Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

This is one of the main reasons why Ciro Santilli invested in OurBigBook.com.

Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher's main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.

Everything else, the student must choose.

This idea is generally known as self-directed learning.

This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to waste one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don't want to risk another year of their lives.

And importantly: It must be easy to change your area of study.

Ciro saw this first hand École Polytechnique which was way freer than his university in Brazil.

Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.

Interesting projects:

Godfrey Hounsfield, 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:^[ref]

Related ideas:

What you Google-into when trying to understand English slangs as of 2020.

Once upon a time (early 2010's), Eclipse dominated the IDE landscape and all was good. NetBeans was around too. And Java was still unmarred by Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc..

But then something happened.

For some reason, Eclipse started to decay.

And the project that had once been a vibrant community of awesomeness, started to become... a zombie of its former self.

Buggyness started increasing. And not even hard to fix bugs. One liners that affect every user immediately after startup.

Sometimes, to Eclipse's defense they weren't "bugs". Just features that it became evident with time every programmer expected from a modern IDE.

But somehow the Eclipse community had a deep problem. A cancer. It had completely lost touch with user experience.

Perhaps is was due to the increasing interest of the several corporations that had adopted Eclipse as the base IDE for the proprietary solutions?

Perhaps.

Many users stuck to the IDE.

Some heroic efforts were made as plugins that drastically improved certain defects. The Darkest Dark plugin comes to mind.

But all those efforts required configuration. A setup time that most users simply don't have. The core devteam had become dumb and dead, unable to incorporate such changes.

This greatly opened up the space for other competing IDEs to come along. The "semi feature complete but at least easy to use and not so buggy" Visual Studio Code and the proprietary JetBrains IDEs being some of the most notable ones.

Using Eclipse as of the early 2020's is such a mixed experience. If you spend enough time to configure out the key buggyness, there are moments where you can feel "OMG, this feature is amazing".

But the effort is just too great, and soon another bug or obvious missing feature hits you and brings you back to reality.

Every young person uses VS Code now. Eclipse is dead, and there is no way back, usage will just continue dropping.

RIP, Eclipse. It wasn't meant to be.

Bibliography:

Islam has some really nice things in it.

The way it was perverted to be used as a tool for terrorism by some is a great tragedy.

Ciro Santilli especially appreciates the ideas of

This paper appears to calculate the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom.

TODO is this the original paper on the Schrödinger equation?

Published on Annalen der Physik in 1926.

Open access in German at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/andp.19263840404 which gives volume 384, Issue 4, Pages 361-376. Kudos to Wiley for that. E.g. Nature did not have similar policies as of 2023.

This paper may have fallen into the public domain in the US in 2022! On the Internet Archive we can see scans of the journal that contains it at: ia903403.us.archive.org/29/items/sim_annalen-der-physik_1926_79_contents/sim_annalen-der-physik_1926_79_contents.pdf. Ciro Santilli extracted just the paper to: commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AQuantisierung_als_Eigenwertproblem.pdf. It is not as well processed as the Wiley one, but it is of 100% guaranteed clean public domain provenance! TODO: hmmm, it may be public domain in the USA but not Germany, where 70 years after author deaths rules, and Schrodinger died in 1961, so it may be up to 2031 in that country... messy stuff. There's also the question of wether copyright is was tranferred to AdP at publication or not.

An early English translation present at Collected Papers On Wave Mechanics by Deans (1928).

Contains formulas such as the Schrödinger equation solution for the hydrogen atom (1''):where: