Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 40

www.nature.com/articles/206757a0 on Nature 181, 662-666. Paywalled as of 2022. Has some nice pictures in it.

This is one of the main reasons why Ciro Santilli invested in OurBigBook.com.

Ciro believes that the only thing students must be forced to learn is to speak read and write English and that a teacher's main job after that is to help students find their next big goals and also ties into the backward design philosophy.

Everything else, the student must choose.

This idea is generally known as self-directed learning.

This is most notable in University entry examinations of poor countries, where students often have to waste one extra year of their lives to go through preparation for the useless university entry exams. And then, surprise surprise, if they actually get in, they find that this is not what they really wanted to do, and they just go through to the end miserably because they understandably they don't want to risk another year of their lives.

And importantly: It must be easy to change your area of study.

Ciro saw this first hand École Polytechnique which was way freer than his university in Brazil.

Steve Jobs's university dropout stories from Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address also come to mind.

Interesting projects:

Godfrey Hounsfield, 1979 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine:^[ref]

TODO who bought the Bitcoins? Is anyone else besides Jeremy Sturdivant

The original forum thread bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.msg1195 suggests multiple purchases were made, until he had to withdrawl the offer. Perhaps an easier question is how many pizzas he got in the first place.

www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/13on6px/comment/jl55025/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 mentions without source:One source is: bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/the-man-behind-bitcoin-pizza-day-is-more-than-a-meme-hes-a-mining-pioneer

Related thread from May 2023: bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5453728.msg62286606#msg62286606 "Did Laszlo Hanyecz exchange 40000 BTC for 8 pizzas, not 10000 BTC for 2 pizzas?" but their Googling is so bad no one had found the 100,000 quote before Ciro.

As per bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/113831/searching-the-blockchain-based-on-transaction-amount-and-or-date at blockchair.com/bitcoin/outputs?s=time(asc)&q=value(1000000000000),time(2010-05-18..2010-08-05) we can list all the transactions made between the offer and withdrawal dates for value exactly 10k. There are only about 20 of them, and including someone the 22nd of May, so it is extremely likely that this will contain the hits. No repeated recipients however, so it is hard to progress with more advanced analytics tools

Some of the transactions are:8 d1a429c05868f9be6cf312498b77f4e81c2d4db3268b007b6b80716fb56a35ad (29 May) is a common looking transaction with a single input from 1Bc7T7ygkKKvcburmEg14hJKBrLD7BXCkX and two outputs, one likely being the change to 1GH4dRUAagj67XVjr4TV6J9RFNmGYsLe7c and the other the actual value to 138eoqfNcEdeU9EG9CKfAxnYYz62uHRNrA.

The input chain is complex, but it does contain one block reward on the third level: 17PBFeDzks3LzBTyt6bAMATNhowrvx5kBw + 79 rewards 4th level at 045795627ca29ec72a94c23a65ee775ea1949d60b6fba0938b75e1cfe1e6643e.

All gene names that start with an Y such as:appear to be proteins of unknown function.

UniProt for example describes YaaX as "Uncharacterized protein YaaX".

As function is discovered, they then change it to a better name, e.g. to names such as the E. Coli K-12 MG1655 transcription unit thrLABC proteins all of which have a clear name due to threonine.

There are many other y??? as of 2021! Though they do tend to be smaller molecules.

Cool that there is actually a page for a change: www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/exams/timetables e.g. working in 2024: web.archive.org/web/20240305013807/https://www.ox.ac.uk/students/academic/exams/timetables

And translating from their arcane vocabulary:

Compared to Waring's problem, this is potentially much harder, as we can go infinitely negative in our attempts, there isn't a bound on how many tries we can have for each number.

In other words, it is unlikely to have a Conjecture reduction to a halting problem.

Erniang is way more popular than her ranking in the 108 Stars of Destiny.

This is of course in part because she is one of the only 3 108 Stars of Destiny women. But her story about making human mantou is particularly fun!

She's also quite seductive, which gives directors a good opportunity for a bit of fan service. See e.g. kknews.cc/history/6epp2pp.html for a still from The Water Margin showing some good cleavage for example.

At Section "Quantum computing is just matrix multiplication" we saw that making a quantum circuit actually comes down to designing one big unitary matrix.

We have to say though that that was a bit of a lie.

Quantum programmers normally don't just produce those big matrices manually from scratch.

Instead, they use quantum logic gates.

The following are the main reasons for that:

One of the most flashy chinese musical instrument!

It is very similar to the Indian shehnai.

domain-specific language unfortunately, but at least it's on GitHub, looks promising.

How to play scores and save them to files is discussed at: doc.sccode.org/Guides/Non-Realtime-Synthesis.html

They have a nice looking IDE, but running anything from the command-line interface is super hard, much unlike Csound. How to get a decent hello world: stackoverflow.com/questions/65360414/how-to-play-a-supercollider-file-non-interactively-from-the-terminal-command-lin

Sample composition with custom synths + notes: sccode.org/1-5cl

leanpub.com/ScoringSound looks like a decent tutorial, it is basically the Csound FLOSS manual for SuperCollider.

wikix.binets.fr runs an internal MediaWiki instance available to all logged in alumni.