Quantum Mechanics for Engineers by Leon van Dommelen (2011) Updated 2025-06-17 +Created 1970-01-01
Looks very impressive! Last update marked 2011 as of 2020.
Goes up to "A.15 quantum field theory in a Nanoshell", Ciro have to review it to see if there's anything worthwhile in that section.
Personal page says he retired as of 2020: www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/ But hopefully he has more time for these notes!
And he appears to have his own lightweight markup language that transpiles to LaTeX called l2h: www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/l2h/
The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories Updated 2025-06-17 +Created 1970-01-01
Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.
Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.
Basically all of this could be done online from books.
Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.
For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.
Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".
Is this the one?
Build failed with
undefined reference to pcre_config
on Ubuntu 23.04: github.com/DavyLandman/csvtools/issues/18Unfortunately it is lacking some basic options, like optional header + selecting column by index on
csvgrep
(though csvcut
has it). The project seems kind of dead.Also unclear if it allows to filter + print only selected columns.
The first proper galaxy near the Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy. Everything else in the middle is a satellite of either of of those.
Some major ones:noirlab.edu/public/images/noao-m49/?nocache=true also lists: M58, M59, M60, M61, M84, M85, M86, M87, M88, M89, M90, M91, M98, M99, and M100 so lots of large and easily observable galaxies in the area.
Ciro Santilli is a big believer that there is value in tutorials written by beginners, because beginners are more likely to explain things in a way that other beginners can understand.
Even though they make more mistakes, this more approachable point of view can be very valuable.
And mistakes/omissions can be corrected on comments by people with more knowledge, so that the writer also ends up learning something new.
By other people:
- jakobschwichtenberg.com/about/ from Jakob Schwichtenberg mentions quotes C. S. Lewis book "Reflections on the Psalms"[ref]:
It often happens that two schoolboys can solve difficulties in their work for one another better than the master can. [...] The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago he has forgotten. He sees the whole subject, by now, in a different light that he cannot conceive what is really troubling the pupil; he sees a dozen other difficulties which ought to be troubling him but aren't.
The side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved Updated 2025-06-17 +Created 1970-01-01
A quote by Ciro's Teacher R.:
Sometimes, even if our end goals are too far from reality, the side effects of trying to reach them can have meaningful impact.
If the goals are not ambitious enough, you risk not even having useful side effects so show in the end!
By doing the prerequisites of the impossible goal you desire, maybe the next generation will be able to achieve it.
This is basically why Ciro Santilli has contributed to Stack Overflow, which has happened while was doing his overly ambitious projects and notice that all kinds of basic pre-requisites were not well explained anywhere.
This is especially effective when you use backward design, because then you will go "down the dependency graph of prerequisites" and smoothen out any particularly inefficient points that you come across.
There are of course countless examples of such events:
- youtu.be/qrDZhAxpKrQ?t=174 Blitzscaling 11: Patrick Collison on Hiring at Stripe and the Role of a Product-Focused CEO by Greylock (2015)
The danger of this approach is of course spending too much time on stuff that will not be done enough times to be worth it, as highlighted by several xkcds:
xkcd 1319: Automation
. Source. 2017. Directed by Michael Oswald. Adam Curtis vibes.
Some notable points:
- the role of the British Overseas Territories as tax havens
- the role of the City of London in setting economic policy
- the role of trusts
The standard model and general relativity are incompatible Updated 2025-06-17 +Created 1970-01-01
TODO arguments, proofs
There are unlisted articles, also show them or only show them.