How to teach Publish somewhere people can comment Updated 2025-07-16
Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.
Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.
The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues
How to teach Publish your material even if it is not perfect 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Schwinger, and Tomonaga by Silvan Schweber (1994) chapter 7.11 "Epilogue" mentions how Julian Schwinger has lots of unpublished notes, or that his collaborators had to write most of the stuff down themselves in the end because he felt they were not perfect enough
How to teach Text is cheaper than video Updated 2025-07-16
Text materials are generally superior to video because they:
Only produce video material if:
- it shows an experiment, physical technique, natural phenomena or location that is of interest. See also: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments"
- it gives fundamental geometric insight on the subject
- you are filming a human transmitting their passion about the subject, and the speaker is amazing, and does not speak for too long
How to teach Use English Updated 2025-07-16
By writing in English you reach more people.
English is the de-facto Lingua Franca of the second half of the 20th Century, it is the new lingua franca, the new Latin, and there is no escaping it.
Students who don't know English will never do anything truly useful in science and technology. So it is pointless to teach them anything (besides English itself).
How to write technical help requests and bug reports Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli often sees all those genius who are much smarter than him making shitty forum/mailing list posts, they need to learn this:
- The apparently most important one liner error message must appear in the title, and fuller apparently relevant logs must appear on the body
- These are an important part of the minimal working example.
- For build errors, you must give your OS and compiler version and version of any relevant external library
How to develop Ciro Santilli's website before the OurBigBook migration Updated 2025-07-16
The website moved from AsciiDoctor to OurBigBook Markup in 2020, making this section mostly useless. But hey, history!
The source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
Build locally, watch for changes and rebuild automatically, and start a local server with:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
cd cirosantilli.github.io
bundle install
npm install
./run
Source:
./run
.The website will be visible at: localhost:4000.
Tested on the latest Ubuntu.
Publish changes to GitHub Pages:
git add -u
git commit -m 'make yourself look sillier'
./publish
Source:
./publish
.GitHub forces us to use the master branch for the build output... so the actual source is in the branch
dev
.Update the gems with:
bundle update
git add Gemfile.lock
git commit -m 'update gems'
His website was originally written in markdown, however those were deprecated in favour of AsciiDoctor when Ciro saw the light, rationale shown at: markdown-style-guideuse-asciidoc
GitHub pages is chosen instead of a single page GitHub README.adoc for the following reasons:
- Ciro will want some unsupported extensions, notably mathematics, likely with KaTeX server side:
- github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/pull/3338
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- g14n.info/2014/09/math-on-github-pages/
- stackoverflow.com/questions/11256433/how-to-show-math-equations-in-general-githubs-markdownnot-githubs-blog
- www.quora.com/How-can-I-combine-latex-and-markdown-in-GitHub
- when GitHub dies, Ciro's website URL still lives and retains the PageRank!
HTML canvas Updated 2025-07-16
Here is an animation demo with some useful controls:
HTML snippet:
new class extends OurbigbookCanvasDemo {
init() {
super.init('hello');
this.pixel_size_input = this.addInputAfterEnable(
'Pixel size',
{
'min': 1,
'type': 'number',
'value': 1,
}
);
}
draw() {
var pixel_size = parseInt(this.pixel_size_input.value);
for (var x = 0; x < this.width; x += pixel_size) {
for (var y = 0; y < this.height; y += pixel_size) {
var b = ((1.0 + Math.sin(this.time * Math.PI / 16)) / 2.0);
this.ctx.fillStyle =
'rgba(' +
(x / this.width) * 255 + ',' +
(y / this.height) * 255 + ',' +
b * 255 +
',255)'
;
this.ctx.fillRect(x, y, pixel_size, pixel_size);
}
}
}
}
Human brain Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli feels it is not for his generation though, and that is one of the philosophical things that saddens him the most in this world.
On the other hand, Ciro's playing with the Linux kernel and other complex software which no single human can every fully understand cheer him up a bit. But still, the high level view, that we can have...
For now, Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.
Hyperscale computing Updated 2025-07-16
Basically means "company with huge server farms, and which usually rents them out like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform
IAU designated constellations Updated 2025-07-16
Cover up the entire sky in a compatible way with the traditional constellations. They are also very square, the boundaries consisting only of vertical and horizontal lines on the sphere.
IBM 2017 beryllium hydride ground state calculation on a quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
IBM Generalized Markup Language Updated 2025-07-16
SGML predecessor.
IBM Personal Computer Updated 2025-07-16
Ice Updated 2025-07-16
In informal contexts, it usually refers to the phase of ice observed in atmospheric pressure, Ice Ih.
ICMP runs on top of IP Updated 2025-07-16
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain Cursed ordinal Updated 2025-07-16
These were ordinals that were only indexed in later versions of the script. So to prevent changing the useless indices of existing ordinals, they gave them negative numbers.
Some examples:
- ordinals.com/inscription/4b9a822a057743813efbefa0dd21d0a01342ee793ce2ce5bd499a5f262187553i0 first inscription with no mime type.
- ordinals.com/inscription/2fa287270e4203ca2fc9f82ea3de7a0f7b785875791a76387ef6f4ccbb54eee2i0 is -38:is bugged because it is missing the mime type, on Python:because the
[b"'a\xf9\x19X%\xa8Q\x87SP\xe5\xf2H\xa6\xeew\x0e\x81\xa5hl\xcd\xaa\x97e\xfeqJ\x16\x12?", OP_CHECKSIG, 0, OP_IF, b'ord', 1, b'text/plain', 0, b'Hello World, this is a Rust Taproot test\xe2\x80\xa6', OP_ENDIF]
1
should instead beb'\x01
.
Idaho stop Updated 2025-07-16
In a bicycle you just have too much more control and awareness than in a car, so if the way is completely clear, you should be allowed to stop, look if the way is clear, and then run reds.
IEEE 754 Updated 2025-07-16
Ilana Wisby Updated 2025-07-16
Founding CEO of Oxford Quantum Circuits.
As mentioned at www.investmentmonitor.ai/tech/innovation/in-conversation-with-oxford-quantum-circuits-ilana-wisby she is not the original tech person:Did they mean Oxford Sciences Enterprises? There's nothing called "Oxford Science and Innovation" on Google. Yes, it is just a typo oxfordscienceenterprises.com/news/meet-the-founder-ilana-wisby-ceo-of-oxford-quantum-circuits/ says it clearly:
she was finally headhunted by Oxford Science and Innovation to become the founding CEO of OQC. The company was spun out of Oxford University's physics department in 2017, at which point Wisby was handed "a laptop and a patent".
I was headhunted by Oxford Sciences Enterprises to be the founding CEO of OQC.
oxfordquantumcircuits.com/story mentions that the core patent was by Dr. Peter Leek: www.linkedin.com/in/peter-leek-00954b62/
Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain Eternity Wall Updated 2025-07-16
This website used to allow embedding text messages with OP_RETURN, here's an archive from 2015: web.archive.org/web/20150718052659/http://eternitywall.it/
As of January 2024, it seems to read-only mode, where it simply indexes matching transactions that were made via other means: web.archive.org/web/20230929075331/https://eternitywall.it/
A Reddit announcement from July 2015: www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3dxy9f/eternity_wall_messages_lasting_forever/
There were 3191 hits for the search term:in our data starting with tx a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e (2015-06-24):up to the last entry on tx 28820bc14cf2cfda58ecbc9ac6df3f41a1cb90f4246543f01ba42a5e9dac3cf8 (2023-06-15)no doubt initials of 4 Chinesepeople. A blood brother oath comes to mind, akin to the Oath of the Peach Garden. Will these four be the ones to take down the evil dictator Xi Jinping?
git grep '\bEW '
EW Eternity wall is live
EW May our friendship endure, signed by hg, kty, wjj, and xyz.
The very first message gives away the name of what we assume is a web-based upload system, "EW" being its advertisement signature added to every message.
Running shows that the messages are encoded with OP_RETURN:
bitcoin-cli
:bitcoin-core.cli getrawtransaction a3b3af21514bd79a4cbcac9916a8514636a72d813539192214542fd85247082e true
"vout": [
{
"value": 0.00000000,
"n": 0,
"scriptPubKey": {
"asm": "OP_RETURN 455720457465726e6974792077616c6c206973206c697665
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