Electronic money by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Our minimal definition of "electronic money" is the following.
Instead of creating legal tender such as Dollars as banknotes or transactions in some complex obscure banking system, the government offers an official simple centralized API that represents it instead.
Each citizen or legal entity has an account there, and transfers between registered users are just simple API calls.
So for example you would e able to put all your money in the government account instead of using useless banks. And then you would invest it as you want with the investment company of your choice, without tying the "my money is here" with "this is the best investment" aspects of banks.
Whole cell simulation by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli started taking some notes at: github.com/cirosantilli/awesome-whole-cell-simulation. but they are going to be all migrated here.
It is interesting to note how one talks about single cell analysis, in contrast to whole cell simulation: experimentally it is hard to analyse a single cell. But theoretically, it is hard to simulate a single cell. This mismatch is perhaps the ultimate frontier of molecular biology.
Video 1.
A Computational Whole-Cell Model Predicts Genotype From Phenotype by Markus Covert (2013)
Source.
Oxford Nanopore MinION by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the sequencers made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies.
The device has had several updates since however, notably of the pore proteins which are present in the critical flow cell consumable.
Official documentation: nanoporetech.com/products/minion (archive)
Figure 5.
Oxford nanopore MinION flow cell package.
Source.
Figure 6.
Oxford nanopore MinION flow cell front.
Source.
Figure 7.
Oxford nanopore MinION flow cell back.
Source.
Figure 8.
Oxford nanopore MinION flow cell pipette loading.
Source.
Figure 9.
Oxford Nanopore MinION connected to a Mac via USB.
Source.
Video 1.
Oxford Nanopore MinION software channels pannel on Mac.
Source.
KaTeX by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Default mathematics typesetting used in OurBigBook Markup.
Key issues:
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
A cool thought about cancer expressed at Power, Sex, Suicide by Nick Lane (2006) is that cancer it is the direct product of natural selection gone wrong!
Cancer cells are obviously selected against anti-cancer mechanism, which when they manage to evade, they reproduce uncontrollably, gaining more and more momentum.
Laser by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
What makes lasers so special: Lasers vs other light sources.
Video 1.
How Lasers Work by Scientized (2017)
Source.
An extremely good overview of how lasers work. Clearly explains the electron/photon exchange processes involved, notably spontaneous emission.
Talks about the importance of the metastable state to achieve population inversion.
Also briefly explains the imperfections that lead to the slightly imperfect non punctual spectrum seen in a real laser.
Video 2.
Laser Fundamentals I by Shaoul Ezekiel
. Source. 2008, MIT. Many more great videos in this series.
Google Quantum AI by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Google's quantum hardware/software effort.
The "AI" part is just prerequisite buzzword of the AI boom era for any project and completely bullshit.
According to job postings such as: archive.ph/wip/Fdgsv their center is in Goleta, California, near Santa Barbara. Though Google tends to promote it more as Santa Barbara, see e.g. Daniel's t-shirt at Video "Building a quantum computer with superconducting qubits by Daniel Sank (2019)".
Video 1.
Control of transmon qubits using a cryogenic CMOS integrated circuit (QuantumCasts) by Google (2020)
Source. Fantastic video, good photos of the Google Quantum AI setup!
Sometimes it feels like this could be how we finally make experiments to see what the theory of everything looks like, a bit like the first high energy experiments were from less exotic cosmic rays.

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