Help students achieve their goal Updated +Created
Don't set goals for your students.
Ask students what they want to do, and help them achieve that goal.
If they don't know what to do, give suggestions of interesting things they could do.
Once they have a goal, just help them learn everything that is needed to achieve that goal
If they don't have a goal, any attempt to learn is a total and complete waste of time.
This is because the universe of potentially useful things that can be learnt is infinite, and no human can ever learn everything.
The only solution, is to try and learn only what seems necessary to reach your goal, and just try to reach your goal instead.
This approach is called backward design.
Also, setting overly ambitious goals, is a good idea: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved.
"Graduating" and "getting a diploma" are not valid goals, because they are useless. A goal has to be either an amazing specific technological or artistic development.
Text is cheaper than video Updated +Created
Text materials are generally superior to video because they:
  • are faster to create and edit
  • uses less disk space and network bandwidth
  • is easier to search: Ctrl + F on the browser and off you go. And then grep if you have superpowers.
Only produce video material if:
  • it shows an experiment, physical technique, natural phenomena or location that is of interest. See also: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments"
  • it gives fundamental geometric insight on the subject
  • you are filming a human transmitting their passion about the subject, and the speaker is amazing, and does not speak for too long
Never create videos of people just speaking hardcore content for long amounts of time.
If you have to use videos, make them as short as possible, and index them with a textual table of contents.
Also consider using sequences of images or GIFs instead of videos, since those are cheaper.
Figure 1.
Textbooks Y U NO HAVE CTRL-F meme
. Source. Same applies to videos.
Talk with individuals, not to groups Updated +Created
When you do get face to face time with students, don't teach a large group.
Everything you want to teach is already online.
The only goal of meeting students is talking to them individually or in small groups to:
  • understand what they feel
  • transmit your passion for the subject
and letting them do the same amongst themselves.
If you talk to a large group, you will only reach / understand a very small percentage of the group, so your time is wasted.
It is better to deeply understand what 25% of the students feel and adapt the course material, than to talk to everyone at once, and have only 5% understand anything.
Opera Magistris Updated +Created
Very unfortunate license "public domain license" with a "non religious" clause, whatever the fuck that is, which completely defeats the point of a public domain declaration:
The source code and text is under Public License and therefore can be used, translated and distributed at free will.
It is only banned to use the text and content for religious propaganda.
Telecommunication Updated +Created
Communicating at a distance, from Greek "tele" for distance!
A very cool thing about telecommunication is, besides how incredibly fast it advanced (in this sense it is no cooler than integrated circuit development), how much physics and information theory is involved in it. Applications of telecommunication implementation spill over to other fields, e.g. some proposed quantum computing approaches are remarkably related to telecommunication technology, e.g. microwaves and silicon photonics.
This understanding made Ciro Santilli wish he had opted for telecommunication engineering when he was back in school in Brazil. For some incomprehensible reason, telecommunications was the least competitive specialization in the electric engineering department at the time, behind even power electronics. This goes to show both how completely unrelated to reality university is, and how completely outdated Brazil is/was. Sad stuff.
Gas chromatography Updated +Created
This technique is crazy! It allows to both:
  • separate gaseous mixtures
  • identify gaseous compounds
You actually see discrete peaks at different minute counts on the other end.
It is based on how much the gas interacts with the column.
Detection is usually done burning the sample to ionize it when it comes out, and then you measure the current produced.
The procedure remind you a bit of gel electrophoresis, except that it is in gaseous phase.
Video 1.
Gas chromatography by Quick Biochemistry Basics (2019)
Source.
Video 2.
How I invented the electron capture detector interview with James Lovelock by Web of Stories (2001)
Source. He mentions how scientists had to make their own tools during the 40s/60s. Then how gas chromatography was invented at the National Institute for Medical Research and gained a Nobel Prize. Lovelock came in improving the detection part of things.
Millennium Prize Problems Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli would like to fully understand the statements and motivations of each the problems!
Easy to understand the motivation:
Hard to understand the motivation!
  • Riemann hypothesis: a bunch of results on prime numbers, and therefore possible applications to cryptography
    Of course, everything of interest has already been proved conditionally on it, and the likely "true" result will in itself not have any immediate applications.
    As is often the case, the only usefulness would be possible new ideas from the proof technique, and people being more willing to prove stuff based on it without the risk of the hypothesis being false.
  • Yang-Mills existence and mass gap: this one has to do with finding/proving the existence of a more decent formalization of quantum field theory that does not resort to tricks like perturbation theory and effective field theory with a random cutoff value
    This is important because the best theory of light and electrons (and therefore chemistry and material science) that we have today, quantum electrodynamics, is a quantum field theory.
3Blue1Brown Updated +Created
Amazing graphs and formulas.
Python graphics engine open sourced at: github.com/3b1b/manim "Animation engine for explanatory math videos". But for some reason there is a community fork: github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/ "This repository is maintained by the Manim Community, and is not associated with Grant Sanderson or 3Blue1Brown in any way (though we are definitely indebted to him for providing his work to the world). If you want to study how Grant makes his videos, head over to his repository (3b1b/manim). This is a more frequently updated repository than that one, and is recommended if you want to use Manim for your own projects." what a mess.
Microelectromechanical systems Updated +Created
Video 1.
MEMS: The Second Silicon Revolution? by Asianometry (2022)
Source.
Floating-point arithmetic Updated +Created
OurBigBook feature Updated +Created
System of units Updated +Created
The key thing in a good system of units is to define units in a way that depends only on physical properties of nature.
Ideally (or basically necessarily?) the starting point generally has to be discrete phenomena, e.g.
What we don't want is to have macroscopic measurement artifacts, (or even worse, the size of body parts! Inset dick joke) as you can always make a bar slightly more or less wide. And even metals evaporate over time! Though the mad people of the Avogadro project still attempted otherwise well into the 2010s!
Standards of measure that don't depend on artifacts are known as intrinsic standards.
Animation of molecular biology processes Updated +Created
Nothing makes the fact that your life is an illusion clearer than animations of molecular biology processes. You just have no idea what is going on inside your own body right now!
And don't get Ciro Santilli started on the brain and the impossibility of free will.
And yet, we live, oblivious to all of it.
Video 1.
ATP synthase in action by HarvardX (2017)
Source.
Video 3.
The Inner Life of the Cell by XVIVO Scientific Animation (2011)
Source. Also created for BioVisions from Harvard University apparently like other amazing videos. It also has the best music.
Video 4.
DNA animations by wehi.tv for Science-Art exhibition by WEHImovies (2018)
Source.
Video 5.
Dengue virus Invades a Cell by XVIVO Scientific Animation (2008)
Source. Reupload by the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which was reuploaded from www.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/den08.sci.life.stru.dengue/dengue-virus-invades-a-cell/ which was reuploaded from wherever crazy place XVIVO put it.
Scientific American Updated +Created
Emergence Updated +Created
Basically the opposite of reductionism.
Computer science Updated +Created
A branch of mathematics that attempts to prove stuff about computers.
Unfortunately, all software engineers already know the answer to the useful theorems though (except perhaps notably for cryptography), e.g. all programmers obviously know that iehter P != NP or that this is unprovable or some other "for all practical purposes practice P != NP", even though they don't have proof.
And 99% of their time, software engineers are not dealing with mathematically formulatable problems anyways, which is sad.
The only useful "computer science" subset every programmer ever needs to know is:
Funnily, due to the formalization of mathematics, mathematics can be seen as a branch of computer science, just like computer science can be seen as a branch of Mathematics!
Physicist Updated +Created
Figure 1.
xkcd 435: Fields arranged by purity
. Source.
2020-04 DECARETA Pedal Spanner Updated +Created
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07VL2MLYY DECARETA Pedal Spanner Bike Pedal Wrench Three-in-one Function Bicycle Pedal Spanner 24mm Front and Rear Axle Spanner Pedal Install Spanner Repair Tool with Anti-Skidding Long Handle (Silver) £10.99.
Got dented the first time I tried to use it in the Kross bicycle (2017). All Amazon reviews say the same thing, should have read first, and bought instead known brand like Park And Tool which is the same price. Material advertized on Amazon: "Steel alloy and rubber".
It must be easy to change your area of study Updated +Created
If the choice of what to learn depend on a years long dependency graph of other obligations, which currently are the increasingly interlinked:
you end up without much choice at all.
The lock-in periods must be much more fluid and shorter term than those, otherwise it makes the almost inevitable pivots to success impossible.
This is something that Ciro Santilli has heard from several people at the end of their undergrad/PhD degrees. Some online mentions:
When I realized the biggest reason to continue my pdh was to be dr helps, that's when decided I should probably leave.

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