OurBigBook.com GitHub Updated 2025-07-16
If Ciro Santilli were to write a book about quantum mechanics as of 2020 (before OurBigBook.com went live), he would upload an OurBigBook Markup website to GitHub Pages.
But there is one major problem with that: the entry barrier for new contributors is very large.
If they submit a pull request, Ciro has to review it, otherwise, no one will ever see it.
Our amazing website would allow the reader to add his own example of, say, The uncertainty principle, whenever they wants, under the appropriate section.
OurBigBook.com Funding Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro is looking for:
- university teachers who might be interested in trying it out as described at Section "Action plan", especially those who already use open licenses for their lecture notes
- funding possibilities for this project, including donations as mentioned at Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com" and contracts
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.
OurBigBook.com Desired social impact Updated 2025-07-16
Crush the current grossly inefficient educational system, replace today's students + teachers + researchers with unified "online content creators/consumers".
Gamify them, and pay the best creators so they can work it full time, until some company hires for more them since they are so provenly good.
Help create much greater equal opportunity to talented poor students as described at free gifted education.
Give the students a flexible choice of what to learn, which basically implies that a much large proportion of students get a de-facto gifted education.
In some ways, Ciro wants the website to feel like a video game, where you fluidly interact with headers, comments and their metadata. If game developers can achieve impressively complicated game engines, why can't we achieve a decent amazing elearning website? :-)
Related:
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:
- 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.
- Ciro would like to volunteer to work for free for this teacher and students to help the students learn.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.
- 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 editingThe 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 Updated 2025-10-27
The website is the reference instance of OurBigBook Web, which is part of the OurBigBook Project, the other main part of the project are software that users can run locally to publish their content such as the OurBigBook CLI.
The project documentation is present at: docs.ourbigbook.com#ourbigbook-web-user-manual
Intro to the OurBigBook Project
. Source. 
OurBigBook's weird specialization towards the weird overly niche interests of its creator Ciro Santilli, notably "I want to create the perfect documentation for every atom in the universe, is undoubtedly partly to blame for the project's failure to gain even a single user outside of its own creator.
OsmAnd Updated 2025-07-16
Ortholog Updated 2025-07-16
Origins of Precision by Machine Thinking (2017) Updated 2025-07-16
Great overview of the earlier history of unit standardization.
Gives particular emphasis to the invention of gauge blocks.
Origin of replication Updated 2025-07-16
oriC = Origin of Chromosomal replication.
Organization developing quantum hardware Updated 2025-07-16
Organization developing photonic quantum computer Updated 2025-07-16
Organizationally unique identifier Updated 2025-07-16
Organism model Updated 2025-09-09
Organ (anatomy) Updated 2025-07-16
Orange Papers Updated 2025-07-16
Oracle Database Updated 2025-07-16
Optical microscope Updated 2025-07-16
Operon vs transcription unit Updated 2025-07-16
Consider the E. Coli K-12 MG1655 operon thrLABC.
That single operon can produce two different mRNA transcription units:
- thrL only, the transcription unit is also called thrL: biocyc.org/ECOLI/NEW-IMAGE?object=TU0-42486
- thrL + thrA + thrB + thrC all together, the transcription unit is called thrLABC: biocyc.org/ECOLI/NEW-IMAGE?type=OPERON&object=TU00178
The reason for this appears to be that there is a rho-independent termination region after thrL. But then under certain conditions, that must get innactivated, and then the thrLABC is produced instead.
Open X-Embodiment Updated 2025-07-16
Terrible name, but very interesting dataset:
GitHub describes the input quite well:
The model takes as input a RGB image from the robot workspace camera and a task string describing the task that the robot is supposed to perform.What task the model should perform is communicated to the model purely through the task string. The image communicates to the model the current state of the world, i.e. assuming the model runs at three hertz, every 333 milliseconds, we feed the latest RGB image from a robot workspace camera into the model to obtain the next action to take.
TODO: how is the scenario specified?
TODO: any simulation integration to it?
How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it Overview of the experiment Updated 2025-07-16
For those that know biology and just want to do the thing, see: Section "Protocols used".
The PuntSeq team uses an Oxford Nanopore MinION DNA sequencer made by Oxford Nanopore Technologies to sequence the 16S region of bacterial DNA, which is about 1500 nucleotides long.
This kind of "decode everything from the sample to see what species are present approach" is called "metagenomics".
This is how the MinION looks like: Figure 1. "Oxford Nanopore MinION top".
Oxford Nanopore MinION top open
. Source. 
Before sequencing the DNA, we will do a PCR with primers that fit just before and just after the 16S DNA, in well conserved regions expected to be present in all bacteria.
The PCR replicates only the DNA region between our two selected primers a gazillion times so that only those regions will actually get picked up by the sequencing step in practice.
Eukaryotes also have an analogous ribosome part, the 18S region, but the PCR primers are selected for targets around the 16S region which are only present in prokaryotes.
This way, we amplify only the 16S region of bacteria, excluding other parts of bacterial genome, and excluding eukaryotes entirely.
Despite coding such a fundamental piece of RNA, there is still surprisingly variability in the 16S region across different bacteria, and it is those differences will allow us to identify which bacteria are present in the river.
The variability exists because certain base pairs are not fundamental for the function of the 16S region. This variability happens mostly on RNA loops as opposed to stems, i.e. parts of the RNA that don't base pair with other RNA in the RNA secondary structure as shown at: Code 1. "RNA stem-loop structure".
This is how the 16S RNA secondary structure looks like in its full glory: Figure 5. "16S RNA secondary structure".
Since loops don't base pair, they are less crucial in the determination of the secondary structure of the RNA.
The variability is such that it is possible to identify individual species apart if full sequences are known with certainty.
With the experimental limitations of experiment however, we would only be able to obtain family or genus level breakdowns.
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