Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

The approach many courses take to physics, specially "modern Physics" is really bad, this is how it should be taught:

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:

There is only one thing that can truly motivate you to make good materials: becoming famous.

Strive for that. Make good materials. Publish them. Get good reviews. Loop.

This generates a virtuous loop, which makes you produce better and better material.

People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.

Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.

Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.

Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.

This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.

Keep the example/theory ratio high, very, very high.

For natural sciences, add as many reproducible experiment images/videos/descriptions as you can.

Grouping by age as done in traditional education as of 2020 is useless.

Rather, we should group students by subject of interest; e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, a sport, etc., just like in any working adult organization!

This way, younger students can actually actively learn from and collaborate with older students about, see notably Jacques Monod's you can learn more from older students than from faculty.

This becomes even more natural when you try to give students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

This age distinction should be abolished at all stages of the system, not only within K-12, but also across K-12, undergraduate education and postgraduate education.

This idea is part of the ideal that the learning environment should be more like a dojo environment (AKA peer tutoring, see also dojo learning model), rather than an amorphous checkbox ticking exercise in bureaucracy so that "everyone is educated".

Perhaps, even more importantly, is that we should put much more emphasis on grouping students with other students online, where we can select similar interest amongst the entire population and not just on a per-local-neighbourhood basis.

Tell students to:

Praise those that do this very highly, and give them better grades if you have that superpower.

This is part of a larger concept Ciro Santilli holds dear: don't just consume, but also produce.

Whatever you do, even if it is playing video games: if you manage to produce related content that will interest other people, and possibly allow you to get paid, it will much much fun to do that thing.

If you give a course in a classroom, you reach 10 people (the others were sleeping).

If you make a perfect course online, and answer questions online, you reach 10 thousand.

Not doing things online is a waste of time.

You are a highly trained professional, and your time is extremely valuable.

Even if it takes twice as long to create the material than giving course, you are still more efficient by a factor of 500.

It is as if there were 500 little copies of you working full time. It is a superpower.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_using_a_source_more_than_once gives the following method:

Definition, anywhere on article, likely ideally as the first usage:

And then you can use it later on as:which automatically expands the exact same thing, or using the shortcut:

To cite multiple pages of a book: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Citing_multiple_pages_of_the_same_source, the best method is to define and use the reference without adding the p or location in cite as:Do not set the page in cite, otherwise it shows up on the references. Instead we use the {{rp}} template. And then use the reference with the {{r}} template as:or for multiple pages:

Circa 2023, the feed is an unbearable list of stupid suggestions, never-ending idiotic memes, and you just end up missing posts you actually care about from people you actually follow.

Allows us to draw with JavaScript pixel by pixel! Great way to create computational physics demos!

Here is an animation demo with some useful controls:

new class extends OurbigbookCanvasDemo {
  init() {
    super.init('hello');
    this.pixel_size_input = this.addInputAfterEnable(
      'Pixel size',
      {
        'min': 1,
        'type': 'number',
        'value': 1,
      }
    );
  }
  draw() {
    var pixel_size = parseInt(this.pixel_size_input.value);
    for (var x = 0; x < this.width; x += pixel_size) {
      for (var y = 0; y < this.height; y += pixel_size) {
        var b = ((1.0 + Math.sin(this.time * Math.PI / 16)) / 2.0);
        this.ctx.fillStyle =
          'rgba(' +
          (x / this.width) * 255 + ',' +
          (y / this.height) * 255 + ',' +
          b * 255 +
          ',255)'
        ;
        this.ctx.fillRect(x, y, pixel_size, pixel_size);
      }
    }
  }
}

Bibliography: developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations">https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Tutorial/Basic_animations

Interesting website, hosts mostly:

What's the point of this website vs GitHub? www.reddit.com/r/MLQuestions/comments/ylf4be/whats_the_deal_with_hugging_faces_popularity/

The key takeaway is that setting an explicit value function to an AGI entity is a good way to destroy the world due to poor AI alignment. We are more likely to not destroy by creating an AI whose goals is to "do want humans what it to do", but in a way that it does not know before hand what it is that humans want, and it has to learn from them. This approach appears to be known as reward modeling.

Some other cool ideas:

This section is about games initially designed for humans, but which ended up being used in AI development as well, e.g.:

Allow us to determine with good approximation in a multi-electron atom which electron configuration have more energy. It is a bit like the Aufbau principle, but at a finer resolution.

Note that this is not trivial since there is no explicit solution to the Schrödinger equation for multi-electron atoms like there is for hydrogen.

For example, consider carbon which has electron configuration 1s2 2s2 2p2.

If we were to populate the 3 p-orbitals with two electrons with spins either up or down, which has more energy? E.g. of the following two:

This was the pre-Internet precursor of wikis. This program was likely venerable, shame it predates Ciro Santilli's era.

But the thing was much more bloated it seems, and also included visual programming elements, and WYSISYG UI creation.

Created by Dr. Rod Nave from Georgia State University, where he worked from 1968 after his post-doc in North Wales on molecular spectroscopy.

While there is value to that website, it always feels like it falls a bit too short as too "encyclopedic" and too little "tutorial-like". Most notably, it has very little on the history of physics/experiments.

Ciro Santilli likes this Rod, he really practices some good braindumping, just look at how he documented his life in the pre-social media Internet dark ages: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Nave-html/nave.html

The website evolved from a HyperCard stack, as suggested by the website name, mentioned at: hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.

Shame he was too old for CC BY-SA, see "Please respect the Copyright" at hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.

exhibits.library.gsu.edu/kell/exhibits/show/nave-kell-hall/capturing-a-career has some good photo selection focused on showing the department, and has an interview.

Kell hall is a building of GSU that was demolished in 2019: atlanta.curbed.com/2020/1/31/21115980/gsu-georgia-state-atlanta-kell-hall-demolition-park-library-north

Basically means "company with huge server farms, and which usually rents them out like Amazon AWS or Google Cloud Platform

Cover up the entire sky in a compatible way with the traditional constellations. They are also very square, the boundaries consisting only of vertical and horizontal lines on the sphere.

TODO what's the largest molecule done on a classical computer?