Ciro Santilli's selfish desires Updated 2025-07-16
Just enough money to raise 3 kids in a rich country without having to work (so he can focus on whatever project he wants) and no more. Then maximize fame.
Fame is slightly convertible into money with generally little liquidity, but is more valuable if money becomes useless in a TEOTWAWKI.
Of course, in the end, one just does whatever seems cool and useful, and the Gods decide what proportion of fame/money/power they will get. Due to Ciro's love of open source software however, a higher fame percentage seems more likely than money.
Searching just for just "Santilli" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits. The name appears to be a minor variation of the much more common "Santini". Since the name is not that common, it is possible to go over all noteworthy hits. Some relevant ones are shown at: interesting members of the Santilli family.
Searching just for just "Ciro" on Google does not give any Ciro Santilli hits, mostly some smaller brands that could be beaten, this is Ciro's main initial fame metric goal. Reaching it would require doing things known much beyond the programming community however, as Ciro has done until of 2019. ciro.com is from an electromechanics consultancy as of 2019, so it's not bad, let them be.
At the next useless gamified level, an honorary OBE and more ambitiously ForMemRS from the Royal Society post nominal letters would be nice.
The ultimate dream however would be to beat Cyrus the Great himself on Google searches ("Ciro" == "Cyrus" in Portuguese), maybe becoming "Cyrus the Greater"? That one will be a bit harder though. Maybe if Falung Gong becomes the dominant religion in 2000 years like Christianism did, catapulting the Judaism benefactor Cyrus into greater fame, then there is some hope for Ciro as well.
Ciro Santilli's sport practice Updated 2025-07-16
Playing soccer just feels amazing, because you are constantly running around, but with a more specific goal in mind: to get that ball into that goal!
Playing soccer was specially amazing in the flat wet sand beach of Santos. weekend, the sea, feet touching the sand, the sun going down, and your school mates next to you. Nirvana.
It is also true that under those conditions, the skin of your feet will get ripped off due to running on the slightly wet and flat sand no matter how thick it has become. But it is worth it.
Teams would often be slit between "the team with shirts vs the team without shirts", who would just take off their shirts. The two best players would take turns picking players into their teams, the first one to pick would be decided by odds and evens (par ou ímpar).
A pair of Havaianas, or Havaianas rip-offs, stuck into the sand, or even just some school bags, would do as a goal posts. More organized people, especially adults, would have their own water pipe goal with a proper net and all. But doing so would spoil the fun of endless discussions if a non flat ball had gone in or not into an imaginary rectangle.
That's how soccer was meant to be played.
Ciro became however disillusioned with soccer after his injury. It is a shame.
And so after that, Ciro decided to dedicate himself to sports where you can't hurt your knee.
Ciro hates water, so swimming is out of the question. What could be more boring than going back and forth on a fixed location a million times to gain some milliseconds?
And so Ciro has been left with the gym as the only main option for a while.
Running would have been a consideration, but Ciro Santilli's legs sometimes itch when he runs.
This is until he ended up living in a place with decent roads for cycling in the late 2010's, which led to Ciro Santilli's cycling.
Video 1.
Adults playing soccer in Santos, São Paulo, Brazil beach on a rainy day
. Source. It is still warm though as you can see from their clothing.
The University of São Paulo had been elected the best South American university in the Times Ranking 2013 (archive) in all subjects.
Ciro finished the course with honors of "The Best Student in Automation and Control of the year 2013".
Ciro didn´t learn basically any control engineering however unfortunately. He did only the 3 base years of the electrical engineering course, and the rest got lost on stupid politics of having to go back to do 6 months from France to validate his Brazilian degree, see also: Section "Don't force international exchange students to come back early".
Ciro's call hierarchy notation Updated 2025-07-16
This is a simple hierarchical plaintext notation Ciro Santilli created to explain programs to himself.
It is usuall created by doing searches in an IDE, and then manually selecting the information of interest.
It attempts to capture intuitive information not only of the call graph itself, including callbacks, but of when things get called or not, by the addition of some context code.
For example, consider the following pseudocode:
f1() {
}

f2(i) {
  if (i > 5) {
    f1()
  }
}

f3() {
  f1()
  f2_2()
}

f2_2() {
  for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {

    f2(i)
  }
}

main() {
  f2_2()
  f3()
}
Supose that we are interested in determining what calls f1.
Then a reasonable call hierarchy for f1 would be:
f2(i)
  if (i > 5) {
    f1()

  f2_2()
    for (i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
      f2(i)

    main
    f3
f3()
  main()
Some general principles:
  • start with a regular call tree
  • to include context:
    • remove any blank lines from the snippet of interest
    • add it indented below the function
    • and then follow it up with a blank line
    • and then finally add any callers at the same indentation level
City of London Updated 2025-07-16
The City of London is an obscene thing. Its existence goes against the will of the greater part of society. All it takes is one glance to see how it is but a bunch of corruption. See e.g.: The Spiders' Web: Britain's Second Empire.
Classical limit Updated 2025-07-16
The idea tha taking the limit of the non-classical theories for certain parameters (relativity and quantum mechanics) should lead to the classical theory.
It appears that classical limit is only very strict for relativity. For quantum mechanics it is much more hand-wavy thing. See also: Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 55.
Classification of closed surfaces Updated 2025-07-16
So simple!! You can either:
A handle cancels out a Möbius strip, so adding one of each does not lead to a new object.
You can glue a Mobius strip into a single hole in dimension larger than 3! And it gives you a Klein bottle!
Intuitively speaking, they can be sees as the smooth surfaces in N-dimensional space (called an embedding), such that deforming them is allowed. 4-dimensions is enough to embed cover all the cases: 3 is not enough because of the Klein bottle and family.
Classification of finite fields Updated 2025-07-16
There's exactly one field per prime power, so all we need to specify a field is give its order, notated e.g. as .
Every element of a finite field satisfies .
It is interesting to compare this result philosophically with the classification of finite groups: fields are more constrained as they have to have two operations, and this leads to a much simpler classification!
Classification of finite groups Updated 2025-07-16
As shown in Video "Simple Groups - Abstract Algebra by Socratica (2018)", this can be split up into two steps:This split is sometimes called the "Jordan-Hölder program" in reference to the authors of the jordan-Holder Theorem.
Good lists to start playing with:
It is generally believed that no such classification is possible in general beyond the simple groups.
Ciro Santilli is very fond of this result: the beauty of mathematics.
How can so much complexity come out from so few rules?
How can the proof be so long (thousands of papers)?? Surprise!!
And to top if all off, the awesomely named monster group could have a relationship with string theory via the monstrous moonshine?
The classification contains:
Video 1.
Simple Groups - Abstract Algebra by Socratica (2018)
Source. Good quick overview.
Classification of regular polytopes Updated 2025-07-16
The 3D regular convex polyhedrons are super famous, have the name: Platonic solid, and have been known since antiquity. In particular, there are only 5 of them.
The counts per dimension are:
DimensionCount
2Infinite
35
46
>43
The cool thing is that the 3 that exist in 5+ dimensions are all of one of the three families:Then, the 2 3D missing ones have 4D analogues and the sixth one in 4D does not have a 3D analogue: the 24-cell. Yes, this is the kind of irregular stuff Ciro Santilli lives for.
Clifford gates Updated 2025-07-16
This gate set alone is not a set of universal quantum gates.
Notably, circuits containing those gates alone can be fully simulated by classical computers according to the Gottesman-Knill theorem, so there's no way they could be universal.
This means that if we add any number of Clifford gates to a quantum circuit, we haven't really increased the complexity of the algorithm, which can be useful as a transformational device.
Climate of the United Kingdom Updated 2025-07-16
British weather is not as bad as the stereotype, at least not in the southern half of the country.
Notably, it does not rain that much, and when it rains, it is a very light rain, which Brazilians from São Paulo or , at most, a "drizzle".
It feels like the weather forecasts are almost always worse than reality, maybe it is a way to not make people disappointed.
What there is relatively a lot of is wind, and fog. But the wind is generally warm and wet, it is very maritime.
Clinton Engineer Works Updated 2025-07-16
Precursor organization to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, name that it took in January 1948.
Produced the enriched uranium used for Little Boy, located in the area/predecessor of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Figure 1.
Y-12 shift change photograph
. Source. At the back, a poster reads:
Make C.E.W. count: continue to protect project information
What a fantastic picture!
High budget movies are shit Updated 2025-07-16
Movies that are very expensive to make tend to be bad, because they have to make returns and thus appeal to a large amorphous population without any specialization, i.e. the lowest common denominator but in TV Tropes terminology rather than mathematics: tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LowestCommonDenominator.
Looking down the largest flops of all time list didn't help much, only Heaven's gate appears reasonable from the top 20.

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