A Hermite spline is a type of piecewise-defined curve that is particularly useful in computer graphics and animation for smoothly interpolating between two or more points. The defining characteristic of Hermite splines is that they are defined by their endpoints and associated tangents (or derivatives) at these endpoints. This makes them versatile for creating smooth curves that pass through specified points with controlled slopes.
GÉANT is a high-speed research and education network that connects national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe and beyond. It facilitates collaboration and data transfer among researchers, institutions, and organizations in the academic sector, providing a backbone for advanced internet services and applications. GÉANT supports a range of activities, including high-capacity data transfers, collaboration on scientific projects, and the deployment of innovative technologies.
An astronomical transit refers to the event when one celestial body passes in front of another, as observed from a particular vantage point, typically from Earth. This phenomenon can occur among various celestial objects, such as planets, moons, or even stars. The most common types of transits are: 1. **Planetary Transit**: This occurs when a planet passes directly between a star and an observer, causing a temporary dimming of the star's light.
AMSRefs is a reference management tool developed by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for use in mathematical writing. It helps authors manage citations and formatting in their documents, particularly those written in LaTeX. AMSRefs provides a way to create bibliographies and ensures that references are formatted according to the AMS style guidelines. The tool simplifies the process of citing mathematical literature by allowing users to generate references in various formats, making it easier to prepare manuscripts for submission to journals or for inclusion in personal projects.
"Chinga" is the name of the 10th episode of the fifth season of the television series "The X-Files." It originally aired on January 12, 1998. The episode was written by Stephen King and features a story revolving around a cursed doll that has a mysterious and malevolent power over its owners.
Ollama by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ollama is a highly automated open source wrapper that makes it very easy to run multiple Open weight LLM models either on CPU or GPU.
Its README alone is of great value, serving as a fantastic list of the most popular Open weight LLM models in existence.
Install with:
curl https://ollama.ai/install.sh | sh
The below was tested on Ollama 0.1.14 from December 2013.
Download llama2 7B and open a prompt:
ollama run llama2
On P14s it runs on CPU and generates a few tokens per second, which is quite usable for a quick interactive play.
As mentioned at github.com/jmorganca/ollama/blob/0174665d0e7dcdd8c60390ab2dd07155ef84eb3f/docs/faq.md the downloads to under /usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models/ and ncdu tells me:
--- /usr/share/ollama ----------------------------------
    3.6 GiB [###########################] /.ollama
    4.0 KiB [                           ]  .bashrc
    4.0 KiB [                           ]  .profile
    4.0 KiB [                           ]  .bash_logout
The file:
/usr/share/ollama/.ollama/models/manifests/hf.co/mlabonne/Meta-Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-abliterated-GGUF/Q2_K
gives a the exact model name and parameters.
We can also do it non-interactively with:
/bin/time ollama run llama2 'What is quantum field theory?'
which gave me:
0.13user 0.17system 2:06.32elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 17280maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+2203minor)pagefaults 0swaps
but note that there is a random seed that affects each run by default. ollama-expect is an attempt to make the output deterministic.
Some other quick benchmarks from Amazon EC2 GPU on a g4nd.xlarge instance which had an Nvidia Tesla T4:
0.07user 0.05system 0:16.91elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 16896maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+1960minor)pagefaults 0swaps
and on Nvidia A10G in an g5.xlarge instance:
0.03user 0.05system 0:09.59elapsed 0%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 17312maxresident)k
8inputs+0outputs (1major+1934minor)pagefaults 0swaps
So it's not too bad, a small article in 10s.
It tends to babble quite a lot by default, but eventually decides to stop.
WordNet by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Groups concepts by hyponymy and hypernymy and meronymy and holonymy. That actually makes a lot of sense! TODO: is there a clear separation between hyponymy and meronymy?
Browse: wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn Appears dead as of 2025 lol.
The online version of WordNet has been deprecated and is no longer available.
Does not contain intermediat scientific terms, only very common ones, e.g. no mention, of "Josephson effect", "photoelectric effect"
fast.ai by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
A pair of Austrailan deep learning training provider/consuntants that have produced a lot of good free learning materials:Authors:
Two Minute Papers by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The approach of this channel of exposing recent research papers is a "honking good idea" that should be taken to other areas beyond just machine learning. It takes a very direct stab at the missing link between basic and advanced!
Memory semantics by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
These are the rules which specify what different concurrent read/write memory accesses from different threads/processes can or cannot see.
Notable such set of rules include:
Read-modify-write by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
That's what usually fucks up parallel programs.

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