Light year Updated 2025-07-16
This was the major final step of fully integrating the OurBigBook CLI into the dynamic website (besides fixing some nasty bugs that escaped passed by me from the previous newsletter).
The implementation was done by "simply" reusing scopes, e.g.: cirosantilli's article about mathematics has scope cirosantilli and full ID cirosantilli/mathematics.
That on the website is equivalent to a local file structure of:
cirodown/mathematics.bigb
The problem is that a bunch of subdirectory scope operations were broken locally as well, as it simply wasn't a major use case. But now they became a major use case for , so I fixed them.
Ciro Santilli's sport practice Updated 2025-07-16
Playing soccer just feels amazing, because you are constantly running around, but with a more specific goal in mind: to get that ball into that goal!
Playing soccer was specially amazing in the flat wet sand beach of Santos. weekend, the sea, feet touching the sand, the sun going down, and your school mates next to you. Nirvana.
It is also true that under those conditions, the skin of your feet will get ripped off due to running on the slightly wet and flat sand no matter how thick it has become. But it is worth it.
Teams would often be slit between "the team with shirts vs the team without shirts", who would just take off their shirts. The two best players would take turns picking players into their teams, the first one to pick would be decided by odds and evens (par ou ímpar).
A pair of Havaianas, or Havaianas rip-offs, stuck into the sand, or even just some school bags, would do as a goal posts. More organized people, especially adults, would have their own water pipe goal with a proper net and all. But doing so would spoil the fun of endless discussions if a non flat ball had gone in or not into an imaginary rectangle.
That's how soccer was meant to be played.
Ciro became however disillusioned with soccer after his injury. It is a shame.
And so after that, Ciro decided to dedicate himself to sports where you can't hurt your knee.
Ciro hates water, so swimming is out of the question. What could be more boring than going back and forth on a fixed location a million times to gain some milliseconds?
And so Ciro has been left with the gym as the only main option for a while.
Running would have been a consideration, but Ciro Santilli's legs sometimes itch when he runs.
This is until he ended up living in a place with decent roads for cycling in the late 2010's, which led to Ciro Santilli's cycling.
Video 1.
Adults playing soccer in Santos, São Paulo, Brazil beach on a rainy day
. Source. It is still warm though as you can see from their clothing.
City of London Updated 2025-07-16
The City of London is an obscene thing. Its existence goes against the will of the greater part of society. All it takes is one glance to see how it is but a bunch of corruption. See e.g.: The Spiders' Web: Britain's Second Empire.
Now that we can reliably split files at will with \Include, I finally added this feature.
This means while developing a website locally with the OurBigBook CLI, if you have a bunch of files with an error in one of them, your first run will run slowly until the error:
extract_ids README.ciro
extract_ids README.ciro finished in 73.82836899906397 ms
extract_ids art.ciro
extract_ids art.ciro finished in 671.1738419979811 ms
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro finished in 1009.6256089992821 ms
extract_ids science.ciro
error: science.ciro:13686:1: named argument "parent" given multiple times
extract_ids science.ciro finished in 1649.6193730011582 ms
but further runs will blast through the files that worked, skipping all files that have sucessfully converted:
extract_ids README.ciro
extract_ids README.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids art.ciro
extract_ids art.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro
extract_ids ciro-santilli.ciro skipped by timestamp
extract_ids science.ciro
so you can fix file by file and move on quickly.
This was not fully trivial to implement because we had to rework how duplicate IDs are checked. Previously, we just nuked the DB every time on a directory conversion, and then repopulated everything. If a duplicated showed up on a file, it was a duplicate.
But now that we are not necessarily extracing IDs from every file, we can't just nuke the database anymore, otherwise we'd lose the information. Therefore, what we have to do is to convert every file, and only at the end check the duplicates.
Ciro's Edict #6 / Next steps Updated 2025-07-16
Make article editing more reasonable. Several bugs in the area.
Classification of closed surfaces Updated 2025-07-16
So simple!! You can either:
A handle cancels out a Möbius strip, so adding one of each does not lead to a new object.
You can glue a Mobius strip into a single hole in dimension larger than 3! And it gives you a Klein bottle!
Intuitively speaking, they can be sees as the smooth surfaces in N-dimensional space (called an embedding), such that deforming them is allowed. 4-dimensions is enough to embed cover all the cases: 3 is not enough because of the Klein bottle and family.
Phenylalanine Updated 2025-07-16
How many "la"s does a name need to have?
Sequelize example Updated 2025-07-16
To run examples on a specific database:
All examples can be tested on all databases with:
cd sequelize
./test
Overview of the examples:
~1TB.
Internal hard drive likely removed from some old computer I lost track of, kept in a crappy case, incredible stuff.
Ubuntu 20.04 gnome-disks benchmark, NTFS partition: 40MB/s.

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