Light cone by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The key insights that it gives are:
  • future and past are well defined: every reference frame sees your future in your future cone, and your past in your past cone
    Otherwise causality could be violated, and then things would go really bad, you could tell your past self to tell your past self to tell your past self to do something.
    You can only affect the outcome of events in your future cone, and you can only be affected by events in your past cone. You can't travel fast enough to affect.
    Two spacetime events with such fixed causality are called timelike-separated events.
  • every other event (to right and left, known as spacelike-separated events) can be measured to happen before or after your current spacetime event by different observers.
    But that does not violate causality, because you just can't reach those spacetime points anyways to affect them.
Figure 1.
Animation showing how space-separated events can be observed to happen in different orders by observers in different frames of reference
. Source.
BioCyc by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Some things that they have of interest which may not be on NCBI:
Hits a free login wall after a few IP hits. And just a very normal casually browsing number of hits. What is this bullshit?
Omics by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Each of the omics studies a subset of molecular biology with a data intensive and broad point of view that tries to understand global function or organisms, trying to understand what every biologically relevant molecule does as part of the hole metabolism.
Omics might be stamp collecting, but maybe it is a bit more like Trading card game/Magic: The Gathering collecting, in which the cards that you are collecting actually have specific uses and interactions, especially considering that most metabolic pathways are analogous across many species.
Figure 1.
Hierarchical diagram of the major omics
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Photosynthesis by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
It is quite cool that photosynthesis works just like cellular respiration by producing a proton potential through chemiosmosis.
Phylogenetic tree by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
It is important to note that due to horizontal gene transfer, the early days of life, and still bacteria to this day due to bacterial conjugation, are actually a graph and not a tree, see also: Figure "Graph of life".
Definitely have a look at: coral of life representations.
All non-clade groups are evil. All non-clade terms must be forgotten. Some notable ones:
Basal (phylogenetics) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
When a characteristic is basal, it basically means the opposite of it being polyphyletic.
E.g. monotremes laying eggs did not evolve separately after function loss, it comes directly from reptiles.
Polyphyly by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Basically mean that parallel evolution happened. Some cool ones:
Parallel evolution by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The cool thing about parallel evolution is that it shows how complex phenotype can evolve from very different initial genetic conditions, highlighting the great power of evolution.
We list some cool ones at: polyphyly.

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