Marc Verdiell by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Marc Verdiell is a human electrical engineer best known for being the creator and host of the CuriousMarc YouTube channel.
Marc made $58.4m from the sale of LightLogic, an optoelectronics company he founded, to Intel in 2001:
Figure 1. . Source. Location inferred from Marc's videos', but likely, he often frequents the place, and it looks a bit like that.
Video 1.
Profile of Marc Verdiell by Gizmodo (2018)
Source.
youtu.be/tJ2-kkhghD4?t=74 gives his house's location Atherton, California, part of Silicon Valley. youtu.be/tJ2-kkhghD4?t=279 shows his amazing garden a bit more.
A quick look on Google Maps show that that area is full of some incredible mansions. They managed to keep the entire place green, every house has a pool. Wikipedia comments web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/:
Atherton is known for its wealth; in 1990 and 2019, Atherton was ranked as having the highest per capita income among U.S. towns with a population between 2,500 and 9,999, and it is regularly ranked as the most expensive ZIP Code in the United States [(94027)]. The town has very restricting zoning, only permitting one single-family home per acre and no sidewalks. The inhabitants have strongly opposed proposals to permit more housing construction
.
and Forbes confirms it for 2022: web.archive.org/web/20220906010554/https://www.forbes.com/home-improvement/features/most-expensive-zip-codes-us/, by far on top.
youtu.be/ZgAreiFXhJk?t=253 lists some famous people who live there. It's like a micro heaven.
And a person who makes open educational content like Marc, truly deserves it.
Video 2.
Soyuz Clock Part 4: How accurate is it? by CuriousMarc (2020)
Source. The timestamp youtu.be/HKsjwT53yXw?t=580 mentions that his wife is called "Laurie", and that she escaped the Soviet Union, and two of her brothers went to jail in the escape process.
Electrical engineer by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Semiconductor package by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Okular by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
This is generally good, especially compared to how crappy Evince, the default Ubuntu one, has been around 2014-2020.
Harmonic function by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
PBS Space Time by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Always a bit too much on the superficial side, but sometimes OK, 5-10 minute videos.
Fabrice Bellard by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Creator of QEMU and FFmpeg, both of which Ciro Santilli deeply respects. And a bunch other random stuff.
What is shocking about Fabrice this is that both are insanely important software that Ciro Santilli really likes, and both seem to be completely unrelated subjects!
Google made billions on top of this dude:
At last but not least, Fabrice also studied in the same school that Ciro Santilli studied in France, École Polytechnique.
It is a shame that he keeps such a low profile, there are no videos of him on the web, and he declines interviews.
Another surprising fact is that Fabrice has not worked for the "Big Tech Companies" as far as can be publicly seen, but rather mostly on smaller companies that he co-founded: www.quora.com/Computer-Programmers/Computer-Programmers-Where-is-Fabrice-Bellard-employed
And he's also into some completely random projcts unsurprisingly:
Bibliography:
Figure 1. . Source. At a restaurant with the author apparently. Plus Miguel De Icaza who was in Paris for some conference, which they all presumably attended.
Figure 2.
Fabrice Bellard with light
. There are no in-focus images of Fabrice on the Internet.
Sandy Lerner nude photo by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
She posed naked on horseback for Forbes to promote animal rights in 1997.
She's kind of lying on top of the horse's back, and you can't see much, just some tastefully light erotica. It's not like she's fucking the horse or anything.
NP-hard cryptosystems by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
This is natural question because both integer factorization and discrete logarithm are the basis for the most popular public-key cryptography systems as of 2020 (RSA and Diffie-Hellman key exchange respectively), and both are NP-intermediate. Why not use something more provenly hard?
Iterative algorithm by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Undecidable problem by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Is a decision problem of determining if something belongs to a non-recursive language.
Or in other words: there is no Turing machine that always halts for every input with the yes/no output.
Every undecidable problem must obviously have an infinite number of "possibilities of stuff you can try": if there is only a finite number, then you can brute-force it.
Some undecidable problems are of recursively enumerable language, e.g. the halting problem.
Coolest ones besides the obvious boring halting problem:
Sugar by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
We define a "sugar" as either of:because these are small carbohydrates, and they taste sweet to humans.
Exceptional object by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Oh, and the dude who created the en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exceptional_object Wikipedia page won an Oscar: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF_FLN-TmCY, Dan Piponi, aka @sigfpe. Cool dude.
Cool examples:
Chomsky hierarchy by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
This is the classic result of formal language theory, but there is too much slack between context free and context sensitive, which is PSPACE (larger than NP!).
TODO had seen a good table on Wikipedia with an expanded hierarchy, but lost it!
Halting problem by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Fock space by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
Yup, this one Focks you up.
Video 1.
What's a Fock space? by Physics Duck (2023)
Source.
Ladner's Theorem by Ciro Santilli 35 Updated +Created
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!
Video 1.
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source.
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
    Video 2.
    OurBigBook Web topics demo
    . Source.
  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:
    • 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
    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 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.
    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