Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

When Ciro Santilli was studying electronics at the University of São Paulo, the courses, which were heavily inspired from the USA 50's were obsessed by this one! Thinking about it, it is kind of a cool thing though.

That Wikipedia page is the epitome of Wikipedia failure to explain things in a way that is of any interest to any learner. Video 1. "Tutorial on LC resonant circuits by w2aew (2012)" is the opposite.

TEM: sample has to be very thin, you get a 2D image. Higher resolution possible.

SEM: sample does not need to be ultra thin, you get a 3D image. Lower resolution possible.

It sees and moves individual atoms!!!

This technique has managed to determine protein 3D structures for proteins that people were not able to crystallize for X-ray crystallography.

It is said however that cryoEM is even fiddlier than X-ray crystallography, so it is mostly attempted if crystallization attempts fail.

By looking at Figure 1. "A cryoEM image", you can easily understand the basics of cryoEM.

We just put a gazillion copies of our molecule of interest in a solution, and then image all of them in the frozen water.

Each one of them appears in the image in a random rotated view, so given enough of those point of view images, we can deduce the entire 3D structure of the molecule.

Ciro Santilli once watched a talk by Richard Henderson about cryoEM circa 2020, where he mentioned that he witnessed some students in the 1980's going to Germany, and coming into contact with early cryoEM. And when they came back, they just told their principal investigator: "I'm going to drop my PhD theme and focus exclusively on cryoEM". That's how hot the cryo thing was! So cool.

Once Ciro was at a University course practical session, and a graduate was around helping out. Ciro asked if what the graduate did anything specifically related to the course, and they replied they didn't. And they added that:Even though Ciro was already completely disillusioned by then, that still made an impression on him. Something is really wrong with this shit.

Other people that think that the educational system is currently bullshit as of 2020:

If school weren't bullshit, 99% of students would be in gifted education for what they truly love and are good at.

What is sad about many programs is that they are exclusivist and non scalable, selecting people some how and non scalably educating them. We need a more "here's some projects let's do them whoever can" approach to things, maybe like Google Summer of Code.

Related programs:

Example from École Polytechnique: Figure "A typical small classroom at École Polytechnique".

Basically the same remarks as for university, just 10 times more useless, see also: Section "Motivation".

As of 2020, university has the following very important applications:Notably, Education is an IQ test, not a way to learn useful and beautiful things.

One major issue is that teachers don't have the right incentive to, nor are selected to, teach well. Thus the existence of Rate My Professors! But we can do better...

Which is why Ciro Santilli wants to destroy its current format with OurBigBook.com. He believes that we can find a more efficient organization to achieve both the social and research functions of university, by first doing as much as possible online

Ciro's university experiences are mentioned at: Ciro Santilli's formal education.