There is just one key gotcha: the project has to be useful.
For an example with context, have a look at E. Coli K-12 MG1655 and the second protein of the genome, e. Coli K-12 MG1655 gene thrA.
Ciro Santilli is against affirmative action university entry quotas that reserve spaces e.g. for students from discriminated races or poor families. Instead, he believes that affirmative action should take place on earlier stages of education as described at: free gifted education.
Notably, Brazil has implemented a very heavy university entry quota system after Ciro had left university there: www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-23862676
This is of course easy for a white male from a privileged background to say, and infinite debate has already been had on this matter, but here goes again.
First, in defense to the personal attack, Ciro raises the fact that he has dedicated large chunks (all?) of his life to open source software and knowledge in general, which Ciro believes is the only way to actually make the world fairer to poor countries. His money (time) is where his mouth is.
One good argument in favor of the Brazilian quota system, is that the kids who enter university because of quotas do just as well as those who don't.
Ciro has actually believes that this is possible, and offers the following possible explanation: most of pre-university knowledge is useless, and university selection system is crap, and Ciro wants to destroy it with a system in which anyone can learn university stuff from home.
Both the top end of the quota and non-quota kids are basically equally capable of doing useful stuff therefore.
And possibly more importantly than knowledge, Ciro saw many of his colleagues (basically all of which were from relatively privileged backgrounds) "do badly" in university, because of lack of motivation, because they had chosen a course only to find that they were not interested in it because the existing high school educational system is crap and does not help them find what they love and because it costs you several years of your life to change your choice in most universities (long live École Polytechnique).
Maybe the fact that poor kids know that they are fucked if they fail, and so they have to succeed at any cost, might also help with motivation. Which is a terrible terrible thing, because only those who have to leeway to take risks end up taking them and making the the next big thing.
Ciro believes instead that only once kids have learnt university level stuff in their area of interest for free on the Internet should they go through selection based on that specific and much more concentrated useful knowledge.
And this competition must only be used to distribute resources which you can't learn from fucking computers:
- laboratories. Actually, one of Ciro's most important advices to kids nowadays is: when in doubt, choose the course that has the most experimental work
- one to one mentorship on advanced master thesis/PhD level projects
Once this point knowledge is reached however, it starts to become unclear if a single "everyone takes the same test to avoid discrimination" test is feasible anymore, and we start entering the much more relevant (and potentially discriminatory) "I am a teacher trying to advance the state of the art, and I need a person mildly skilled in the art to do some slave labor for me", which is PhDs selection work.
If quota are in place, what will happen is that parents of the rich kids will start investing less in education, and possibly just put their kids in high schools, and do home schooling instead. This would therefore reduce the total investments the country makes in education!
Outside of the obvious technical evolution proposed, Ciro is a huge proponent of free gifted education. Or closely related, creating scholarships that focus on poor students. The entry requirements should be the same, but once you qualify, everyone should have enough money to lead a decent life during their studies.
Then let those kids pass exactly the same university entry exams, and watch them crush the average privileged kids.
This advice is similar to what is mentioned at: what poor countries have to do to get richer. When you don't have money to do everything, you must select a few good bets and focus on them. You can't pay a lot to every public school teacher, so you must select a few select places that need it the most. As those smart bets pay off, you start to have more and more money to expand the system further.
Inside Westside Barbell by Vice News (2018)
Source. One sentence of this nice documentary about the notorious Westside Barbell gym where the openly pro-performance-enhancing-drug powerlifting legend leader and cult-leader-like personality Louis Simmons teaches just stuck to Ciro Santilli's mind. His top tenant and manager Tom Barry talks about Louis:Ciro admires this level of focus, directness and meritocracy. Just don't take drugs, children. Louis' creation of a cult-like training atmosphere is another interesting aspect, see also: Section "Group students by interest, not by age".
The man [Louis] lives in his own world, and he just rejects everything outside of it, it doesn't matter. Like: "what's your name"? He doesn't care. If you lift numbers, he cares about that, that's more important.
Started in 1987 and written in Pascal, by the French from Pierre and Marie Curie University, the French are really strong in numerical analysis.
The fact that French wrote it can be seen in the documentation, for example doc.freefem.org/tutorials/index.html uses file extension
mycode.edp instead of mycode.pde where dep stands for "Équation aux dérivées partielles".Besides the painful build, using FreeFem is relatively simple, as can be seen from the examples on the website.
They do use a domain-specific language on the examples, which appears to be the main/only interface, which is a bad thing, Ciro would rather have a Python API as the "main API", which is more the approach taken by the FEniCS Project, but so be it. This domain-specific language business means that you always stumble upon basic stuff you want to do but can't, and then you have to think about how to share data between the simulation and the plotting. The plotting notably is super complex and they can't implement all of what people want, upstream examples often offload that to gnuplot. This is potentially a big advantage of FEniCS Project.
It nice though that they do have some graphics out of the box, as that allows to quickly debug common problems.
Uses variational formulation of a partial differential equation, which is not immediately obvious to beginners? The introduction doc.freefem.org/tutorials/poisson.html gives an ultra quick example, but your are mostly on your own with that.
On Ubuntu 20.04, the
freefem is a bit out-of-date (3.5.8, there isn't even a tag for that in the GitHub repo, and refs/tags/release_3_10 is from 2010!) and fails to run the examples from the website. It did work with the example package though, but the output does not have color, which makes me sad :-)sudo apt install freefem freefem-examples
freefem /usr/share/doc/freefem-examples/heat.pdeSo let's just compile the latest v4.6 it from source, on Ubuntu 20.04:
sudo apt build-dep freefem
git clone https://github.com/FreeFem/FreeFem-sources
cd FreeFem-sources
# Post v4.6 with some fixes.
git checkout 3df0e2370d9752801ac744b11307b14e16743a44
# Won't apply automatically due to tab hell.
# https://superuser.com/questions/607410/how-to-copy-paste-tab-characters-via-the-clipboard-into-terminal-session-on-gnom
git apply <<'EOS'
diff --git a/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile b/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile
index dc62ab06..13cd3253 100644
--- a/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile
+++ b/3rdparty/ff-petsc/Makefile
@@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ $(SRCDIR)/tag-make-real:$(SRCDIR)/tag-conf-real
$(SRCDIR)/tag-install-real :$(SRCDIR)/tag-make-real
cd $(SRCDIR) && $(MAKE) PETSC_DIR=$(PETSC_DIR) PETSC_ARCH=fr install
-test -x "`type -p otool`" && make changer
- cd $(SRCDIR) && $(MAKE) PETSC_DIR=$(PETSC_DIR) PETSC_ARCH=fr check
+ #cd $(SRCDIR) && $(MAKE) PETSC_DIR=$(PETSC_DIR) PETSC_ARCH=fr check
test -e $(DIR_INSTALL_REAL)/include/petsc.h
test -e $(DIR_INSTALL_REAL)/lib/petsc/conf/petscvariables
touch $@
@@ -293,7 +293,6 @@ $(SRCDIR)/tag-tar:$(PACKAGE)
-tar xzf $(PACKAGE)
patch -p1 < petsc-hpddm.patch
ifeq ($(WIN32DLLTARGET),)
- patch -p1 < petsc-metis.patch
endif
touch $@
$(PACKAGE):
EOS
autoreconf -i
./configure --enable-download --enable-optim --prefix="$(pwd)/../FreeFem-install"
./3rdparty/getall -a
cd 3rdparty/ff-petsc
make petsc-slepc
cd -
./reconfigure
make -j`nproc`
make install
cd ../FreeFem-install
PATH="${PATH}:$(pwd)/bin" ./bin/FreeFem++ ../FreeFem-sources/examples/tutorial/Ciro's initial build experience was a bit painful, possibly because it was done on a relatively new Ubuntu 20.04 as of June 2020, but in the end it worked: github.com/FreeFem/FreeFem-sources/issues/141
users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~lvovsky/B3/ contain assorted PDFs from between 2015 and 2019
Syllabus reads:
- Multi-electron atoms: central field approximation, electron configurations, shell structure, residual electrostatic interaction, spin orbit coupling (fine structure).
- Spectra and energy levels: Term symbols, selection rules, X-ray notation, Auger transitions.
- Hyperfine structure; effects of magnetic fields on fine and hyperfine structure. Presumably Zeeman effect.
- Two level system in a classical light field: Rabi oscillations and Ramsey fringes, decaying states; Einstein
- A and B coefficients; homogeneous and inhomogeneous broadening of spectral lines; rate equations.
- Optical absorption and gain: population inversion in 3- and 4-level systems; optical gain cross section; saturated absorption and gain.
Professor in 2000s seems to beBut as of 2023 marked emeritus, so who took over?
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ewart. He actually fought not to be dismissed by age and won!
- www.physics.ox.ac.uk/our-people/ewart
Ewart is actually religious:This dude is pure trouble for Oxford!
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=aulL-Qa65i0 Paul Ewart, Chance, Science and Spirituality by Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Oh, he is/was actually chairman of that crap
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVX2F4XvGYo Chaos and the Character of God by Prof. Paul Ewart
Undated materials Ewart:
- users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~ewart/index.htm
- users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~ewart/Atomic%20Physics%20lecture%20notes%20C%20port.pdf
- slides: users.physics.ox.ac.uk/~ewart/Atomic%20Physics%20Lecture%20PPT%20slides%201_8.pdf. Also under: www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2011-10-19/atomic_physics_lectures_1_8_09_pdf_pdf_18283.pdf. The course was previously B1, they just change the IDs randomly from time to time to fit the B1-7 numbering.
users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0014/B6-lectures.html gives a syllabus:
- Heat capacity in solids, localised harmonic oscillator models (Dulong-Petit law and Einstein model)
- Heat capacity in solids, a model of sound waves (Debye model)
- A gas of classical charged particles (Drude theory)
- A gas of charged fermions (Sommerfeld theory)
- Bonding
- Microscopic theory of vibrations: the 1D monatomic harmonic chain. Mike Glazer's Chainplot program.
- Microscopic theory of vibrations: the 1D diatomic harmonic chain
- Microscopic theory of electrons in solids: the 1D tight-binding chain
- Geometry of solids: crystal structure in real space. VESTA, 3D visualization program for structural models; an example crystal structure database.
- Geometry of solids: real space and reciprocal space. Reciprocal Space teaching and learning package.
- Reciprocal space and scattering. A fun way to discover the world of crystals and their symmetries through diffraction.
- Scattering experiments II
- Scattering experiments III
- Waves in reciprocal space
- Nearly-free electron model
- Band structure and optical properties
- Dynamics of electrons in bands
- Semiconductor devices. Intel's "A History of Innovation"; Moore's Law; From Sand to Circuits.
- Magnetic properties of atoms
- Collective magnetism. A micromagnetic simulation tool, The Object Oriented MicroMagnetic Framework (OOMMF); OOMMF movies of magnetic domains and domain reversal.
- Mean field theory
Problem set dated 2015: users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0014/B6-materials/B6_Problems.pdf Marked by: A. Ardavan and T. Hesjedal. Some more stuff under: users.ox.ac.uk/~corp0014/B6-materials/
The book is the fully commercial The Oxford Solid State Basics.
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.