Molecular Sciences Course of the University of São Paulo Updated 2025-07-16
Good Portuguese overview: www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1806-11172017000300301&lng=pt&tlng=pt
A fantastic sounding full time 4-year course that any student could transfer to called that teaches various natural science topics, notably mathematics, physics, chemistry and molecular biology.
Many past students Ciro talked to however share a common frustration with the course: in the first 2 years at least, the "basic cycle", you have infinitely many courses, and no time to study, and no choice of what to study, it is only in the latter 2 years (the advanced cycle) that you get the choices.
Also, if you get low grades in a single subject, your out. And exams are useless of course.
Here's a Quora question in Portuguese about the course: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP, the only decent answer so far being: pt.quora.com/Como-funciona-o-tal-do-curso-secreto-da-USP/answer/Victor-Soares-31. Very disappointing to hear.
On the advanced cycle, you have a lot of academic freedom. You are basically supposed to pick a research project with an advisor and go for it, with a small amount of mandatory course hours. Ciro was told in 2022 that you can even have advisors from other universities or industry, and that it is perfectly feasible to take courses in another university and validate the course hours later on. Fantastic!!!
Students from the entire University of São Paulo can apply to transfer to it only after joining the university, with the guarantee that they can go back to their original courses if they don't adapt to the new course, which is great!
Around 2007, they were in a really shady building of the University, but when Ciro checked in 2021, they had apparently moved to a shiny new entrepreneurship-focused building. Fantastic news!!!
One of the Brazilians who came to École Polytechnique together with Ciro was from this course. The fact that he is one of the most intelligent people Ciro knows gave further credit to that course in his eyes.
National Nuclear Security Administration Updated 2025-07-16
Open source software that is not-FOSS Updated 2025-07-16
Permian-Triassic extinction event Updated 2025-07-16
Principle of locality Updated 2025-07-16
Protium Updated 2025-07-16
WYSIWYG Updated 2025-07-16
X Updated 2025-07-16
Waring's problem for squares Updated 2025-10-14
3 is not enough by Legendre's three-square theorem.
The subsets reachable with 2 and 3 squares are fully characterized by Legendre's three-square theorem.
feathers-chat PostgreSQL Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli managed to port it to Sequelize for PostgreSQL as shown at: github.com/cirosantilli/feathers-chat/tree/sequelize-pg
graphviz/hello.dot Updated 2025-07-16
Genetics company Updated 2025-07-16
Gravitational constant Updated 2025-07-16
Historical correspondence between Latin and Greek Updated 2025-07-16
Integer factorization Updated 2025-10-14
Complexity: NP-intermediate as of 2020:
- expected not to be NP-complete because it would imply NP != Co-NP: cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/167/what-are-the-consequences-of-factoring-being-np-complete#comment104849_169
- expected not to be in P because "could we be that dumb that we haven't found a solution after having tried for that long?
Integer multiplication Updated 2025-10-14
Publishing Updated 2025-07-16
The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) Updated 2025-07-16
Version of the Hebrew Bible Updated 2025-07-16
x86 Paging Tutorial The problem with single-level paging Updated 2025-07-16
The problem with a single-level paging scheme is that it would take up too much RAM: 4G / 4K = 1M entries per process.
If each entry is 4 bytes long, that would make 4M per process, which is too much even for a desktop computer:
ps -A | wc -l says that I am running 244 processes right now, so that would take around 1GB of my RAM! Unlisted articles are being shown, click here to show only listed articles.