Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli 37

Ciro Santilli publishes videos of this not-so-common visual programming experiments on his YouTube channel occasionally: www.youtube.com/c/CiroSantilli. Ciro should however not be lazy and also upload each video produced to Wikimedia Commons, since YouTube does not offer a download option even for videos marked with a Creative Commons license: www.quora.com/Can-I-download-Creative-Commons-licensed-YouTube-videos-to-edit-them-and-use-them/answer/Tarmo-Toikkanen!

This is also where Ciro's downtime converged to in his early 30's, since he long lost patience for stupid video games and television series.

Ciro developed one interesting technique: while scrolling through YouTube's useless recommendations, when he understands what a channel is about, he either immediately:This helps to keep this feed clean of boring stuff he already knows about. There is unfortunately an infinite amount of useless videos out there however on the topics of:and no matter how much you say you don't want to hear about them, YouTube juts keeps on sending more.

Things Ciro hates about YouTube:

Likely FFmpeg is the backend of YouTube.

Bought by Google in 2006.

It is unbelievable that you can't find easily on YouTube recreations of many of the key physics/chemistry experiments and of common laboratory techniques.

Experiments, the techniques required to to them, and the history of how they were first achieved, are the heart of the natural sciences. Without them, there is no motivation, no beauty, no nothing.

School gives too much emphasis on the formulas. This is bad. Much more important is to understand how the experiments are done in greater detail.

The videos must be completely reproducible, indicating the exact model of every experimental element used, and how the experiment is setup.

A bit like what Ciro Santilli does in his Stack Overflow contributions but with computers, by indicating precise versions of his operating system, software stack, and hardware whenever they may matter.

It is understandable that some experiments are just to complex and expensive to re-create. As an extreme example, say, a precise description of the Large Hadron Collider anyone? But experiments up to the mid-20th century before "big science"? We should have all of those nailed down.

We should strive to achieve the cheapest most reproducible setup possible with currently available materials: recreating the original historic setup is cute, but not a priority.

Furthermore, it is also desirable to reproduce the original setups whenever possible in addition to having the most convenient modern setup.

Lists of good experiments to cover be found at: the most important physics experiments.

This project is to a large extent a political endeavour.

Someone with enough access to labs has to step up and make a name for themselves through the huge effort of creating a baseline of amazing content without yet being famous.

Until it reaches a point that this person is actively sought to create new material for others, and things snowball out of control. Maybe, if the Gods allow it, that person could be Ciro.

Tutorials with a gazillion photos and short videos are also equally good or even better than videos, see for example Ciro's How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in bacteria for an example that goes toward that level of perfection.

The Applied Science does well in that direction.

This project is one step that could be taken towards improving the replication crisis of science. It's a bit what Hackster.io wants to do really. But that website is useless, just use OurBigBook.com and create videos instead :-)

We're maintaining a list of experiments for which we could not find decent videos at: Section "Physics experiment without a decent modern video".

Ciro Santilli visited the teaching labs of a large European university in the early 2020's. They had a few large rooms filled with mostly ready to run versions of several key experiments, many/most from "modern physics", e.g. Stern-Gerlach experiment, Quantum Hall effect, etc.. These included booklets with detailed descriptions of how to operate the apparatus, what you'd expect to see, and the theory behind them. With a fat copyright notice at the bottom. If only such universities aimed to actually serve the public for free rather than hoarding resources to get more tuition fees, university level education would already have been solved a long time ago!

One thing we can more or less easily do is to search for existing freely licensed videos and add them to the corresponding Wikipedia page where missing. This requires knowing how to search for freely licensed videos:

Related:

Main section: fusion power.

This is a long haul. But we have to give it a shot.

Since 2015 Ciro Santilli has carried out a campaign to promote freedom of speech in China.

Centerpiece: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship

Fully rendered at: github.com/china-dictatorship

The campaign has centered around publishing censored keywords on his Stack Overflow username, thus using his considerable Stack Overflow presence to sabotage the website in China. Here is an early web archive.

Like most people in the West, Ciro has always been for political freedom of speech, and therefore against the Chinese government's policies.

However, the seriousness of the matter only fully dawned on him in 2015 when, his mother-in-law, a then a 63-year-old lady, was put into jail for 15 days for doing Falun Gong.

And all of this was made 100 times worse because Ciro deeply loves several aspects of China, such as food, language, art and culture, and saw it all being destroyed by the Communists: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/does-ciro-santilli-hate-china

The rationale of this is to force the Chinese government to either:

In the beginning, this generated some commotion, but activity reduced as novelty wore off, and as he collected the reply to all possible comments at: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship.

This campaign has led him to have an insane profile view/reputation ratio, since many people pause to look at his profile. He is point "A" at the top right corner of Figure 2. "Scatter plot of Stack Overflow user reputation vs profile views in March 2019 with Ciro Santilli marked as A":

Ciro feels that the view count started increasing more slowly since 2020 compared to his reputation, likely every single Chinese user has already viewed the profile.

Further analysis has been done at: stats.stackexchange.com/questions/376361/how-to-find-the-sample-points-that-have-statistically-meaningful-large-outlier-r

A solid-state electronic switch and amplifier.

Although transistors were revolutionary, it is fun to note that they were just "way cheaper and more reliable and smaller" versions of exactly the main functions that a vacuum tube could achieve

The Einstein summation convention works will with partial derivatives and it is widely used in particle physics.

In particular, the divergence and the Laplacian can be succinctly expressed in this notation:

In order to express partial derivatives, we must use what Ciro Santilli calls the "partial index partial derivative notation", which refers to variables with indices such as $x_0$, $x_1$, $x_2$, ${\partial }_0$, ${\partial }_1$ and ${\partial }_2$ instead of the usual letters $x$, $y$ and $z$.

See: eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

See also: e-learning website.

Ciro Santilli has become slightly obsessed with this story, and the main mastermind Ross Ulbricht.

The best article available so far is: www.theregister.co.uk/2019/01/29/how_i_caught_silk_road_mastermind (archive) which summarizes what one of the investigators said in a 2019 French computer security conference.

The key living posts are:

The big question is of course how libertarian free market ideologically motivated the website was, and how purely criminal greed it was.

The magnitude of the early operational security mistakes does make Ciro think that Ross did it "because he could" and "for the lolz" in a real world Breaking Bad way.

The entry in Ross' diary does resonate a lot with Ciro and any entrepreneur, full diary at: www.wired.com/2015/01/heres-secret-silk-road-journal-laptop-ross-ulbricht/ (archive).

Having this kind of feeling, is the greatest thing any human can have, and what motivates all great things.

Capitalizing in illegal things though is a cheat, big things take longer than a few years to reach, but reaching them is that much more satisfying as well.

Other interesting quotes:which Ciro also feels, see don't be a pussy, and:

Also very worth reading is the San Francisco flat mate account: www.vice.com/en_us/article/ae3q8g/my-roommate-the-darknet-drug-lord (archive).

The murder for hire allegations are also interesting: mashable.com/2013/10/03/silk-road-hits, he paid 80k dollars to undercover DEA agents!

Except for the fact that Ross was an 80 million Dollar drug lord, those accounts sound exactly like what you would expect from any other nerdy startup founder! The:

It is also amusing to see very concretely the obvious fact that the FBI can get a subpoena for all accounts you ever had, e.g. they knew his laptop model from Amazon and brought a corresponding power cable to the arrest! If you are going to be a cyber criminal, don't use your real name, ever!

Should justice be blind? Maybe. But it does hurt for mere non-blind men to see it sometimes. Especially when drug liberalization is involved.

Notable ones: