Stuff that is beautiful but useless because it does not make food or houses cheaper.
Or from Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts:
Without technology, one cannot survive. Without art, one cannot live.
But that sure enough has a Jesus semi-precursor, and likely many others: man shall not live by bread alone.
There is some art however that lives in the fine intersection between beauty and usefulness:
Maybe those are genial. Maybe not. Nostalgia is just too strong to discern. Ciro still goes back to them for rest.
Quick facts:
- Nationalities: Italian and Brazilian
- Grew up in: Brazil
- Relationship status 2017-: married
- Given name pronunciation: take your pick from Ciro Santilli's given name
- Chinese name: 三西猴, means "three western monkeys". Phonetic approximation to SANtilli CIRO. More info at: Ciro Santilli's Chinese name. Semi-unintentionally reminds Chinese people of Sun Wukong (孙悟空). This association is further slightly strengthened by the phonetic choice of 三 San, which Ciro later noticed matches the middle character of Tang Sanzang (唐三藏), the monk in Journey to the West. The given name 西猴 was given by Ciro Santilli's wife, then recent girlfriend, as a semi-joke, and he took it up because the best way to take a joke is to play along with the joker. 三 was chosen by Ciro himself.
- laptop: high end Lenovo ThinkPad
- distro: latest Ubuntu release
- Vim or Emacs: vi/vim. But for The Love, will someone please make an open source C++ integrated development environment that actually just works?
- tabs or spaces: spaces
- Mailing list or Git(Hub|Lab): Git(Hub|Lab), with passion, see Section "Mailing list"
- system or unit tests: system
- programming languages: Python and C++. He'll learn Rust and Haskell once he's rich. As of the 2020s, Rust was picking up some serious steam, so Ciro might end up eating his own words there.
- musical instruments to listen: Chinese Guqin and electric Jazz-fusion guitar
- metric or imperial: metric, for The Love. Science? Standardization? 21st century anyone?
- QWERTY or Dvorak: QWERTY, alas
- birth name: Ciro Duran Santilli
Other people with the same name are listed at Section "Ciro Santilli's homonyms".
19th century illustration of the Journey to the West protagonist Sun Wukong
. Source. Sun Wukong (孙悟空) is a playful and obscenely powerful monkey Journey to the West. He protects Buddhist monk Tang Sanzang, and likes eating fruit, just like Ciro. Oh, and Goku from Dragon Ball is based on him. His japanese name is "Sun Wukong" (same Chinese characters with different Japanese pronunciation) for the love. His given name "Wukong" means literally "the one who mastered the void", which is clearly a Dharma name and fucking awesome in multiple ways. This is another sad instance of a Chinese thing better known in the West as Japanese.
It is worth noting however that although Wukong is extremely charming, Ciro's favorite novel of the Four Great Classic Novels is Water Margin. Journey to the West is just a monster of the week for kids, but Water Margin is a fight for justice saga. Sorry Wukong!
The photo was taken in an open event organized by the awesome Cambridge Synthetic Biology outreach group, more or less the same people who organize: www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Synthetic-Biology-Meetup/ and who helped organize Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it".
Taking part in such activities is what Ciro tries to do to overcome his lifelong regret of not having done more experimental stuff at university. Would he have had the patience to handle all the bullshit of the physical word without going back to the informational sciences? Maybe, maybe not. But now he will probably never know?!
Notice the orange high visibility cycling jersey under the lab coat, from someone who had just ridden in from work as fast as possible as part of his "lunch break". It is more fun when it is hard.
Scribe Jean Miélot, 15th century
. Ciro Santilli fantasizes that he would have make a good scribe in the middle ages, partly due to his self diagnosed graphomania, but also appreciation for foreign languages, and his mild obsession with the natural sciences.
OurBigBook.com is Ciro's view of a modern day scriptorium, except that now the illuminations are YouTube videos.
Chill and eat your bread in peace comes to mind. A scribe, in a library, reading and writing the entire day in peace and quiet. The life!
The job of a Internet-age scribe is basically that of making knowledge more open, legally extracting it from closed copyrighted sources, and explaining your understanding of it to the wider world under Creative Commons licenses on the web. And in the process of greater openness, given a well organized system, we are able combine the knowledge of many different people, and thus make things more understandable than any single/few creator closed source source could ever achieve.
Ciro once saw some cartoon on Wikipedia help pages of a turtle with a book in one hand, and typing into Wikipedia on its computer, TODO find it. That cartoon summarizes well the modern scribe life.
Another analogous version of this fantasy more in touch with Ciro's sinophily is the ideal of the Chinese scholar, notably including their stereotypical attributes such as mastery of the Four arts.
Ciro Santilli piling boxes as a child
. A natural born engineer.
Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared.
More info at: Figure "Ciro Santilli waving hello in infrared".The weird one, not directly coded in the genetic code.
Jugalbandi in Chartaal-Ki-Sawari from album Together (1990)
Source. Background?Taal Pancham Sawaari by Zakir Hussain
. Source. The top YouTube commend mentions:This video was made in 1970, on Zakir's first visit to the USA. He and Aashish Khan (keeping taal next to him) had a guest residency at UW Seattle, under the ethnomusicology dept. set up by Robert Garfias.
Sequence and organization of the human mitochondrial genome by Sanger et al. (1981) Updated 2025-03-28 +Created 1970-01-01
The approach many courses take to physics, specially "modern Physics" is really bad, this is how it should be taught:
- start by describing experiments that the previous best theory did not explain, see also: Section "Physics education needs more focus on understanding experiments and their history"
- then, give the final formula for the next best theory
- then, give all the important final implications of that formula, and how it amazingly describes the experiments. In particular this means: doing physics means calculating a number
- then, give some mathematical intuition on the formulas, and how the main equation could have been derived
- finally, then and only then, start deriving the outcomes of the main formula in detail
This is likely because at some point, experiments get more and more complicated, and so people are tempted to say "this is the truth" instead of "this is why we think this is the truth", which is much harder.
But we can't be lazy, there is no replacement to the why.
Related:
- settheory.net/learnphysics and www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MKjPYuD60I&list=PLJcTRymdlUQPwx8qU4ln83huPx-6Y3XxH from settheory.net
- math.ucr.edu/home/baez/books.html by John Baez. Mentions:Ciro Santilli is trying to change that: OurBigBook.com.
This webpage doesn't have lots of links to websites. Websites just don't have the sort of in-depth material you need to learn technical subjects like advanced math and physics — at least, not yet. To learn this stuff, you need to read lots of books
- web.archive.org/web/20210324182549/http://jakobschwichtenberg.com/one-thing/ by Jakob Schwichtenberg
Interesting dude, with some interest overlaps with Ciro Santilli, like quantum computing:
2022-02: Kiea Barlast floor lamp: www.ikea.com/gb/en/p/barlast-floor-lamp-black-white-50437810 Bulb: LED bulb E27 globe opal white.
TODO original experiment?
Laughlin paper: 1981 Quantized Hall conductivity in two dimensions.
Shows a cool new type of matter: Abelian anyons.
In degrees Celsius:
- 25+
- palm tree shade and coconut water. Seriously though, if there's some shade or earlier morning/later afternoon it's OK, but if it's on an open road at midday, be careful, and stop early if you start getting slightly dizzy, it only gets worse!
- 18-25
- "dhb Aeron Short Sleeve Jersey"
- XGC Men's Cycling Shorts
- 2020-04 Giro Rumble VR Off Road Shoe
- 15-18:
- "dhb Aeron Short Sleeve Jersey"
- "dhb Lightweight Mesh Long Sleeve Base Layer"
- XGC Men's Cycling Shorts
- 2020-04 Giro Rumble VR Off Road Shoe
- 10-15:
- dhb Classic Thermal Bib Tights 10 and under. TODO this is a bit too warm for the upper range, need something more intermediate
- "dhb Lightweight Mesh Long Sleeve Base Layer"
- Castelli Perfetto RoS Long Sleeve - Cycling jersey. TODO this is a bit too warm for the upper range, need something more intermediate
- "Karrimor X Lite Run Black Headband"
- "Nike academy hyperwarm gloves"
- "Nevica Skuff". A bit too hot on upper range, but easy to take off.
- 0-10:
- dhb Merino Long Sleeve Base Layer
- Castelli Perfetto RoS Long Sleeve - Cycling jersey
- dhb Classic Thermal Bib Tights 10 and under
- dhb Dorica MTB Shoe (2020-12)
- "Karrimor X Lite Run Black Headband". Head a bit cold on lower range.
- "dhb Neoprene Nylon Overshoes". Feet a bit cold on lower range.
- "Extremities XDRY gloves". Hands a bit cold on lower range.
- "Nevica Skuff"
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.