Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

Funding:

This is apparently where past exam papers can be found. Paywalled of course.

The paywall is stupid however, as they seem to provide past papers upon request, e.g.

This adds to the mess of having a different location for material per department. Presumably this exists because the central university authority wants to centralize examinations to have better control over degree requirements. If only they would also do the same for all materials and end the mess.

As seen from explicit scalar form of the Maxwell's equations, this expands to 8 equations, so the question arises if the system is over-determined because it only has 6 functions to be determined.

As explained on the Wikipedia page however, this is not the case, because if the first two equations hold for the initial condition, then the othe six equations imply that they also hold for all time, so they can be essentially omitted.

It is also worth noting that the first two equations don't involve time derivatives. Therefore, they can be seen as spacial constraints.

TODO: the electric field and magnetic field can be expressed in terms of the electric potential and magnetic vector potential. So then we only need 4 variables?

Bibliography:

Base JavaScript library that implements the OurBigBook Markup. Use by both:

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:

Bibliography:

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.

We reject this bullshit.

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.

See: docs.ourbigbook.com/#ourbigbook-web-user-manual

If Ciro Santilli were to write a book about quantum mechanics as of 2020 (before OurBigBook.com went live), he would upload an OurBigBook Markup website to GitHub Pages.

But there is one major problem with that: the entry barrier for new contributors is very large.

If they submit a pull request, Ciro has to review it, otherwise, no one will ever see it.

Our amazing website would allow the reader to add his own example of, say, The uncertainty principle, whenever they wants, under the appropriate section.

Then, people who want to learn more about it, would click on the "defined tag" by the article, and our amazing analytics would point them to the best such articles.

Ciro is looking for:

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.

Crush the current grossly inefficient educational system, replace today's students + teachers + researchers with unified "online content creators/consumers".

Gamify them, and pay the best creators so they can work it full time, until some company hires for more them since they are so provenly good.

Destroy useless exams, the only metrics of society are either:

Reduce the entry barrier to education, like Uber has done for taxis.

Help create much greater equal opportunity to talented poor students as described at free gifted education.

Give the students a flexible choice of what to learn, which basically implies that a much large proportion of students get a de-facto gifted education.

In some ways, Ciro wants the website to feel like a video game, where you fluidly interact with headers, comments and their metadata. If game developers can achieve impressively complicated game engines, why can't we achieve a decent amazing elearning website? :-)

Related:

The steps are sorted in roughly chronological order. The project might fail at any point, and some steps may be carried in parallel:

Ciro decided to start with a decent markup language with a decent implementation: OurBigBook Markup. Once that gets reasonable, he will move on to another attempt at the website itself.

The project description was originally at: github.com/cirosantilli/write-free-science-books-to-get-famous-website but being migrated here. The original working project name was "Write free books to get famous website", until Ciro decided to settle for OurBigBook.com and fixed the domain name.

ourbigbook.com is a website created by Ciro Santilli.

The website is the reference instance of OurBigBook Web, which is part of the OurBigBook Project, the other main part of the project are software that users can run locally to publish their content such as the OurBigBook CLI.

The source code for ourbigbook.com is present at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook/tree/master/web

The project documentation is present at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-user-manual

This page contains further information about the project's rationale, motivation and planning.

Kind of works! Notably, has the amazing cycling database offline for you, if you fall within the 6 area downloads. It is worth supporting these people beyond the 6 free downloads however.

A gene that was inherited from the same ancestor in two different species, and which has maintained the same function in both species.

Great overview of the earlier history of unit standardization.

Gives particular emphasis to the invention of gauge blocks.

oriC = Origin of Chromosomal replication.