OurBigBook.com Funding Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro is looking for:
- university teachers who might be interested in trying it out as described at Section "Action plan", especially those who already use open licenses for their lecture notes
- funding possibilities for this project, including donations as mentioned at Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com" and contracts
The initial incentive for the creators is to make them famous and allow them to get more fulfilling jobs more easily, although Ciro also wants to add money transfer mechanisms to it later on.
We can't rely on teachers writing materials, because they simply don't have enough incentive: publication count is all that matters to their careers. The students however, are desperate to prove themselves to the world, and becoming famous for amazing educational content is something that some of them might want to spend their times on, besides grinding for useless grade.
OurBigBook.com Learning management systems Updated 2025-07-16
This website basically aims to be a learning management system, allowing in particular a teacher to focus his help on students that he is legally obliged to help due to their job. But it will have the following unusual characteristics in current LMS solutions:
- public first, to allow reuse across universities, rather than paywalled as is the case for most top universities
- students can create material just like teachers, both are on equal footing. Students/teachers will see an indicator "this is your teacher"/"this is your student for this/past semester", but that is the only difference between their interfaces.
Gallatin School of Individualized Study Updated 2025-07-16
Gallium arsenide Updated 2025-07-16
This is apparently the most important III-V semiconductor, it seems to actually have some applications, see also: gallium arsenide vs silicon.
Gallium arsenide vs silicon Updated 2025-07-16
Trying to use gallium arsenide was Seymour Cray's fatal last flaw as mentioned at The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997).
The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997) page 4 mentions:
Cray wanted his new machine to employ circuits made from a material called gallium arsenide. Gallium arsenide had achieved limited success, particularly in satellite communications and military electronics. But no one had succeeded with it in anything so complicated as a computer. In the computer industry, engineers had developed a saying: "Gallium arsenide is the technology of the future," they would say. "And it always will be."
Game of chance Updated 2025-07-16
The definition is not very precise, as in many games with random elements there is a mixture of both skill and luck.
So we just use the precise Non-deterministic game term instead for any game that has any random element beyond the control of the players.
Gao Qiu Updated 2025-07-16
He is extremely despicable and petty, enjoys only useless things, and is vengeful and disloyal. Rooting for sport teams is stupid.
Gauge block Updated 2025-07-16
Highlighted at the Origins of Precision by Machine Thinking (2017).
gcc
-save-temps Updated 2025-07-16Saves preprocessor output and generated assembly to separate files.
- preprocessor:
- assembly:
Generative AI by modality Updated 2025-07-16
Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) Updated 2025-07-16
It has some overlap with Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which it likely takes as primary sources of some stories.
However, while Surely goes into a lot of detail of each event, this book paints a more cohesive and global picture of things.
In terms of hard physics/mathematics, this book takes the approach of spending a few paragraphs in some chapters describing in high level terms some of the key ideas, which is a good compromise. It does sometime fall into the sin of to talk about something without giving the real name to not scare off the audience, but it does give a lot of names, notably it talks a lot about Lagrangian mechanics. And it goes into more details than Surely in any case.
Genome Updated 2025-07-16
Genomics Updated 2025-07-16
Geographic information system file format Updated 2025-07-16
Gilberto Gil Updated 2025-07-16
Gilberto is definitely the most psychedelic/tribal one of the The Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music, though he also has a boyish quality to his soul.
He is also perhaps the one that impresses Ciro Santilli the most, at times he can't help but feel:
OMG how the hell did he come up with that?!
OurBigBook.com Manifesto Updated 2025-07-16
Education has become an expensive bureaucratic exercise, completely dissociated from reality and usefulness.
It completely rejects what the individual wants to achieve, and instead attempts to mass homogenize and test people through endless hours of boredom.
And the only goals it achieves are testing student's resilience to stress, and facilitating the finding of sexual partners. True learning is completely absent.
Teachers only teach because they have to do it to get paid, not for passion. Their only true incentive is co-authoring papers.
Education is meant to help us, the students, achieve our goals through passionate learning.
And, we, the students, are individuals, with different goals and capabilities.
The way we protest is to publish the knowledge from University for free, on the Internet, so that anyone can access it.
And we do this is a law-abiding way, without copyright infringement, so that no one can legally take it down.
We come to our courses just for the useless roll calls. But we already know all the subject better than the "teacher" on the very first day.
And we are already more famous than the "teacher" online, and through the Internet have already taught more way way more people than they ever will.
The effect of this is to demoralize the entire school system at all levels, until only one conclusion is possible: implosion.
And from the ashes of the old system, we will build a new one, which does only what matters with absolute efficiency: help the individual students achieve their goals.
A system in which the only reason why university exist will be to allow the most knowledgeable students to access million dollar laboratory equipment, and to pay the most prolific content creators so they can continue content creating.
No more useless courses. No more useless tests. Only passion, usefulness and focus.
OurBigBook.com PageRank-like ranking Updated 2025-07-16
It would be really cool to have a PageRank-link algorithm that answers the key questions:However, Ciro has decided to leave this for phase two action plan, because it is impossible to tune such an algorithm if you have no users or test data.
- what is the best content for subject X.For example, if you are reading
cirosantilli/riemann-integraland it is crap, you would be able to click the buttonwhich leads you to the URL: ourbigbook.com/subject/mathematics. This URL then contains a list of all pages people have written about the subjectVersions by other authors
mathematics, sorted by some algorithm, containing for example: - who knows the most about subject X. This can be found by visiting: ourbigbook.com/users/mathematics "Top Mathematics users", which would contain the list of users sorted by the algorithm:
Perhaps it is also worth looking into ExpertRank, they appear to do some kind of "expert in this area", but with clustering (unlike us, where the clustering would be more explicit).
Other dump of things worth looking into:
GHDL Updated 2025-07-16
Examples under vhdl.
Run all examples, which have assertions in them:
cd vhdl
./runFiles:
- Examples
- Basic
- vhdl/hello_world_tb.vhdl: hello world
- vhdl/min_tb.vhdl: min
- vhdl/assert_tb.vhdl: assert
- Lexer
- vhdl/comments_tb.vhdl: comments
- vhdl/case_insensitive_tb.vhdl: case insensitive
- vhdl/whitespace_tb.vhdl: whitespace
- vhdl/literals_tb.vhdl: literals
- Flow control
- vhdl/procedure_tb.vhdl: procedure
- vhdl/function_tb.vhdl: function
- vhdl/operators_tb.vhdl: operators
- Types
- vhdl/integer_types_tb.vhdl: integer types
- vhdl/array_tb.vhdl: array
- vhdl/record_tb.vhdl.bak: record. TODO fails with "GHDL Bug occurred" on GHDL 1.0.0
- vhdl/generic_tb.vhdl: generic
- vhdl/package_test_tb.vhdl: Packages
- vhdl/standard_package_tb.vhdl: standard package
- textio
* vhdl/write_tb.vhdl: write
* vhdl/read_tb.vhdl: read - vhdl/std_logic_tb.vhdl: std_logic
- vhdl/stop_delta_tb.vhdl:
--stop-delta
- Basic
- Applications
- Combinatoric
- vhdl/adder.vhdl: adder
- vhdl/sqrt8_tb.vhdl: sqrt8
- Sequential
- vhdl/clock_tb.vhdl: clock
- vhdl/counter.vhdl: counter
- Combinatoric
- Helpers
* vhdl/template_tb.vhdl: template
OurBigBook.com Stack Exchange Updated 2025-07-16
Stack Exchange solves to a good extent the use cases:
points of view. It is a big open question if we can actually substantially improve it.
Major shortcoming are mentioned at idiotic Stack Overflow policies:
- Scope restrictions can lead to a lot of content deletion: closing questions as off-topicThis greatly discourages new users, who might still have added value to the project.On our website, anyone can post anything that is legal in a given country. No one can ever delete your content if it is legal, no matter their reputation.
- Although you can answer your own question, there's no way to write an organized multi-page book with Stack Exchange due to shortcomings such as no table of contents, 30k max chars on answer, huge risk of deletion due to "too broad"
- Absolutely no algorithmic attempt to overcome the fastest gun in the West problem (early answers have huge advantage over newer ones): meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/404535/closing-an-old-upvoted-question-as-duplicate-of-new-unvoted-questions/404567#404567
- Native reputation system:
- if the living ultimate God of
C++upvotes you, you get10reputation - if the first-day newb of
Javaupvotes you, you also get10reputation
- if the living ultimate God of
- Randomly split between sites like Stack Overflow vs Super User, with separate user reputations, but huge overlaps, and many questions that appears as dupes on both and never get merged.
- Possible edit wars, just like Wikipedia, but these are much less common since content ownership is much clearer than in Wikipedia however
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Bioinformatics Updated 2025-07-16
Because Ciro's a software engineer, and he's done enough staring in computers for a lifetime already, and he believes in the power of Git, he didn't pay much attention to this part ;-)
According to the eLife paper, the code appears to have been uploaded to: github.com/d-j-k/puntseq. TODO at least mention the key algorithms used more precisely.
Ciro can however see that it does present interesting problems!
Because it was necessary to wait for 2 days to get our data, the workshop first reused sample data from previous collections done earlier in the year to illustrate the software.
First there is some signal processing/machine learning required to do the base calling, which is not trivial in the Oxford Nanopore, since neighbouring bases can affect the signal of each other. This is mostly handled by Oxford Nanopore itself, or by hardcore programmers in the field however.
After the base calling was done, the data was analyzed using computer programs that match the sequenced 16S sequences to a database of known sequenced species.
This is of course not just a simple direct string matching problem, since like any in experiment, the DNA reads have some errors, so the program has to find the best match even though it is not exact.
The PuntSeq team would later upload the data to well known open databases so that it will be preserved forever! When ready, a link to the data would be uploaded to: www.puntseq.co.uk/data
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