Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) by 
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01 Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory by Robert D Klauber (2013) by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro Santilli's dreams almost all include the following aspect: Ciro is trying to do something mundane, like climbing a hill, walking across town, etc. but doing so it extremely difficult. The hill is too steep, he gets lost, and things which are easy to use in real life are impossibly hard to use in the dream.
So they are a bit like nightmares, but not that bad. Just really annoying and tiresome. Still, Ciro does enjoy o visiting the semi-real places those dreams bring him to, much for the same reasons he enjoys cycling.
Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro like to interpret this as him having "a creative personality" with the tradeoff of generally not being amazing at his well defined jobs.
Ciro is obsessed by that which is "quirky". This also often has a parallel with "naughty". He often fantasizes about an imaginary parallel between that feeling and Jobs and Wozniak's blue box.
Ciro's natural fight-or-flight response is to hide in a little corner, and try to solve the problem out. Then get distracted and start procrastinating. And then he tries to solve the unsolvable. Someone Ciro barely new once told him quite correctly:This is also perhaps why Ciro likes prison decks in Magic: The Gathering. You just sit on your corner, making yourself safer and safer, until the opponent can't do you any harm and concedes.
In the event of war, you would be the type that hides away and makes the bombs.
There are of course infinitely many videos on the "entrepreneurial mindset" online, and it is impossible to know if they are bullshit, or if everyone just feels like that, but OK, just let Ciro feels that he is specially creative will you?
Creative people continuously step outside of the domain of evaluation structures
If you are creative and you go off on tangents all the time, there's some probability that one of those tangents is going to be exactly what is needed at the time, and you are going to become hyper-successful as a consequence[but the probability of that being the right time and place for the idea is extraordinarily low]The sensible thing to tell anybody is "you shouldn't do it, your probability of success is so low, that its better to just to something sensible".
Ciro also one heard a story, likely apocryphal, but still nonetheless resonated with him, that went something like this (TODO find source, Google wasn't helping, stuff that happened before website as usual):
The newly hired manager of some subsection of DuPont (or some other gigantic chemical company) came into the office, and found a chemical engineer, completely drunk in the middle of the day.Outraged, the manager searched for this colleagues who explained.Ah, don't mind John (or some other name), the guy invented Teflon (or some other substance) which accounted for 20% of our revenue last year. Even if he does not do anything else in his entire career, his salary won't make any difference compared to those gains, and we take the chance that he might invent something else later.
Ciro likes this story because although he does not drink, he feels his work mind works in a related way. Often, when there is something really hard he knows needs doing he hides, and distracts himself with less important tasks, or by watching crap on YouTube, because he knows that the hard task will hurt his mind. Then one day he wakes up and says: OK, fuck it, let's do it, and does it.
Once Ciro got a performance review from a colleague that said:This is closely related to effortless effort.
If Ciro spent as much effort on his job as he does on side projects, he'd be the most amazing worker.
Yes, low conscientiousness, give it to me.
And I am not and never have been 'familiar' scene from The Big Short (2015)
. Source. Gel electrophoresis alelle determination by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 35 Updated 2025-04-24 +Created 1970-01-01In the case of indel mutations (see limits of gel electrophoresis for minimal size difference issues), it is possible to determine the allele with gel electrophoresis. You can just read out the alleles right in the gel. It is a thing of beauty.
As of 2020, this method appears to be much cheaper than DNA sequencing approaches.
Gel Electrophoresis to Determine Genotype
. Source. 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
. 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 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:
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