Electron microscope by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
All of them need a vacuum because you can't shoot elecrons through air, as mentioned at Video "50,000,000x Magnification by AlphaPhoenix (2022)".
Education by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
A list of complaints against education: Section "Education is broken".
How to improve education? Simple:
Wikipedia mentions quoting his Nobel Prize biography:
In Monod's studies he discovered that the course work was decades behind the current biological science. He learned from other students a little older than himself, rather than from the faculty.
Super-resolution means resolution beyond the diffraction limit.
First you shine a lot of light which saturates most fluorophores, leaving very few active.
They you can observe fluorophores firing one by one. Their exact position is a bit stochastic and beyond the diffraction limit, but so long as there aren't to many in close proximity, you can wait for it to fire a bunch of times, and the center of the Gaussian is the actual location.
From this we see that super-resolution microscopy is basically a space-time tradeoff: the more time we wait, the better spacial resolution we get. But we can't do it if things are moving too fast in the sample.
Tradeoff with cryoEM: you get to see things moving in live cell. Electron microscopy fully kills cells, so you have no chance of seeing anything that moves ever.
Caveats:
  • initial illumination to saturate most fluorophores I think can still kill cells, things get harder the less light you put in. So it's not like you don't kill things at all necessarily, you just get a chance not to
  • the presence fluorophore disturbs the system slightly, and is not at the same Exact location of the protein of interest
While in Brazil, Ciro Santilli used to walk through the outskirts of a small favela to get to university every day, the Favela de São Remo.
To the left, the outer walls of a large police station, with concertina wire on top and all.
To the right, dudes selling drugs on the entry of a small corridor street, presumably to which they could easily escape to in case of need.
The cops could have identified the dealers with binoculars if they actually wanted to!!!
The drug sellers did keep the peace in their business area, and Ciro never got robbed, and would come back from university parties on foot late through the favela.
But Ciro's friends did say that things got much worse after Ciro left, for example a flash kidnapping was reported in 2015.
Wikipedia says that this favela started in the 60s and 70s as settlements of the builders of the University, and that many of the people there still work for the University.
This is consistent with the terribly old buildings Ciro saw when he was at university. They even had the building skills to build their own homes.
The state just has to either legalize those people, or give them houses somewhere else nearby. A world class University is the most important thing a poor country can have, and its image cannot be jeopardized like that.
The existence of that favela, right next to one of the most important universities in Latin America, puts Brazil's surreal social inequality into perspective. Especially considering that before extremely heavy university entry quotas were added, basically all students of the university (or at least of the courses that lead to high paying jobs) had attended private schools, and therefore were not of the poorer classes (see passage about 10 out 500 passage from Section "Free gifted education").
The janitors of the apartment block Ciro lived all lived in the favela. Yes, in poor countries lives are worth nothing, and some poorer people work by watching the entrance of buildings of less poor people 24/7 to guard it from other even more desperate poor people who might want to rob the not so poor inhabitants. They also do janitor jobs like cleaning common areas in parallel.
They were incredibly nice hard-working people, and Ciro spoke often with them. If only given the opportunity, those people could be amazing engineers or scientists obviously. Ciro was also glad to be their friends, and sat down with them quite a few times for several minutes after coming back from University parties, partly because he felt bad about them having to work at that time, but also partly because he just liked them. And they were always up to date on who had come back with a girl to the apartment or not. Ciro imagines that if it had been him, it would have been a perfect bragging opportunity ;)
They had "nothing" but were still happy. This is true wisdom, and a good reminder that all our non-transhumanist technical goals are nothing.
We must destroy social inequality.
University of Michigan by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Not to be confused with the Michigan State University. Not confusing at all right!
Reproductive cue by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A signal that indicates that an animal is ready for mating.

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