Front-end web framework Updated 2025-07-16
You need those because it is hard to do the following:
This is hard to do notably because when the update happens, several things might need to change on the webpage at the same time.
Notably, new elements might need to be added to the webpage, which in turn means that new bindings such as button clicks have to be added to those, in a way that keeps the page working.
The only way to do this basically is to have a functional dependency graph that keeps everything in the page in working state as updates come.
OurBigBook.com / Action plan Updated 2025-07-16
The steps are sorted in roughly chronological order. The project might fail at any point, and some steps may be carried in parallel:
  • make OurBigBook Markup good enough, to the point that it allows to create a static version of the website, which is used to prototype certain ideas, and for Ciro to start writing test content.
    Status March 2022: reached a point that it is already highly usable. The following website may continue.
  • create a basic implementation of the website, without advanced features like PageRank sorting and WYSIWYG. This is not much more than a blog with some extra metadata, so it is definitely achievable with constrained resources.
  • find a university teacher would would like to try it out.
    Ciro would like to volunteer to work for free for this teacher and students to help the students learn.
    He would like act like a "super student" who has a lot of free time and motivation.
    Ciro would start by mapping the headers of the lecture notes onto the website, and then slowly adding content as he feels the need to improve certain explanations.
    Finding teachers willing to allow this will be a major roadblock: how to convince teachers to use CC BY-SA.
    If such enlightened teacher is found, it will allow for the initial validation of the website, to decide what kind of tweaking the idea might need, and start uploading quality technical content to the site.
  • once some level of validation as been done, Ciro will start looking for charitable charitable grant opportunities more aggressively
  • if things seem to be working, start adding more advance features: PageRank-like ranking sorting and WYSIWYG editing
    The recommendation algorithms notably is left for a second stage because it needs real world data to be tested. And at the beginning, before Eternal September kicks in, there would be few posts written by well educated university students, so a simple sort by upvote would likely be good enough.
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 / Advertisement Updated 2025-07-16
Don't like this very much, but if it's the only way...
Maybe focus on job ads like Stack Overflow.
Then:
  • like YouTube, pay creators proportionally to views/metrics
  • paid subscription to remove ads from site
OurBigBook.com / Blogs Updated 2025-07-16
Where blog is taken in a wide sense, including e.g. Medium, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, etc., etc.
The main shortcoming of blogs is the lack of topic convergence across blogs. Each blog is a moderated castle. So who is the best user for a given topic, or the best content for a given tag, across the entire website?
The only reasonable free material we have for advanced subjects nowadays are university lecture notes.
While some of those are awesome, when writing a large content, no one can keep quality high across all sections, there will always be knowledge that you don't have which is enlightening. And Googlers are more often than not interested only in specific sections of your content.
Our website aims to make smaller subjects vertically curated across horizontal single author tutorials.
MIT calculus course             UCLA calculus course

* Calculus                <---> * Calculus
  * Limit                 <--->   * Limit
    * Limit of a function
    * Limit of a series   <--->     * Limit of a series
  * Derivative            <--->   * Derivative
                                    * L'Hôpital's rule
  * Integral              <--->   * Integral
Some more links:
Fullerene Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Buckyballs (C60) by Periodic Videos (2010)
Source. Actually shows them in a lab!
Functional function Updated 2025-07-16
This is about functions that take functions as input or output.
Fundação Estudar Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
What I learned in Harvard part 1 by Jorge Paulo Lemann (2012)
Source. Portuguese talk about his experiences. A bit bably, but has a few good comments:
  • You don't learn the Harvard experience, you absorb it.
  • Being amongst excellent people makes you learn what excelent people are like, just like only by tasting many different types of wine can you know what good wine is like.
    This one does have bias danger though. But detecting greatness, is as type of bias arguably.
Fusion power Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
Why Private Billions Are Flowing Into Fusion by Bloomberg (2022)
Source.
It is interesting that there are several different approaches to the problem. This feels a bit like quantum computing's development at the same time, increases hope that at least one will work.
Main section: fusion power.
This is a long haul. But we have to give it a shot.
OurBigBook.com / Funding Updated 2025-07-16
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.
This website basically aims to be a learning management system, allowing in particular a teacher to focus his help on students that he is legally obliged to help due to their job. But it will have the following unusual characteristics in current LMS solutions:
  • public first, to allow reuse across universities, rather than paywalled as is the case for most top universities
  • students can create material just like teachers, both are on equal footing. Students/teachers will see an indicator "this is your teacher"/"this is your student for this/past semester", but that is the only difference between their interfaces.
Gallium arsenide Updated 2025-07-16
This is apparently the most important III-V semiconductor, it seems to actually have some applications, see also: gallium arsenide vs silicon.
Gallium arsenide vs silicon Updated 2025-07-16
The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray by Charles J. Murray (1997) page 4 mentions:
Cray wanted his new machine to employ circuits made from a material called gallium arsenide. Gallium arsenide had achieved limited success, particularly in satellite communications and military electronics. But no one had succeeded with it in anything so complicated as a computer. In the computer industry, engineers had developed a saying: "Gallium arsenide is the technology of the future," they would say. "And it always will be."
Game of chance Updated 2025-07-16
The definition is not very precise, as in many games with random elements there is a mixture of both skill and luck.
So we just use the precise Non-deterministic game term instead for any game that has any random element beyond the control of the players.
Gao Qiu Updated 2025-07-16
The ball game is named cuju.
He is extremely despicable and petty, enjoys only useless things, and is vengeful and disloyal. Rooting for sport teams is stupid.
Surely his family name 俅 is a pun on the same sounding character 求 for ball.

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