"Ciro" is "Cyrus" from Cyrus the Great in both Portuguese and Italian (although with very different pronunciations), thus doubly appropriate given that Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil, and has Italian ancestry.
After he conquered Babylon in 539 BC from the hands Neo-Babylonian Empire, Cyrus the Great did a great service to the Hebrews by allowing war prisoners that were held in Babylon to back to their home Judea, thus terminating the Babylonian captivity. These Jews were imprisoned because they had previously fought a war or revolted against the Neo-Babylonian Empire and lost. As Wikipedia puts it:He is therefore viewed extremely positively in the good old book. Ciro was quite happy about this name choice by his father, given the human rights connotations of the figure and Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.
According to Isaiah 45:1 of the Hebrew Bible, God anointed Cyrus for this task, even referring to him as a messiah (lit. 'anointed one'); Cyrus is the only non-Jewish figure in the Bible to be revered in this capacity.
Particularly fun things related to modern Cyrus are:
Because it belongs to some relatively obscure character of the Bible, the name it has been mostly passed on by writing to every single Christian country, and every single language came up with different way of saying it, because the only place they would possibly hear that name said out loud would be in Church!
As of 2020, the country in which the name is most popular in undoubtedly Italy. In Brazil, it is definitely not common, but also not completely unheard of either, e.g. Ciro Gomes is a notable Brazilian politician.
And Ciro responds to all the versions of the name that he knows of. These include:and glad to add any new ones as they come.
- English:
- direct English reading of "Ciro" as "See Roll". Not the most cultured, but its what things tend to converge to, especially in highly international environments where it would be impossible to try and learn the origin of everyone's name! So it's fine. Slightly too close to "zero" for comfort.
- Cyrus, the actual English version of the name. Ciro was so happy when his elderly English neighbour who went to Eton College, upon recognizing what Ciro was, immediately said: "Ah, Cyrus the Great!" He was the cutest, and he had some culture. Many/most English speaking people can't or won't be very sure about the spelling, but the sound of the name has a distinctly exotic feel to it, and the sounds are immediately recognized without sound ambiguity (unlike Ciro vs Zero).
- French:
- Portuguese: "See Ru" with accent on See, and rolling r, and very weak "u". Some people might have some doubt of how to spell it and will ask for confirmation if needed, though many/most will get it right. Not particularly exotic like it is for English speakers.
- Italian: "Chee Ro" with accent on Chee and rolling r. Widely understood and correctly spelled, more than in any other language. Not exotic at all, could be any random dude from Naples.
- "fratm Ciruzzo": reserved for the Napolitan mates. It means "my bro little Ciro" in Napolitan. The "m" in fratm is a possessive inflection ("my", "mio", but on the same word), and "frat" is of course something like he standard Italian fratello (brother).
- www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=fratm. "Fratello" is the Italian standard for "brother". "Fra'" appears to be a variant.
- Ciruzzo means "little Ciro", i.e. it is a diminutive of Ciro, or more precisely a term of endearment. In Italian the correct name is "Vezzeggiativi":
- "fratm Ciruzzo": reserved for the Napolitan mates. It means "my bro little Ciro" in Napolitan. The "m" in fratm is a possessive inflection ("my", "mio", but on the same word), and "frat" is of course something like he standard Italian fratello (brother).
- German: Kyrus. Because Cyrus the Great is known Kyrus II. (Cyrus the Second, his grandfather was also called Cyrus), Ciro once joked to a German friend that he should call him Kyrus III! He liked that.
He is actually quite happy when people use the name in their own language, because that means they understand the origin of the name.
Some Ciro's of interest:
Article likely written by him: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/feb/22/home-schooling-register-families
“Especially my father. He was doing most of it and he is a savoury, strong character. He has strong beliefs about the world and in himself, and he was helping me a lot, even when I was at university as an undergraduate.”An only child, Arran was born in 1995 in Glasgow, where his parents were studying at the time. His father has Spanish lineage, having a great grandfather who was a sailor who moved from Spain to St Vincent in the Carribean. A son later left the islands for the UK where he married an English woman. Arran’s mother is Norwegian.
One of the articles says his father has a PhD. TODO where did he work? What's his PhD on? Photo: www.topfoto.co.uk/asset/1357880/
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-everyday-genius-pxsq5c50kt9:
What poor countries have to do to get richer Allow your citizens to have double citizenship by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-13 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-13 +Created 1970-01-01In 2020 Brazil for example, you are not allowed in theory to obtain a double nationality which you were not allowed to have as a birth right.
This means that Brazilian students e.g. in France, many of whom could easily obtain the French citizenship had to either chose between:Can you guess which option Brazilian students would usually pick?
- giving up their Brazilian citizenship. Who the fuck would do that? Brazilians love their country despite all!
- not getting French citizenship. This meant in France having to come 6 AM once a year to some police station on some suburbia to stamp a piece of paper, plus having your VISA completely dependant on your employer for several years until you could obtain a permanent VISA, making it very hard to change jobs, and putting you in a constantly precarious position
- keeping both citizenships, ignoring Brazilian law, which is extremely unlikely to sue you anyways for this bullshit law, and just hope for the best
As a poor country, you have to allow people to obtain multiple citizenship. Students are not going to go back because they don't have the foreign citizenship. They are just going to have to ensure shittier jobs for a few years, thus diminishing the chances that they will actually lean anything useful to bring back to your country later on.
Deterministic and non-deterministic game by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-13 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-13 +Created 1970-01-01 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!
Intro to OurBigBook
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- 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
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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:
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