{wiki}

= Imperial unit
{synonym}

= Imperial system
{synonym}


Imperial units

{c}

First <Amazon> hire, wrote and led the team that wrote v1.

He looks like an older and more experienced dude compared to Bezos at the time.

Bibliography:
. https://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/2/ also mentions that unlike California, there's no sales tax in the state of Washington, which is important for selling books.
* a few mentions at: <video Jeff Bezos presentation at MIT (2002)>

\Video[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM0CcJ7Kjoc]
{title=Shel Kaphan interview by Internet History Podcast (2015)}

\Video[https://youtu.be/tJX5pfswHFI?t=20]
{title=Amazon.com Continues to Grow by NBC 15 (2014)}
{description=Features short excerpt of filmed interview with Shel.}

\Image[https://web.archive.org/web/20210304160316im_/https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/dUUsQKAPqI8JH6M-2hCC_5bE_Q0=/0x0:6144x4089/920x613/filters:focal(3812x421:4794x1403):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/66308477/175972523.jpg.0.jpg]
{title=Shel Kaphan}
{description=TODO year. Presumably more or less close to publishing date of source at 2020.}
{source=https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/13/21136126/amazon-first-employee-shel-kaphan-big-tech-regulation}


Shel Kaphan

These are websites that offer somewhat overlapping services, many of which served inspirations, and why we think something different is needed to achieve our goals.

Notably, OurBigBook is the result of <Ciro Santilli>'s experiences with:
* <Wikipedia>
* <GitHub>
* <Stack Exchange> (or as non techies might point out, <Urban Dictionary>, or <Quora> before it was such an incomprehensible shitshow)
OurBigBook could be seen as a cross between those three websites.

Quick mentions:
* https://handwiki.org/wiki/HandWiki:About[]: technically the same as <Wikipedia>, but with more aligned moderation policies
* https://ecotext.co/ similar goals. Their website seems quite broken now though as of 2021, can't see text properly. Crunchbase entry: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/ecotext says they are from Durham, New Hampshire, United States. Cannot see how to publish, curated material only? Twitter: https://twitter.com/ecotextinc?lang=en One of the founders: https://twitter.com/BigNel_21 | https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecotextnelsonthomas/[]. Their LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ecotext/people/
* https://fiveable.me/ bad: separates students and teachers, as a student I don't see where to create my content. Good: focus on teaching university level stuff to people outside of university via <Advanced Placement>. Bad: Lots of video content. Bad: Can't see the issue tracker attached to each page.
* <LessWrong>: their website system does have some similar feature sets to what we want. Reputation, Q&A sections, links between articles most likely, sort by upvote everywhere.
* https://crowdpub.org collaborative writing website, somehow goes to paragraph level, TODO how they reconcile different authors? Closed beta as of writing, so hard to be sure. From quick presentation on beta website, appears to attempt to share revenue to authors proportionally to the size of their contribution. Some <blockchain>-based reputation. Meh.
* TODO migrate all from: https://github.com/booktree/booktree/blob/master/alternatives.md
* https://studynotes.ie/[]. Admin approval on everything. No ToC. Fixed tag list for <university entry exams> topics.
* https://mindstone.com[]: there appears to be no sharing focus? File upload basesd? Not sure.
* <EverybodyWiki>
* looking for <open source> <Confluence (software)>-alternatives is an interesting way to go:
  * lists:
    * https://opensource.com/article/20/9/open-source-alternatives-confluence
    * https://www.nuclino.com/alternatives/confluence-alternative\#ynaw
  * <BookStack>:
    * fixed 3-level page hierarchy
    * writen in <PHP>
    * <Markdown> support: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/markdown-editor/
    * no source-level import-export apparently: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/admin/backup-restore/[], https://youtu.be/WUvtzJfCAKE?t=904
    * <WYSIWYG>: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/wysiwyg-editor/[] via <TinyMCE>
    * page content repeating: https://www.bookstackapp.com/docs/user/reusing-page-content/ (will be useful for course modelling)
* https://github.com/shuding/nextra converts <Markdown> links to Next.js links. We should look into how it works.
* https://zettelkasten.de/the-archive/ "The Archive" from zettelkasten.de/. Closed source. By German software engineer Christian Tietze https://twitter.com/ctietze?lang=en
* <LLM generated wiki> e.g.:
  * <Kinnu>
* https://docs.tigyog.app/cli beautiful website, but doesn't achieve much. Has a Markdown upload mechanism. Ah, those newbs who think the average user will care about markup upload to DB... Oh, wait...
* https://www.stuvia.com/en-gb/school/uk/oxford-university/physics[]. PDF uploads. In theory you have to own copyright: https://www.stuvia.com/en-gb/copyright/guidelines but it feels unlikely that most material was uploaded by the copyright owners. If those people are up, then why can't we? Maybe... Registred in the UK. People: some Dutch dudes:
  * https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaapvannes
  * https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugo-kuijzer-bb81a625
* <Project Xanadu>: crazy overlaps, though that project is <vaporware> apparently?
  \Q[Administrators of Project Xanadu have declared it superior to the World Wide Web, with the mission statement: "Today's popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.]

<Static website>-only alternatives:
* https://quarto.org/
* https://vitepress.dev[]. https://vitepress.dev/guide/markdown unmanaged internal links. Sample website: https://wiki.nikiv.dev/[].

Conceptual:
* <The Final Encyclopedia (Paul Allen)>: <science fiction> concept, but the name was reused by <Paul Allen> in a research project
* <second brain>
* <collective intelligence>

Markup editors:
* https://www.zettlr.com Good local Markdown editor with some extensions, including cross file links. Good mixture of <WYSIWYG> and markup code, e.g. images show up.
  * Internal cross references extension are not crisp though, open up a search apparently, and no error checking, and don't render correctly on HTML?

TODO:
* https://pressbooks.directory/


Alternatives

SVG tutorial

Sulfur compound

Cocaine

Security hacker

Economist

Spycraft

List of systems of units

Limits of gel electrophoresis

Git bibliography

Syllabary

Group axiom

{wiki}

* <The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011)> page 10 mentions:
  \Q[Early examples of such cavities included rather expensive closed cylinders made from porcelain and platinum.]
  and the footnote comments:
  \Q[The study of cavity radiation was not just about establishing theoretical principles, however. It was also of interest to the German Bureau of Standards as a reference for rating electric lamps.]
* 1859-60 Gustav Kirchhoff demonstrated that the ratio of emitted to absorbed energy depends only on the frequency of the radiation and the temperature inside the cavity
* 1896 <Wien approximation> seems to explain existing curves well
* 1900 expriments by Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim show <Wien approximation> is bad for lower frequencies
* 1900-10-07 Heinrich Rubens visits Planck in Planck's villa in the Berlin suburb of Grünewald and informs him about new experimental he and Ferdinand Kurlbaum obtained, still showing that <Wien approximation> is bad
* 1900 <Planck's law> matches Lummer and Pringsheim's experiments well. Planck forced to make the "desperate" postulate that energy is exchanged in quantized lumps. Not clear that light itself is quantized however, he thinks it might be something to do with allowed vibration modes of the atoms of the cavity rather.
* 1900 <Rayleigh-Jeans law> derived <from first principles>[from classical first principles] matches <Planck's law> for low frequencies, but diverges at higher frequencies.

\Video[https://youtube.com/watch?v=HnBZf1RfB-w]
{title=<black-body radiation>[Black-body Radiation] Experiment by sciencesolution (2008)}
{description=A modern version of the experiment with a PASCO scientific EX-9920 setup.}


Black-body radiation experiment

The new default homepage for a logged out user how shows a list of the topics with the most articles.

This is a reasonable choice for default homepage, and it immediately exposes users to this central feature of the website: the topic system.

Doing this required in particular calculating the best title for a topic, since it is possible to have different titles with the same ID, the most common way being with capitalization changes, e.g.:
``
JavaScript
Javascript
``
would both have topic ID `javascript`.

With this in place we also added the preferred topic title to the top topic page.

The algorithm chosen is to pick the top 10 most upvoted topics, and select the most common title from amongst them. This should make topic title vandalism quite hard. This was made in a single <SQL> query, and became the most complext SQL query <Ciro Santilli> has ever written so far: https://twitter.com/cirosantilli2/status/1549721815832043522

\Image[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/OurBigBook_topic_index_page.png]
{height=800}
{title=Screenshot showing the list of topics}
{description=The page is: https://ourbigbook.com[] for the logged out user, https://ourbigbook.com/go/topics[] for the logged in user.}

\Image[https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/OurBigBook_topic_page_with_title.png]
{height=400}
{title=Screenshot showing a topic page}
{description=The page is: https://ourbigbook.com/go/topic/vector-space[]. Before this sprint, we didn't have the "Vector Space" at the top, as it wasn't necessarily trivial to determine what the preferred title would be.}


Title	Author	Created	Updated
Imperial units	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Shel Kaphan	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Alternatives	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
SVG tutorial	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Sulfur compound	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Cocaine	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Security hacker	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Economist	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Spycraft	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
List of systems of units	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Limits of gel electrophoresis	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Git bibliography	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Syllabary	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Group axiom	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Black-body radiation experiment	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
List topics on home page	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Area of law	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Amino acid	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Picometer	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01
Aether theory	Ciro Santilli 32	1970-01-01	1970-01-01

Ciro Santilli (@cirosantilli, 32)