Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

This is the dude that made many of the amazing WEHImovies animation.

Unfortunately, the process appears to be quite manual and laborious, more art than simulation, based on the software list used: www.drewberry.com/faq

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.

OMG this is sick.

Full official album on YouTube: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_myUBkJ0UJbkV7O1q-hg7ONxxGBLGz4SzU. so glad he managed to upload it...

A member of the underlying field of a vector space. E.g. in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$, the underlying field is $\mathbb{R}$, and a scalar is a member of $\mathbb{R}$, i.e. a real number.

This is a version of free gifted education but more focused on university.

This is Ciro Santilli's ideal university system. It is a system that actually lives up to the name "Open University":

Related:

So far as of the early 2020's, the university that comes closest to some but not all of these principles is the University of the People. It's sad that it's such a crappy unknown thing, but it is what it is.

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".

This is the actual main function of university for many people as of the 2020s. And it fulfills it quite well. A breeding ground.

In a closely related sense, university is simply a symbol of personal status. Not a place where you go to learn. And especially in the Anglophone world of fancy colleges, university also doubles down as a form of long term luxury hotel. Even if it ends up meaning debt.

There's nothing wrong with sexual selection. This type of natural eugenics is an important part of humankind. It is however just sad that any type of learning falls so much behind. A close second would be fine. But as it stands, it is just too far off.

Related:

For a critique/history of this insanity, see also: Section "Colleges of the University of Oxford".

Ciro Santilli's general feeling is that university should not own IP, it should belong to the researchers. Instead, university should help researchers make their startups, so they can become big, and then we can tax them and reinvest in the universities.

Of course, this goes through the nonprofit impact measurement difficulty. Maybe we could instead limit the IP to some reasonably small percentage, like 10%?

But still, as of 2020, if feels like universities are way too greedy.