Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

This seems to be the "brown Brazilian bean" that many Brazilians eat every day.

Edit: after buying it, not 100% sure. This one felt smaller than what Ciro had in Brazil, borlotti beans might be closer. Pinto beans are smaller, and creamier, and have softer peel, possibly produced less natural gas.

2021-04: second try.

2021-03: did for first time, started with same procedure as borlotti beans 2021-03. Maybe 1h30 is too much. Outcome was still very good.

Proprietary extension to Mozilla rr by rr lead coder Robert O'Callahan et. al, started in 2016 after he quit Mozilla.

TODO what does it add to rr?

Forms the bacterial cell wall.

From the Wikipedia image we can see clearly the polymer structure formed: it is a mesh with:

There are two main ways to try and reach AGI:Which one of them to take is of of the most important technological questions of humanity according to Ciro Santilli

There is also an intermediate area of research/engineering where people try to first simulate the robot and its world realistically, use the simulation for training, and then transfer the simulated training to real robots, see e.g.: realistic robotics simulation.

This one might actually be understandable! It is what Richard Feynman starts to explain at: Richard Feynman Quantum Electrodynamics Lecture at University of Auckland (1979).

The difficulty is then proving that the total probability remains at 1, and maybe causality is hard too.

The path integral formulation can be seen as a generalization of the double-slit experiment to infinitely many slits.

Feynman first stared working it out for non-relativistic quantum mechanics, with the relativistic goal in mind, and only later on he attained the relativistic goal.

TODO why intuitively did he take that approach? Likely is makes it easier to add special relativity.

This approach more directly suggests the idea that quantum particles take all possible paths.

One cool thing we did in this procedure was to use magnetic separation with magnetic beads to further concentrate the DNA: Figure 1. "GE MagRack 6 pipetting.".

The beads are coated to stick to the DNA, which allows us to easily extract the DNA from the rest of the solution. This is cool, but bio people are borderline obsessed by those beads! Go figure!

Then we prepared the DNA for sequencing with the Oxford Nanopore specific part: Oxford Nanopore SQK-LSK109 Ligation Sequencing Kit.

Here some of the steps required a bit more of vortexing for mixing the reagents, and for this we used the VELP Scientifica WIZARD IR Infrared Vortex Mixer which appears to be quicker to use and not as strong as the Vortex Genie 2 previously used to break up the cells:

After all that was done, the DNA of the several 400 ml water bottles and hours of hard purification labour were contained in one single Eppendorf!

After filtration, all DNA should present in the filter, so we cut the paper up with scissors and put the pieces into an Eppendorf: Video 1. "Cutting vacuum pump filter and placing it in Eppendorf".

Now that we had the DNA in Eppendorfs, we were ready to continue the purification in a simpler and more standardized lab pipeline fashion.

First we added some small specialized beads and chemicals to the water and shook them Eppendorfs hard in a Scientific Industries Inc. Vortex-Genie 2 machine to break the cell and free the DNA.

Once that was done, we added several reagents which split the solution into two phases: one containing the DNA and the other not. We would then pipette the phase with the DNA out to the next Eppendorf, and continue the process.

In one step for example, the DNA was present as a white precipitate at the bottom of the tube, and we threw away the supernatant liquid: Figure 1. "White precipitate formed with Qiagen DNeasy PowerWater Kit".

At various stages, centrifuging was also necessary. Much like the previous vacuum pump step, this adds extra gravity to speed up the separation of phases with different molecular masses.

In our case, we used a VWR Micro Star 17 microcentrifuge for those steps:

Then, when we had finally finished all the purification steps, we measured the quantity of DNA with a Biochrom SimpliNano spectrophotometer to check that the purification went well:

And because the readings were good, we put it in our -20 C fridge to preserve it until the second day of the workshop and called it a day:

The first thing we did was to filter the water samples with a membrane filter that is so fine that not even bacteria can pass through, but water can.

Therefore, after filtration, we would have all particles such as bacteria and larger dirt pieces in the filter.

From the 1 liter in each bottle, we only used 400 ml because previous experiments showed that filtering the remaining 600 ml is very time consuming because the membrane filter gets clogged up.

Therefore, the filtration step allows us to reduce those 400 ml volumes to more manageable Eppendorf tube volumes: Figure 1. "An Eppendorf tube". Reagents are expensive, and lab bench centrifuges are small!

Since the filter is so fine, filtering by gravity alone would take forever, and so we used a vacuum pump to speed thing up!

For that we used:

biochromspectros.com/spectrophotometers/simplinano-cat/simplinano-spectrophotometer.html (archive)

Manual: biochromspectros.com/media/wysiwyg/support_page/support-simplinano/Simplinano-UM.pdf (archive)

If enough people use it, we could let people sell knowledge content through us.

Teachers have the incentive of making open source to get more students.

Students pay when they want help to learn something.

We take a cut of the transactions.

However this goes a bit against our "open content" ideal.

Forced sponsorware would be a possibility.

Would be a bit like Fiverr. Hmmm, maybe this is not a good thing ;-)

A list of reviews of such systems is maintained at:

This is the class of existing software the perhaps comes the closest to OurBigBook, in particular systems such as:

While we believe that OurBigBook can hold its own against most of them as a personal knowledge base, there is one feature which we believe truly distinguishes OurBigBook from all others in a big way: trustless mind meld with the OurBigBook topic feature, which no other system seems to have.

Many such systems are also no publishing focused enough, and are more focused only in maintaining people's private knowledge bases. Some of them don't even have publishing at all, or its complicated. While publishing is optional in OurBigBook, it is a crucial feature and extremely well supported.

Start with consulting for universities to get some cash flowing.

Help teachers create perfect courses.

At the same time, develop the website, and use the generated content to bootstrap it.

Choose a domain of knowledge, generate perfect courses for it, and find all teachers of the domain in the world who are teaching that and help them out.

Then expand out to other domains.

TODO: which domain of knowledge should we go for? The more precise the better.

Not really dedicated to open source course material, nor to free courses...

The "Open" in its name only made sense in the 60's, when it was founded, nowadays, there isn't much about this institution that is very different compared to traditional Oxbridge. "Cheap more online university" would be a more adequate name for it.

A system that would truly live up to the name "Open" in the year 2020 is the one described at the ideal university by Ciro Santilli.

Wikipedia even says that the initial focus was on broadcasting learning material on television and radio, so what happened to that now that we have an even more powerful on-demand tool called Internet!

They even created their own MOOC website, FutureLearn. But www.freecodecamp.org/news/massive-open-online-courses-started-out-completely-free-but-where-are-they-now-1dd1020f59/ mentions:OMG. God why.

A few open sources at: www.open.edu/openlearn/free-courses. The 5-hour course on particle physics says it all. Stated as of 2023 at www.open.ac.uk/about/open-educational-resources/openlearn/free-learning:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj0rbafFBak What's an Open University Degree Like? by Luke Cutforth (2021) mentions that it is more autodidactic/online, and it encourages part time learning.

youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=99 Open University - How does it work? by Matt Greg Vlogs (2017) shows that they do have their own custom institutional material. And it is not open???? Please. youtu.be/rsWwffX-u0A?t=222 mentions that there is no entry exam, and you can change your courses at any time, that is good at least.

Israel apparently also created their own version in the 70's inspired by the British one: Open University of Israel. Same story it seems.

It is rare to find a project with such a ridiculously high importance over funding ratio.

E.g., as of 2020, their help login help.openstreetmap.org/ shows MyOpenID as an option, which was discontinued in 2014, and not Google OAuth.

They do still seem to have a bit more activity than gis.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/openstreetmap on Stack Exchange.

Complaints:

All of this is a shame, because they do have some incredible data that you cannot find easily on other maps because people just edited it up.

John Thompson's Guqin website.

Holy crap amazing list of Guqin pieces by the guy for MP3 download! www.silkqin.com/06hear.htm And the explanations are insane. What a dude. Ciro Santilli's hero.

Download all MP3:

Ciro Santilli Contacted John by email in 2019 telling him to put his stuff on YouTube and offering help, and he replied, but nothing came of it unfortunately. Edit: he uploaded a bunch of videos of him playing live in 2020! www.youtube.com/user/silkqin/videos

John focuses on playing the tunes in a "historically informed performance", in particular using silk strings rather than metal ones which are used by most modern artists: www.silkqin.com/08anal/hip.htm

Like Reddit (option to allow it per community added in late 2021) and support.google.com/.

And of course, 4chan just takes that to a whole new level, usually closing on the same day, and then getting deleted within a week. Why would anyone contribute non-illegal content to that king of system?!

Ridiculous, so when new information comes out, we just duplicate all the old comments on a new thread again?

Remember, Ciro Santilli is the Necromancer God.

Dan Dascalescu agrees for Reddit specifically: www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/9oujwf/why_archiving_old_threads_is_a_bigger_problem/