Dan, if you ever Google yourself here, please contact Ciro Santilli: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to do something with OurBigBook.com. Cheers.

This post-quantum cryptography competition by NIST is a huge milestone of the field.

It was mind blowing when in 2022, after several years of selection, one of the 7 finalists was broken on a classical computer, not even in a quantum computer! news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30466063 | eprint.iacr.org/2022/214 Breaking Rainbow Takes a Weekend on a Laptop by Ward Beullens. Dude announced he had a break a few days before submission: twitter.com/WardBeullens/status/1492780462028300290 On Twitter. He's so young. Epic.

Edit: and then, after the third round, things were a bit unclear, so they made a fourth round with 4 choices out of the 7 from round 3, and in August 2022 one of the four was broken again on a classic CPU!!! OMG: arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/08/sike-once-a-post-quantum-encryption-contender-is-koed-in-nist-smackdown/

Unfortunately accused of sexual misconduct: www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/11/google-executive-payout-harassment-amit-singhal. But one can still do good despite our defects:

Pitched OurBigBook.com to him:

Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.

Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.

Basically all of this could be done online from books.

Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.

For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.

Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".

Ciro Santilli's general feeling is that university should not own IP, it should belong to the researchers. Instead, university should help researchers make their startups, so they can become big, and then we can tax them and reinvest in the universities.

Of course, this goes through the nonprofit impact measurement difficulty. Maybe we could instead limit the IP to some reasonably small percentage, like 10%?

But still, as of 2020, if feels like universities are way too greedy.

Like the U.S.' spring term.

A good explanation of how this insane system came up is given at Video "History of Oxford University by Chris Day (2018)".

As if it weren't enough, there are also the 6 Halls: permanent private hall.

The colleges are controlled by its fellows, a small self-electing body of highly successful scholars, usually in the dozens per college number it seems. Each college also usually has different types of fellows, e.g. see he university college page: www.univ.ox.ac.uk/about/college-fellowships/ (archive)

The college system does has its merits though, as it instates a certain sense of Hogwarts "belonging" to a certain group, so it might help students get better support for their learning projects from older students, or through the tutoring system. Of course, all such "belonging" feelings are bad, the correct thing would be to make great online tutorials for all, and answer questions in the open. But oh well, humans are dumb.

The college you are in impacts the quality of your courses, because tutorials are per-college. As of 2023, Ciro Santilli spoke to some students of the Computer science course of the University of Oxford, and was told that in some cases where you don't have anyone who can give the tutorial, you instead get a "class", i.e. a P.h.D. student going through question sheets with no interaction in the C.S. department, rather than a deep interactive discussion over the college fire. How can this system be so broken, it is beyond belief

This functionality is somewhat related to fraternities and sororities in 2000's United States.

Course actually means "degree", not just one specific "course":

The course outline is given in a "handbook", a one or more PDF files that contain what people will learn and other practicalities. There is a full list of handbooks at: www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/undergraduate/handbooks, but many of them are closed. The system is so closed that even the fucking course list is closed, e.g. all links at: www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/students/undergraduates are closed. Insane.

Handbook 2019/2020: web.archive.org/web/20210211192812/http://teaching.chem.ox.ac.uk/Data/Sites/58/media/courseinfo/ug-handbook-chemistry-2019-20.pdf

At teaching.chem.ox.ac.uk/undergraduate-course-handbook.aspx there's a paywall, but Google found the PDF it anyways.

www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/guidance/undergraduate/handbooks in theory links to all handbooks, but some are likely paywalled. But Google can generally find them anyways.

Public landing page: www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate/courses/course-listing/computer-science-and-philosophy

A mixed cross department course with the philosophy department. Its corresponding masters is known as Oxford MCompSciPhil. The handbook is together with the computer science one: Section "Computer science course of the University of Oxford".