I was trying to learn about how some types of quantum computers work, when I came across this pearl:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Paul#Scientific_results Wolfgang Paul, 1989 Nobel Prize in Physics winner, referred to Wolfgang Pauli, 1945 winner, as his "imaginary part".
Ciro's Edict #6 cirosantilli.com content uploaded to ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16Managed to upload the content from the static website cirosantilli.com (OurBigBook Markup source at github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io) to ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli.
Although most of the key requirements were already in place since the last update, as usual doing things with the complex reference content stresses the system further and leads to the exposition of several new bugs.
The upload of OurBigBook Markup files to ourbigbook.com was done with the newly added OurBigBook CLI
ourbigbook --web option. Although fully exposed to end users, the setup is not super efficient: a trully decent implementation should only upload changed files, and would basically mean reimplementing/using Git, since version diffing is what Git shines at. But I've decided not to put much emphasis on CLI upload for now, since it is expected that initially the majority of users will use the Web UI only. The functionality was added primarily to upload the reference content.This is a major milestone, as the new content can start attracting new users, and makes the purpose of the website much clearer. Just having this more realistic content also immediately highlighted what the next development steps need to be.
Once v1.0 is reached, I will actually make all internal links of cirosantilli.com to point to ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli to try and drive some more traffic.
The new content blows up by far the limit of the free Heroku PostgreSQL database of 10k lines. This meant that I needed to upgrade the Heroku Postgres plugin from the free Hobby Dev to the 9 USD/month Hobby Basic: elements.heroku.com/addons/heroku-postgresql, so now hosting costs will increase from 7 USD/month for the dyno to 7 + 9 = 16 UDS/month. After this upgrade and uploading all of cirosantilli.com to ourbigbook.com, Heroku dashboard reads reads:so clearly if we are ever forced to upgrade plans again, it means that a bunch of people are using the website and that things are going very very well! Happy how this storage cost turned out so far.
One key limitation found was that Heroku RAM memory is quite limited at 512MB, and JavaScript is not exactly the most memory economical language out there. Started investigation at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/230 Initially working around that by simply splitting the largest files. We were just on the verge of what could be ran however luckily, so a few dozen splits was enough, it managed to handle 70 kB OurBigBook Markup inputs. So hopefully if we manage to optimize a bit more we will be able to set a maximum size of 100 kB and still have a good safety margin.
I've started rewatching The Water Margin, it is just so good. I'm taking some reasonable notes this time however, because due to Ciro Santilli's bad old event memory I'll forget the details again otherwise.
That type of rebellion symbology could also be useful against the Chinese government. It is interesting that Mao Zedong loved the novel.
Water Margin tribute to Chinese dissidents
. Source. Ciro's Edict #5 Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
\Include and \x and working on dynamic website by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16This was the major final step of fully integrating the OurBigBook CLI into the dynamic website (besides fixing some nasty bugs that escaped passed by me from the previous newsletter).
Before
. 
After
. Added font awesome icons. github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/151
Didn't manage to subset, but so be it for now: stackoverflow.com/questions/62395038/how-can-i-export-only-one-character-from-ttf-woff-file-to-avoid-load-unnecessa/71197892#71197892
Ciro's Edict #5 Skip ID extraction and rendering based on database timestamps by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16This means while developing a website locally with the OurBigBook CLI, if you have a bunch of files with an error in one of them, your first run will run slowly until the error:but further runs will blast through the files that worked, skipping all files that have sucessfully converted:so you can fix file by file and move on quickly.
extract_ids README.ciro
extract_ids README.ciro finished in 73.82836899906397 ms
extract_ids art.ciro
extract_ids art.ciro finished in 671.1738419979811 ms
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro finished in 1009.6256089992821 ms
extract_ids science.ciro
error: science.ciro:13686:1: named argument "parent" given multiple times
extract_ids science.ciro finished in 1649.6193730011582 msextract_ids README.ciro
extract_ids README.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids art.ciro
extract_ids art.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids science.ciroMore details at: cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook#no-render-timestamp
This was not fully trivial to implement because we had to rework how duplicate IDs are checked. Previously, we just nuked the DB every time on a directory conversion, and then repopulated everything. If a duplicated showed up on a file, it was a duplicate.
But now that we are not necessarily extracing IDs from every file, we can't just nuke the database anymore, otherwise we'd lose the information. Therefore, what we have to do is to convert every file, and only at the end check the duplicates.
Managed to do that with a single query as documented at: stackoverflow.com/questions/71235548/how-to-find-all-rows-that-have-certain-columns-duplicated-in-sequelize/71235550#71235550
The name cirodown should not appear anywhere now, except with very few exceptions, e.g.:
- github.com/cirosantilli/cirodown to github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
- file extension from
.ciroto.bigb - the Node.js NPM package was renamed from
cirodowntoourbibook. - all in-code instances
I have also squatted
OurBigBook on all major social media handles for near future usage, e.g.: twitter.com/ourbigbook and so on.I was going to do this sooner or later, it was inevitable, but the timing was partly triggered due to noticing that English speakers (and likely many other nationalities) are not able to easily read/hear/pronounce "Ciro".
After breaking production and sweating for a bit hotfixing (not that anyone uses the website yet), I decided to be smart and created a staging server: ourbigbook-staging.herokuapp.com. Now I can blow that server up as I wish without afecting users. Documented at: cirosantilli.com/ourbigbook/staging-deployment
After something broke on the website due to SQLite vs PostgreSQL inconsistencies and took me a day to figure it out, I finally decided to update the test system so that
OURBIGBOOK_POSTGRES=true npm test will run the tests on PostgreSQL.Originally, these were being run only on SQLite, which is the major use case for OurBigBook CLI, which came before the website.
Ciro's Edict #5 Make Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
\Include headers show on table of contents work for cirosantilli.com by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16One of the key advances of the previous update was to show include headers on the table of contents.
This was to allow splitting source files freely.
While that goal was in principle achieved in that commit, when I went ahead to split the huge index of cirosantilli.com into multiple files, I notice several bugs that took a week to fix.
After all of these were solved, I finally managed to split the README at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/commit/84c8a6e7fdbe252041accfb7a06d9b7462287131 and keep the previous desired output. You can now see that the README contains just:
\Include[ciro-santilli]
\Include[science]
\Include[mathematics]
\Include[technology]
\Include[art]This split led to a small positive modification of the output as follows. Previously, a section such as "Quantum Electrodynamics" would have been present in the monolithic README.ciro as:If you visited cirosantilli.com/quantum-electrodynamics, you would see see a link to the "nosplit" version, which would link you back to cirosantilli.com#quantum-electrodynamics, but that is not great, since this is was a humongous page with all of the README.ciro, and took long to display.
= Quantum electrodynamicsAfter the split,
= Quantum electrodynamics is present under science.ciro, and the nosplit version is the more manageable cirosantilli.com/science#quantum-electrodynamics.The key changes that were missing for that to happen were:
Ciro's Edict #5 Link to an image or video in another file that has an Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
\x on title from another file by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16Issue report at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/issues/198 Suppose you had:
programming-language.ciro
= Programming language
\Image[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/python-logo.jpg]
{title=The \x[python-programming-language] logo}
== Python
{c}
{disambiguate=programming-language}= Logos I like
\x[image-the-python-logo]Now, when rendering
\x[image-the-python-logo], we would need to fetch two IDs:image-the-python-logofor theTheandlogopartpython-programming-languageitself, to know that\x[python-programming-language]should render asPython
But after group all SQL queries together was done, there was no way to know that rendering
image-the-python-logo would imply also fetching python-programming-language.This was solved by adding a new database entry type,
REFS_TABLE_X_TITLE_TITLE to the existing References table, which tracks dependencies between IDs.- upload all of cirosantilli.com to ourbigbook.com. I will do this by implementing an import from filesystem functionality based on the OurBigBook CLI. This will also require implementing slit headeres on the server to work well, I'll need to create one
Articlefor every header on render. - get
\xand\Includeworking on the live web preview editor. This will require creating a new simple API, currently the editor jus shows broken references, but final render works because it goes through the database backend - implement email verification signup. Finally! Maybe add some notifications too, e.g. on new comments or likes.
Some smart people just brought up to my attention that OurBigBook.com is a bit like: roamresearch.com/ and other graph knowledges. I feel ashemed for not having seen this software and its alternatives before. I was so focused on the "book aspect" of it that I didn't search much in there. I couldn't find an immediate project killer superset from the options in that area, but maybe one exists. We'll see.
The China front was of course the Russia front this time: stackoverflow.com/users/895245 (web.archive.org/web/20220322230513/https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245/ciro-santilli-Путлер-Капут-六四事)
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