Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

"Ciro" is "Cyrus" from Cyrus the Great in both Portuguese and Italian (although with very different pronunciations), thus doubly appropriate given that Ciro Santilli was born in Brazil, and has Italian ancestry.

After he conquered Babylon in 539 BC from the hands Neo-Babylonian Empire, Cyrus the Great did a great service to the Hebrews by allowing war prisoners that were held in Babylon to back to their home Judea, thus terminating the Babylonian captivity. These Jews were imprisoned because they had previously fought a war or revolted against the Neo-Babylonian Empire and lost. As Wikipedia puts it:He is therefore viewed extremely positively in the good old book. Ciro was quite happy about this name choice by his father, given the human rights connotations of the figure and Ciro Santilli's self perceived compassionate personality.

Particularly fun things related to modern Cyrus are:

Because it belongs to some relatively obscure character of the Bible, the name it has been mostly passed on by writing to every single Christian country, and every single language came up with different way of saying it, because the only place they would possibly hear that name said out loud would be in Church!

As of 2020, the country in which the name is most popular in undoubtedly Italy. In Brazil, it is definitely not common, but also not completely unheard of either, e.g. Ciro Gomes is a notable Brazilian politician.

And Ciro responds to all the versions of the name that he knows of. These include:and glad to add any new ones as they come.

He is actually quite happy when people use the name in their own language, because that means they understand the origin of the name.

Some Ciro's of interest:

Grouping by age as done in traditional education as of 2020 is useless.

Rather, we should group students by subject of interest; e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, a sport, etc., just like in any working adult organization!

This way, younger students can actually actively learn from and collaborate with older students about, see notably Jacques Monod's you can learn more from older students than from faculty.

This becomes even more natural when you try to give students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

This age distinction should be abolished at all stages of the system, not only within K-12, but also across K-12, undergraduate education and postgraduate education.

This idea is part of the ideal that the learning environment should be more like a dojo environment (AKA peer tutoring, see also dojo learning model), rather than an amorphous checkbox ticking exercise in bureaucracy so that "everyone is educated".

Perhaps, even more importantly, is that we should put much more emphasis on grouping students with other students online, where we can select similar interest amongst the entire population and not just on a per-local-neighbourhood basis.

This is the most important of all points.

Don't set goals for your students.

Ask students what they want to do, and help them achieve that goal.

If they don't know what to do, give suggestions of interesting things they could do.

Once they have a goal, just help them learn everything that is needed to achieve that goal

If they don't have a goal, any attempt to learn is a total and complete waste of time.

This is because the universe of potentially useful things that can be learnt is infinite, and no human can ever learn everything.

The only solution, is to try and learn only what seems necessary to reach your goal, and just try to reach your goal instead.

This approach is called backward design.

Also, setting overly ambitious goals, is a good idea: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved.

"Graduating" and "getting a diploma" are not valid goals, because they are useless. A goal has to be either an amazing specific technological or artistic development.

A misogenous Brazilian hacking group:Just kidding.

Some people from them contacted Ciro Santilli after Ciro's initial publishing of CIA 2010 covert communication websites.

After a quick Discord chat with them, it was apparent that these people were really cool and knowledgeable.

Also many of them seem to think university is broken and just go hack straigh away.

A perfect example of a dojo learning model.

Also they don't seem to need sleep. Go figure!

With pepole like this, there's hope for Brazil: Section "What poor countries have to do to get richer".

domain-specific language unfortunately, but at least it's on GitHub, looks promising.

How to play scores and save them to files is discussed at: doc.sccode.org/Guides/Non-Realtime-Synthesis.html

They have a nice looking IDE, but running anything from the command-line interface is super hard, much unlike Csound. How to get a decent hello world: stackoverflow.com/questions/65360414/how-to-play-a-supercollider-file-non-interactively-from-the-terminal-command-lin

Sample composition with custom synths + notes: sccode.org/1-5cl

leanpub.com/ScoringSound looks like a decent tutorial, it is basically the Csound FLOSS manual for SuperCollider.

The literal Chinese name says it all: "Fake Mountain". The stones evoke the feeling of the beautiful rock mountains of China.

The term "奇石假山" (qi2 shi2 jia3 shan1, lit. "weird shaped stone fake mountain") is also used, almost as a synonym by many people, since the stones are often chose in interesting shapes. Choosing the right stone is basically an art form in itself.

The stones used are generally limestone, which as a sedimentary rock is weaker, and more likely to be eroded into interesting shapes.

In Ciro Santilli's view, the following three artists form a Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music:

Elis Regina is not far though.

Ciro remembers quite clearly when he was riding the car with his parents when he pre teen, and he could not understand why they seemed so obsessed with The Trinity et al. Ciro in particular remembers listening to Video "Refazenda by Gilberto Gil (1975)". They had picked it up of course from the 70's and 80's when they were younger.

Young Ciro would also always confuse who was whom from the three of them.

Then Ciro got older, and he understood, they are mind blowing. You do have to look back in time a bit though, lots of lukewarm stuff on later periods. The military dictatorship in Brazil was good for music.

No matter how hight the wave intensity, if it the frequency is small, no photons are removed from the material.

This is different from classic waves where energy is proportional to intensity, and coherent with the existence of photons and the Planck-Einstein relation.

Has $SU(2)$ as a double cover.

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.

See also: there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

Examples of famous fails:

TODO can anything interesting and deep be said about "why phase transition happens?" physics.stackexchange.com/questions/29128/what-causes-a-phase-transition on Physics Stack Exchange

The thing about projects is that they are illiquid: it is not easy to immediately compare them.

And that is the whole point.

The outcome of that however is that you have to learn how to explain what you've achieved to others and why it is awesome.

Just like in the real world.

You have to create portfolio, and do some public relations.

When you do get face to face time with students, don't teach a large group.

Everything you want to teach is already online.

And if it is not, then you are wasting your time saying it face-to-face instead of creating such online resource.

The only goal of meeting students is talking to them individually or in small groups to:

and letting them do the same amongst themselves.

If you talk to a large group, you will only reach / understand a very small percentage of the group, so your time is wasted.

It is better to deeply understand what 25% of the students feel and adapt the course material, than to talk to everyone at once, and have only 5% understand anything.

Likely the best JavaScript 2D game engine as of 2023.Uses Matter.js as a physics engine if enabled. There's also an alternative (in-house?) "arcade" engine: photonstorm.github.io/phaser3-docs/Phaser.Physics.Arcade.ArcadePhysics.html but it appears to be simpler/less robust (but also possibly faster).

TODO any 2D first person examples a bit like Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games?

The examples are present under:but note that that repo is huge, about 4.5 GiB on local disk, as is has tons of assets.

The demos also include a Monaco-editor based sandbox mode where you can edit code directly on the web and see the game update which is a really sweet addition.

Interesting to note that there are quite a few nearer than Sagittarius A, as of 2022 we know of one at 1.5 kly: universemagazine.com/en/discovered-the-closest-black-hole-to-the-sun/

It is interesting that a few months earlier there seemed to be no known specific black holes in the Milky Way: www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2022/hubble-determines-mass-of-isolated-black-hole-roaming-our-milky-way-galaxy although their count is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions.

For comparison, remember that the Milky Way is 185 kly in diameter x 2 kly thick.