Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Main section: fusion power.

This is a long haul. But we have to give it a shot.

It is unbelievable that you can't find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics/chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.

Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.

School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.

The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.

A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.

It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create. As an extreme example, say, a precise description of the Large Hadron Collider anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "big science"? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.

Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.

Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: the most important physics experiments.

This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.

Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.

Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.

Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro's How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in bacteria for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.

The Applied Science does well in that direction.

This project is one step that could be taken towards improving the replication crisis of science. It's a bit what Hackster.io wants to do really. But that website is useless, just use OurBigBook.com and create videos instead :-)

We're maintaining a list of experiments for which we could not find decent videos at: Section "Physics experiment without a decent modern video".

Ciro Santilli visited the teaching labs of a large European university in the early 2020's. They had a few large rooms filled with mostly ready to run versions of several key experiments, many/most from "modern physics", e.g. Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Hall effect, etc.. These included booklets with detailed descriptions of how to operate the apparatus, what you'd expect to see, and the theory behind them. With a fat copyright notice at the bottom. If only such universities aimed to actually serve the public for free rather than hoarding resources to get more tuition fees, university level education would already have been solved a long time ago!

One thing we can more or less easily do is to search for existing freely licensed videos and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia page where missing. This requires knowing how to search for freely licensed videos:

Related:

There are two keywords that are killers: "news" and "world" and their translations or closely related words. Everything else is hard. So a good start is:

grep -e news -e noticias -e nouvelles -e world -e global

iran + football:

3 easy hits with "noticias" (news in Portuguese or Spanish"), uncovering two brand new ip ranges:

Let's see some French "nouvelles/actualites" for those tumultuous Maghrebis:

news + world:

news + global:

OK, I've decided to do a complete Wayback Machine CDX scanning of news... Searching for .JAR or https.*cgi-bin.*\.cgi are killers, particularly the .jar hits, here's what came out:

Wayback Machine CDX scanning of "world":

"headline": only 140 matches in 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv and 3 hits out of 269 hits. Full inspection without CDX led to no new hits.

"today": only 3.5k matches in 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv and 12 hits out of 269 hits, TODO how many on those on 2013-dns-census-a-novirt? No new hits.

"world", "global", "international", and spanish/portuguese/French versions like "mondo", "mundo", "mondi": 15k matches in 2013-dns-census-a-novirt.csv. No new hits.

Actual section at: Section "OurBigBook.com"

An artificial metabolic pathway using synthetic biology technology.

Previously it was unclear if there were any .org hits, until we found the first one with clear comms: web.archive.org/web/20110624203548/http://awfaoi.org/hand.jar

Later on, two more clear ones were found with expired domain trackers:further settling their existence. Later on newimages.org also came to light.

Others that had been previously found in IP ranges but without clear comms:

.org is very rare, and has been excluded from some of our search heuristics. That was a shame, but likely not much was missed.

See: exam.

We've come across a few shallow and stylistically similar websites on suspicious ranges with this pattern.

No JS/JAR/SWF comms, but rather a subdomain, and an HTTPS page with .cgi extension that leads to a login page. Some names seen for this subdomain:

The question is, is this part of some legitimate tooling that created such patterns? And if so which? Or are they actual hits with a new comms mechanism not previously seen?

The fact that:suggests to Ciro that they are an actual hit.

In particular, the secure and ssl ones are overused, and together with some heuristics allowed us to find our first two non Reuters ranges! Section "secure subdomain search on 2013 DNS Census"

Some currently known URLsIf we could do a crawl search for secure.*com/cgi-bin/*.cgi that might be a good enough fingerprint, maybe even *.*com/cgi-bin/*.cgi. Edit: it is not perfect, but we kind of did it: Section "secure subdomain search on 2013 DNS Census".

Later on, we've also come across some stylistic hits in IP ranges with apparent slight variations of the CGI comms pattern:Since these are so rare, it is still a bit hard to classify them for sure, but they are of great interest no doubt, as as we start to notice these patterns more tend to come if it is a thing.

The cell wall of a bacteria. Made of peptidoglycan, a glycoprotein.