So far as of the early 2020's, the university that comes closest to some but not all of these principles is the University of the People. It's sad that it's such a crappy unknown thing, but it is what it is.
Free university by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Related projects:
Amit Singhal by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Pitched OurBigBook.com to him:
Idea: make all Sitare University materials open, and allow students to write the content
Also, allow anyone to take the exams without enrolling (possibly for a fee if they don't have scholarship).
This is the way to go if you really want to increase your impact/dollar and do something truly innovative that ill make a mark. Why just mirror existing university models that haven't yet caught up to the Internet Age?
University is broken by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
You just have to spend a few minutes with students until they complain about the courses or teachers. And you just have to spend a few hours with teachers until they complain about the students or broader system.
University is broken, and everyone knows it. The only question now is finding a viable, "political cash flow positive" path, into something better.
Bibliography:
medium.com/left-right/the-education-system-is-about-to-implode-5c95f774b523 The Education System is About to Implode by Nicholas Budny (2020)
Stanford, MIT, Harvard and Oxford are luxury goods in the same sense that a Mercedes-Benz might be, or the latest iPhone. They sell an aesthetic experience that provides the consumer with social status, similar to acquiring expensive clothes or a fancy house.
Video 1.
Bar scene from Good Will Hunting
. Source. This scene is way way overdone. But:
Hero: You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.
Bad guy: Yeah, but I will have a degree. And you'll be serving my kids fries at a drive-through on our way to a skiing trip.
The image of an university is basically their only real asset, which they extract money out of via undergraduate students in some countries like the USA, and by getting funding.
For this reason, universities will sacrifice basically any principle in order to give themselves a good image.
Although for profit companies also do this, it is simply on another level for universities.

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 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . 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