Hermitian matrix Updated +Created
Banheiros da USP Updated +Created
Semi-comical student website to review the toilets of the University of São Paulo. Some of the toilets had a reputation for being terrible.
One is reminded of Crushbridge.
São Remo, the favela next to USP Updated +Created
While in Brazil, Ciro Santilli used to walk through the outskirts of a small favela to get to university every day, the Favela de São Remo.
To the left, the outer walls of a large police station, with concertina wire on top and all.
To the right, dudes selling drugs on the entry of a small corridor street, presumably to which they could easily escape to in case of need.
The cops could have identified the dealers with binoculars if they actually wanted to!!!
The drug sellers did keep the peace in their business area, and Ciro never got robbed, and would come back from university parties on foot late through the favela.
But Ciro's friends did say that things got much worse after Ciro left, for example a flash kidnapping was reported in 2015.
Wikipedia says that this favela started in the 60s and 70s as settlements of the builders of the University, and that many of the people there still work for the University.
This is consistent with the terribly old buildings Ciro saw when he was at university. They even had the building skills to build their own homes.
The state just has to either legalize those people, or give them houses somewhere else nearby. A world class University is the most important thing a poor country can have, and its image cannot be jeopardized like that.
The existence of that favela, right next to one of the most important universities in Latin America, puts Brazil's surreal social inequality into perspective. Especially considering that before extremely heavy university entry quotas were added, basically all students of the university (or at least of the courses that lead to high paying jobs) had attended private schools, and therefore were not of the poorer classes (see passage about 10 out 500 passage from Section "Free gifted education").
The janitors of the apartment block Ciro lived all lived in the favela. Yes, in poor countries lives are worth nothing, and some poorer people work by watching the entrance of buildings of less poor people 24/7 to guard it from other even more desperate poor people who might want to rob the not so poor inhabitants. They also do janitor jobs like cleaning common areas in parallel.
They were incredibly nice hard-working people, and Ciro spoke often with them. If only given the opportunity, those people could be amazing engineers or scientists obviously. Ciro was also glad to be their friends, and sat down with them quite a few times for several minutes after coming back from University parties, partly because he felt bad about them having to work at that time, but also partly because he just liked them. And they were always up to date on who had come back with a girl to the apartment or not. Ciro imagines that if it had been him, it would have been a perfect bragging opportunity ;)
They had "nothing" but were still happy. This is true wisdom, and a good reminder that all our non-transhumanist technical goals are nothing.
We must destroy social inequality.
Freely licensed Bibles Updated +Created
How can you make a translation of the Bible and not put it in the public domain???? You tell me, you tell me.
With Falun Gong it's even more fun: the words of God Himself are will be copyrighted for a while after Li Hongzhi dies!!!
Septuagint Updated +Created
It is fun to see that some New Testament sources cite this Greek version rather than more ancient ones because they or their listeners would not understand the other original languages.
Electroweak interaction Updated +Created
Video 1.
Electroweak Theory and the Origin of the Fundamental Forces by PBS Space Time (2020)
Source. Unsatisfactory, as usual.
Ciro Santilli's minor projects Updated +Created
These are some smaller projects that Ciro Santilli carried out. They are all either for fun, or misguided use of his time done by an younger self:
Hell Updated +Created
Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo Updated +Created
Vimium Updated +Created
Since you can't escape shitty browser GUIs and live in the command line, the next best thing you can do is to bring Vim bindings to your browser :-)
There is one major annoyance: you can't use ESC to leave the address bar focus, but using Tab as a workaround works:
csvgrep and select column in csvkit Updated +Created
There seems to be no way without a pipe, you seem to need to reparse the columns, e.g. the tutorial at: csvkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial/2_examining_the_data.html#csvgrep-find-the-data-you-need does:
csvcut -c county,item_name,total_cost data.csv | csvgrep -c county -m LANCASTER
École Polytechnique student-managed web service Updated +Created
Cataclysm DDA save scum Updated +Created
Tested as of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead 0.E-3-1, seems possible built-in:
  • Disable autosave on settings
  • Quisave (Esc + 9)
  • To restore the save, just close the game window directly before clicking Yes or No on the "Watch the last moments of your life" dialog.
A less risky save scum can be achieved with rsync:
rsync -av ~/.local/share/cataclysm-dda/save/ ~/.local/share/cataclysm-dda/save.bak/
and after you die:
rsync -av ~/.local/share/cataclysm-dda/save.bak/ ~/.local/share/cataclysm-dda/save/
L-Amino acid Updated +Created
The common ones.
Large Magellanic Cloud Updated +Created
One of the brightest natural objects in the sky, and by far the brightest not in the Milky Way! This is partly because it is relatively close to us.
Shai Reshef Updated +Created

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