The term "solstice" refers to two specific points in the year when the sun reaches its highest or lowest point in the sky at noon, resulting in the longest and shortest days of the year. These events occur twice a year: 1. **Summer Solstice**: This occurs around June 21 in the Northern Hemisphere and marks the longest day of the year, when the sun is at its highest point. In the Southern Hemisphere, this date corresponds to the winter solstice.
Exact division refers to the process of dividing one number by another where the result is a whole number without any remainder.
How to teach Publish your material even if it is not perfect by
Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Just make it very clear what you've tried, what you observed, and what you don't understand if anything at all.
This will already open up room for others to come and expand on your attempt, and you are more likely to learn the answers to your questions as they do.
And there's a good chance someone who knows more than you will come along and correct or teach you something new about the subject. For example, this has happened countless times to Ciro Santilli when doing Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Examples of famous fails:
- QED and the men who made it: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 7.11 "Epilogue" mentions how Julian Schwinger has lots of unpublished notes, or that his collaborators had to write most of the stuff down themselves in the end because he felt they were not perfect enough
The algorithmically minded will have noticed that paging requires associative array (like Java
Map of Python dict()) abstract data structure where:The single level paging scheme uses a simple array implementation of the associative array:and in C pseudo-code it looks like this:
- the keys are the array index
- this implementation is very fast in time
- but it is too inefficient in memory
linear_address[0] = physical_address_0
linear_address[1] = physical_address_1
linear_address[2] = physical_address_2
...
linear_address[2^20-1] = physical_address_NBut there another simple associative array implementation that overcomes the memory problem: an (unbalanced) k-ary tree.
Using a K-ary tree instead of an array implementation has the following trade-offs:
In C-pseudo code, a 2-level K-ary tree with and we have the following arrays:
K = 2^10 looks like this:level0[0] = &level1_0[0]
level1_0[0] = physical_address_0_0
level1_0[1] = physical_address_0_1
...
level1_0[2^10-1] = physical_address_0_N
level0[1] = &level1_1[0]
level1_1[0] = physical_address_1_0
level1_1[1] = physical_address_1_1
...
level1_1[2^10-1] = physical_address_1_N
...
level0[N] = &level1_N[0]
level1_N[0] = physical_address_N_0
level1_N[1] = physical_address_N_1
...
level1_N[2^10-1] = physical_address_N_Nand it still contains
2^10 * 2^10 = 2^20 possible keys.K-ary trees can save up a lot of space, because if we only have one key, then we only need the following arrays:
Some specific examples:
Examples:
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!
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 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. - 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





