cyclotrons produce the better images, but they are expensive/you have to move to them and order a timeslot.
Lab-based just use some X-ray source from the lab, so it is much move convenient e.g. for a pharmaceutical company doing a bunch of images. The Wikipedia image shows such a self-contained lab system: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Freezed_XRD.jpg
TED (conference) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
A bit like a cult.
Many speakers are good. But especially in TEDx, we've had some notorious ones:
42 (school) by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
No teachers, no courses, no tuition fees. Yes please!!! By Xavier Niel.
As of 2020s and much earlier, Ciro Santilli believes that undergrad studies were fundamentally broken (considering the Information Age which completely changed what would be possible) because university had only two goals, with the exception of a few enlightened professors:
  • rank students from worse to best so they can get into PhD programs.
    For regular jobs grades didn't even matter as much compared the prestige of your university (and therefore, university entry exam grades) and your ability to stand the stress of exams to get minimal passing grade.
    In particular, being able to rank requires setting the difficulty level at a point where you can see a normal distribution in grades, and not have everyone at either 0 nor 100%.
    Also, this split could be caused by either shitty learning materials/conditions, or by mere volume. It doesn't matter.
  • get money from the students. Of course, in countries where university is "free", this means reporting how many students you had to some government office so they can give you a corresponding budget. But you still have an incentive to enroll as many as possible.
As a result, most students, who would not go on to do a PhD essentially do a simple trade: all their time, and possibly some money, in exchange for imbuing themselves with the incredible name of a respected institution so they can get better jobs later on.
Beauty, deep understanding, and learning awesome things comes basically as a second thought.
The normal navigation to them was paywalled, but the static files are served without login checks if you know their URL. One way to go about it is to search by prefix on the Wayback Machine: web.archive.org/web/*/https://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/contentblock/2011/06/03/*
The last handbooks we can find are 2020/2021, they might have move to a new more properly paywalled location after that year.
United States by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The ruler of the 1950-2020 world by Dollar and nuke count.
Capable of evil like any other country, and somewhat merciless to its poor and overly egocentric, but not nearly as evil as any dictatorship.
Has the huge advantage of being one large country which speaks English.
Countries of the world have only two choices as of 2019: either rally behind the US and support democracy, or rally behind China and support dictatorship. The choice is up to you, voters. The more you deal with China, the more you lose your democracy and freedom. All dictatorships have no doubt that they must stick together.
And Americans, please stop that America Number 1 bullshit. Obviously everyone has to strive to be the best, so when you say it like that, it sounds like "even if at the expense of everyone else". The motto has to be "democracy number 1" or else you will scare off all allies. If all other countries sell out to China, you are fucked.
They actually abolished the original legal requirement for those institutions to have free scholars as set out by their original charity school beginnings!!! WTF!
But the broadening of scope beyond the Church of England/medieval material was a good thing at least.

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