**Combustion** is a chemical reaction that occurs when a substance (usually a fuel) reacts rapidly with an oxidizer (commonly oxygen) to produce heat and light. This exothermic reaction typically results in the release of energy in the form of heat and light, and it can produce gases, liquids, and solid residues as byproducts, depending on the substances involved.
"The Hot Troll Deviation" is the title of an episode from the popular TV show *The Big Bang Theory*, specifically season 4, episode 14. In this episode, the characters navigate various personal relationships and social dynamics. The storyline revolves around Raj's interest in a woman he meets online after he gets drunk and posts a risqué photo of himself, which leads to humorous situations. The episode explores themes of attraction and identity through its comedic lens, typical of the show's style.
Ionizing radiation detectors are devices designed to measure and detect ionizing radiation, which includes particles and high-energy electromagnetic waves that have enough energy to remove tightly bound electrons from atoms, thereby ionizing them. Ionizing radiation includes alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, and X-rays. The working principle of these detectors typically involves the interaction of ionizing radiation with matter, which generates ion pairs (electron and positive ion) in a sensing medium.
X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation, similar to visible light but with much higher energy and shorter wavelengths, typically in the range of 0.01 to 10 nanometers. They were discovered in 1895 by Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen and are widely used in various fields, most notably in medicine and science. In medical applications, X-rays are primarily used for imaging and diagnostic purposes. When X-rays pass through the body, they are absorbed at different rates by different tissues.
The Kennelly–Heaviside layer, also known as the E layer of the ionosphere, is a region in the Earth's upper atmosphere that is characterized by a high concentration of ionized particles. This layer is located approximately 30 to 100 kilometers (18 to 62 miles) above the Earth's surface and plays a significant role in radio wave propagation.
These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.
Notably, OurBigBook is the result of Ciro Santilli's experiences with:OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.
- Wikipedia
- GitHub
- Stack Exchange (or as non techies might point out, Urban Dictionary, or Quora before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)
Quick mentions:
- handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About: technically the same as Wikipedia, but with more aligned moderation policies
- ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: twitter.com/BigNel_21 | www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/. Their LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
- fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via Advanced Placement. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
- LessWrong: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
- crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some blockchain-based reputation. Meh.
- TODO migrate all from: github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
- studynotes.ie/. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for university entry exams topics.
- mindstone.com: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
- EverybodyWiki
- looking for open source Confluence-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
- lists:
- BookStack:
- fixed 3-level page hierarchy
- writen in PHP
- Markdown support: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
- no source-level import-export apparently: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/, youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
- WYSIWYG: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/ via TinyMCE
- page content repeating: www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
- github.com/shuding/nextra converts Markdown links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
- zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
- LLM generated wiki e.g.:
- docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
- www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
- Project Xanadu: crazy overlaps, though that project is vaporware apparently?
Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
Static website-only alternatives:
- quarto.org/
- vitepress.dev. vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: wiki.nikiv.dev/.
Conceptual:
- The Final Encyclopedia: science fiction concept, but the name was reused by Paul Allen in a research project
- second brain
- collective intelligence
Near Vertical Incidence Skywave (NVIS) is a radio communication technique that uses high-frequency (HF) radio waves to establish communication over relatively short distances, typically up to about 600 kilometers (373 miles). The technique involves transmitting radio signals at a near-vertical angle, which allows the signals to be reflected off the ionosphere back towards the Earth's surface, effectively facilitating local communication.
Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) is one of the core protocols of the Internet Protocol Suite, which is designed for relaying datagrams (packets of data) across networks. Here are some key points about IPv4: 1. **Addressing**: IPv4 uses a 32-bit addressing scheme, which allows for approximately 4.3 billion unique addresses (2^32).
"Iranian biophysicists" refers to scientists from Iran who specialize in the field of biophysics, which is the study of biological processes through the principles and methods of physics. Biophysicists often explore the molecular mechanisms of biological systems, studying aspects such as the structure and function of proteins, nucleic acids, and cellular processes.
Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer and a chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq in the late 1990s. He is known for his controversial views on various military and geopolitical issues, particularly concerning Iraq and the possession of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
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!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- 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
- 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/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 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. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
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





