Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 35

hundreds of too basic popular science, e.g.:
- a 5 minute popular science video trying to explain quantum electrodynamics (an advanced subject) for someone who doesn't know what a Riemann integral is (a basic subject)
a few full university courses that takes 20 hours to deliver the first punchline of the course

Ciro believes that there is often an important missing link between them, e.g.:

a 15 minute video that delivers the main end results and motivations for people who already know the very basic stuff

If we as a society are unable to provide this sweet Middle Way sweet-spot, it is unreasonable to expect that learners will ever have the motivation to advance, because it is just too boring! They are just more likely to go play video games instead.

It is Ciro's hope that OurBigBook.com will help to fill exactly that gap.

In Ciro's view, as of the 2020's this critical gap generally lies somewhere between the end of undergraduate studies, and at the start of postgraduate studies.

What we have to do is make this knowledge more accessible all way down to high school and earlier.

Let's take the gloves off more often, and give the full thing to interested students! Let students learn what they want to learn, and do that as soon as possible! Life is too short!

This problem is basically the knowledge version of the last mile problem. When we reach the end of graduate, there are enough directions of knowledge to go off into, that the probability that a great free tutorial exists is relatively low. Of course, as one approaches the realm of novel research, the branching is so wide that having perfect tutorials becomes impossible. Ciro's goal in life go push the last mile marker a bit further out.

universityphysicstutorials.com/ by Adam Beatty mentions:
There are myriad resources for physics and maths. The Kahn Academy and Patrick JMT were the best for me. They really helped me out. The question is, what resources are there for the advanced undergraduate courses?

Video 1.

Being valued as a lab technician interview with Norman Greenwood by Web of Stories (2017)

Source.

In this video, the noted chemist mentions how he managed to get into a chemistry research development before he even joined university, due to a somewhat exceptional situation. Section "The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories" also comes to mind. This is exactly the type of thing that Ciro Santilli wants to make much more widespread.

Stories of Ainan Celeste Cawley fighting to advance his kids education beyond school, and being forbidden to do so by a stupid educational system, also come to mind.

Bibliography:

Section "Two Minute Papers"

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Industry by

Ciro Santilli 35  Updated 2025-04-24  +Created 1970-01-01

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List of comics by

Ciro Santilli 35  Updated 2025-04-24  +Created 1970-01-01

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Comedy show by

Ciro Santilli 35  Updated 2025-04-24  +Created 1970-01-01

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DNS configuration of Ciro Santilli's website by

Ciro Santilli 35  Updated 2025-04-24  +Created 1970-01-01

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AKA how this GitHub page gets served under the domain: cirosantilli.com

Ciro only touches this very rarely, and always forgets and go into great pain whenever a change needs to done, so it is important to document it.

The last change was of 2019-07-07, when Ciro moved from the www subdomain www.cirosantilli.com to the APEX cirosantilli.com. A redirect is setup from the www subdomain to APEX.

GoDaddy DNS entries:

Type    Name    Value                   TTL
A       @       185.199.108.153         1 Hour
A       @       185.199.109.153         1 Hour
A       @       185.199.110.153         1 Hour
A       @       185.199.111.153         1 Hour
CNAME   www     cirosantilli.github.io  1 Hour

Moved cirosantilli.com to Porkbun 2022-02, unfortunatly records were not automatically updated and domain went down for a bit, upadded to new entries for IPv6 as well which are not documented by GitHub:

TYPE 	HOST	ANSWER	TTL	PRIORITY	OPTIONS
A	cirosantilli.com	185.199.108.153	600
A	cirosantilli.com	185.199.109.153	600
A	cirosantilli.com	185.199.110.153	600
A	cirosantilli.com	185.199.111.153	600
AAAA	cirosantilli.com	2606:50c0:8000::153	600
AAAA	cirosantilli.com	2606:50c0:8001::153	600
AAAA	cirosantilli.com	2606:50c0:8002::153	600
AAAA	cirosantilli.com	2606:50c0:8003::153	600
CNAME	www.cirosantilli.com	cirosantilli.github.io	600

where the IPs are obtained from: help.github.com/en/articles/setting-up-an-apex-domain#configuring-a-records-with-your-dns-provider (archive).

Under github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io/settings

Custom domain: cirosantilli.com
Enforce HTTPS: checked

And the CNAME file is tracked in this repository: CNAME.

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Download Ciro's website for offline viewing by

Ciro Santilli 35  Updated 2025-04-24  +Created 1970-01-01

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First install NVM/NPM as shown at and then:

git clone https://github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io
cd cirosantilli.github.io
npm install
ourbigbook .
xdg-open index.html

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Ciro Santilli's natural languages skills by

Ciro Santilli 35  Updated 2025-04-24  +Created 1970-01-01

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English: Cambridge CPE grade B in 2004. Proficient, with minor defects in collocation/pronunciation. Learned from formal courses and from living in the UK for a few months when he was 10.
French: TCF grade C2 in 2011. Proficient, with a bit more defects than English. Studied and lived in France.
Brazilian Portuguese: Native speaker
Chinese: see github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/tree/df0852b22e585785d734ec69719eddf63f9676a5#do-you-speak-chinese

When asked, Ciro likes to say that he speaks something between 1.5 and 3.5 languages in total, depending on how you count, because Portuguese, French and English are 99.99% the same, and Chinese is completely different but Ciro only knows about 50% of it if counted optimistically.

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