Incoming links: Ciro Santilli
The "most prestigious French engineering school". Only 3 Nobels though as of 2019, the scientists are mostly at École normale supérieure (Paris). A gazillion CEOs ad politicians however.
Ciro Santilli studied there from 2010 to 2013.
Ciro considers him entering at Polytechnique a small miracle. First, on his second year of University in Brazil, he first had to fail to join the also good but not as good École centrales, which really annoyed him as he saw the "other good students" who wanted to go out get their wish. This also explains why there are so few students from his university going to Polytechnique in the late 2010's: most already went to other locations! Then, on his third year, he tried Polytechnique and got in despite feeling that the others who got in knew much more mathematics and physics than him. Rather, Ciro believes that he got in chiefly due to his intense passion for the sciences which he showed during the interview.
The miracle would have been even greater if it had happened in 2020. At this time, out of 10 Brazilians, 9 are from ITA, the "hardest to get into" university in Brazil, and also military like Polytechnique. Make no mistake, those students are amazing and deserve it without any doubt. But there is more to the story. It could be argued that many of them only go because they don't have any other choice of exchange program. Remember: Ciro had to fail applications on previous universities before getting into Polytech. Also, they don't get any Brazilian degree because ITA has no agreements with Polytechnique, and are therefore extremely likely to never come back. Not that Ciro thinks this is particularly bad for Brazil though, but it does make for a better deal for France overall as well. They also happen to have closer ties across cohorts of different years, and have managed to maintain a Google Doc with scanned past examinations (as of 2020 however, some/all of those examinations have been uploaded publicly, big kudos to them). Also almost all of them are software engineers, which is one of the few disciplines given at the relatively small ITA. This lack of diversity might not be ideal: if I were France, I would rather fish around all top Brazilian schools for "the best".
Besides the amazing funding/opportunities/alumni/staff loop which you can read about elsewhere, Polytechnique is amazing because you can choose what you will study every year to a very large extent.
This is in huge contrast to the crappy systems Ciro had seen e.g. in Brazil's Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo, where students have to decide basically all their courses in huge packages, either at university entry (thus when they are completely clueless), or at a single point inside the university studies, changes being much harder.
Life quality was also amazing. Good free accommodation on campus and at the time a no-obligations scholarship for every foreign student great sport facilities. It seems that after Ciro left however more restrictions are added to the scholarships, what a shame! As of 2020 not everyone gets scholarships anymore it seems, mostly only loans that have to be paid back later. And those who are not poor have to pay Polytechnique scholarship fees on top of their living costs. And thus French austerity measures are undermining the greatest long term investment a country can possibly make: that of importing the very best students from other countries into yours. This after their host country has already spent 20 years raising and selecting them. And you won't even pay them 2 years of frugal existence to steal some of them them. Even if those students move away from your country later on, the contacts they made in your country mean they are much more likely to bring businesses over. But some will stay. Basically, France is becoming more like the United States.
This also makes it much more difficult for those students to do a PhD afterwards, where they would get paid very little, and are unable to pay their student debts. A PhD would be where they would possibly bring more of the next big thing to your country. Instead, they are much more likely to just go work for some big American company data wrangling and bring nothing to your country but their student debt dividends instead, which they will be pay to pay for in one year with those amazing salaries. And unsurprisingly many go to into banks. What a big time fail, France.
Sport was mandatory due to the military nature of the school. This did have the upside of getting students together more, although Ciro is against all forms of forced intellectual of physical activities for students. If you liked your sport it would be really cool though. But due to Section "Ciro Santilli's knee", he was forced to give up his first beloved choice which was soccer... life can be cruel. If only Ciro had known cycling at at the time, and if only that had been one of the sports you could choose (but of course it isn't, no school will want the bad reputation of when one of their students gets killed in a car accident).
There were also some useless "military exercises", or special situations in which you had to wear the useless school uniform as a formal "respect social clothing". Ciro Santilli is completely against all that meaningless bullshit, this his just a form of theatrical masturbation to nostalgically remember the good old days of Napoleon when France still ruled the world, and before they tortured the Algerians, see also: Video 4. "Gérard Fuchs interview from Ils racontent la Guerre d'Algérie (1982)". If you are going to do military-like stuff, then at least teach students how to shoot modern rifles and modern warfare tactics (which some of the French students actually do in the pre-school mandatory internship), and not this 18th century bullshit. Ciro favours of course the hoodie-wearing, "I only care about your abilities meritocracy" culture of Silicon Valley. And without the political correctness now associated with it in the 2020s. And no shooting people if possible.
During the time Ciro was at Polytechnique in early 2010's, the school was really isolated in the Plateau de Saclay, there were no shops in 10 minute walking distance! You either had to climb 300 steps to go down to the nearest village, Lozère, or take a bus to the nearest town, Massy. The fact that Times Higher Education ranked it as the second best university in the world in 2019 (archive) makes it good justice, given the small 500 student body. Things started to change a bit after Ciro left however, with the creation of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, which is bringing other schools to the Lozere area. This is for the best, as it might improve the global rankings of Polytechnique. Also it is a waste to have so few students at a technopole. But it will reduce the mystique of the place. You can't have everything in life.
Before 1976, Polytechnique was actually in the center of Paris at the Latin Quarter, so the Lozère mystique is not a traditional thing. But even when in Paris, students were in theory restricted to school grounds a most of the time. Although there are famous stories of a certain tree that could be used to climb the fence to go to Parisian parties when they couldn't stand it anymore. The tree was somewhat intentionally overlooked by school administrators. Polytechnique was drawn to Saclay no doubt because of the gravity of the CEA Paris-Saclay, France's analog to the United States Department of Energy national laboratories.
This made for some good memories though. The isolation favored concentration, and gave the place a mystical feeling. And then when you went to eat amazing Chinese food in Paris it just felt even more special and magic since you were so limited during the week. It was also under those magical circumstances in which Ciro met his wife, another student of the school, see also: Section "The main function of university is sexual selection".
Ciro also agonized about passing courses to get useless grades though! Polytechnique is hard for most Brazilians, specially if you select the more mathematics oriented courses, because the French students were math brainwashed for two years before joining.
Ciro's favorite spots/activities:
- hide in top corner desk of the library to learn some science. Ciro loves libraries.
- weekend days in his awesome room learning Chinese
Figure 1. The room also has a bed and toilet, it was great, and it was free back in those days! Only the kitchen was shared, which is good for meeting people. And for getting your password keylogged in the shared supplies buying system. This actually happened while Ciro was at in Polytechnique, but the keylogger operator was caught, and the semi-secret-unknown-participants-Gestapo-like-but-mostly-head-of-school-approved student association "Khômiss" broke their door (which leads to an internal corridor) with a fire axe, their traditional way of saying that someone fucked up. All students live on campus, which is great for concentration. - randomly go study at night in one of the small 20 person classrooms that were used in the day and left open at night
Figure 3. A typical small classroom at École Polytechnique. Source. The tables are shown in the usual course configuration. Imagine that at night, in pure silence, with some of your best friends studying on a nearby room. The usual course configuration was first a course by the main teacher in a large amphitheater, and then break down into small groups with tutors, known in French as "Petites classes" (PC). In some English-speaking world traditions, such small class system is known as recitation class. While those small classes are a reasonable approach, Ciro Santilli's slow brain would rather just have a book and an online forum where tutors answer questions instead.
Horny Polytechnicienne mural by Binet BD
. Edit: Ciro noticed this mural had been removed as of 2023. Of course it was removed! TODO removal date. TODO photo of the new art that took its place, it seems to be a boring image of R5-D4. Fucking political correctness zealots. A perfectly fine piece of erotica artwork lost forever except for this photo of it. Thanks to Ciro's kinky friend, Mr. F. for in his infinite insight insisting on taking a picture of it.
Every year, student organizations, the binets, get to compete for student elections, and they are allowed to make murals in the school to advertise themselves.
They kinky people from the 1996 Cartoon Binet (BD == Band Dessiné == Cartoon in French) decided to take it to the next level, with the depiction of a horny polytechnicienne, on the corridor near the student bar, the Bôbar, in front of the cartoon library of the Binet BD.
Good old 1996, this would never be allowed in 2019 due to political correctness.
Let's see how much longer it will last.
How about adding a sexy male polytechnicien suggestively holding his theatrical sword (nicknamed the "tangente") with shirt open instead of removing the lady???
In 2022, sexual aggression accusations at Polytechnique surfaced, will the mural survive them?
Ciro heard of two other mural censorship events orally from younger students during a visit in 2023:
- there was a sexy girl from Judo also censored since
- Judo (again) also apparently used a red resing sun symbol that some Chinese students felt was too close to the Japanese war flag: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rising_Sun_Flag. This made Ciro feel a strong urge to advertise his mirror of github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship at gitlab.binets.fr/ciro.duran-santilli/china-dictatorship just to test the supposed French obsession with freedom of speech!
Polytechnicienne by Ecole polytechnique
. Source. Promotional documentary in French showing the situation of women at Polytechnique. Ciro couldn't resist putting it next to the horny polytechnicienne.
Of particular note is is the footage of the first year in which women were accepted, 1972: youtu.be/IA1kSC_d4R8?t=298, shortly before Polytechnique moved from central Paris to Lozère in 1976.
www.mondedesgrandesecoles.fr/egalite-femmes-hommes-polytechnique-et-sa-communaute-sengagent claims that as of 2019 only 14% of the students were women.
The following promotional videos give an idea of how the school looks like, although they fundamentally miss the little corners that Ciro really loved in that the place and which made it magic:
And a one second Ciro Santilli appearance from a 2016 video made during the annual Brazilian barbecue (or as close as you an get to it) which many ex-Brazilian students attend able: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndX_-A2Rjpo&t=189 wearing a Ring t-shirt.
Gérard Fuchs interview from Ils racontent la Guerre d'Algérie (1982)
Source. French. Title translation: "they tell the story War in Algeria". In this segment at this timestamp, French politician and ancient Polytechnician tells of his experience in Algeria, to which all Polytechnicians were sent for 2 years after graduating as part of their mandatory service to the French state. He is not notable enough to have an English Wiki page however unfortunately.
He mentions that the huge scale military operations they did were useless, they enemies could easily notice and escape before they had closed in. He then chose a job in intelligence, the alternative being special operations, without fully knowing what it was going to be. He then once walked into his colleague during an interrogation where torture had obviously been used. He claims however that he managed to forbid torture under his command. He was then gravely shot, but survived.
He then mentions that when he came back and started digesting the experience, he felt that democracy was not enough, and that to actually stop wars people needed to be better informed and have a more direct democracy (a point Ciro Santilli agrees with), and that kind of made him want to become a politician. He looks like a nice guy.
On a related note, the exact same "Maquis"/"Maquisard" is used in French to describe both French WWII Resistance fighters, as well as the Algerian revolutionaries, as the south of France has a somewhat similiar dry bushy region where the revolutionaries would hide. And the French were like the Gestapo in Algeria.
École Polytechnique students identify their academic year, or "promotion" in French, by start year date.
For example, Ciro Santilli's year started in 2009, though as a foreign student he arrived only at the start of 2010, and Ciro's promotion is usually known just as X09. And as the century barrier is broken we'll start to need to specify as X2009 one day.
List of notable alumni:
github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease is a whole cell simulation model created by Covert Lab and other collaborators.
The project is written in Python, hurray!
But according to te README, it seems to be the use a code drop model with on-request access to master. Ciro Santilli asked at rationale on GitHub discussion, and they confirmed as expected that it is to:
- to prevent their publication ideas from being stolen. Who would steal publication ideas with public proof in an issue tracker without crediting original authors? Academia is broken. Academia should be the most open form of knowledge sharing. But instead we get this silly competition for publication points.
- to prevent noise from non-collaborators. But they only get like 2 issues as year on such a meganiche subject... Did you know that you can ignore people, and even block them if they are particularly annoying? Much more likely is that no one will every hear about your project and that it will die with its last graduate student slave.
The project is a followup to the earlier M. genitalium whole cell model by Covert lab which modelled Mycoplasma genitalium. E. Coli has 8x more genes (500 vs 4k), but it the undisputed bacterial model organism and as such has been studied much more thoroughly. It also reproduces faster than Mycoplasma (20 minutes vs a few hours), which is a huge advantages for validation/exploratory experiments.
The project has a partial dependency on the proprietary optimization software CPLEX which is freeware, for students, not sure what it is used for exactly, from the comment in the
requirements.txt the dependency is only partial.This project makes Ciro Santilli think of the E. Coli as an optimization problem. Given such external nutrient/temperature condition, which DNA sequence makes the cell grow the fastest? Balancing metabolites feels like designing a Factorio speedrun.
There is one major thing missing thing in the current model: promoters/transcription factor interactions are not modelled due to lack/low quality of experimental data: github.com/CovertLab/WholeCellEcoliRelease/issues/21. They just have a magic direct "transcription factor to gene" relationship, encoded at reconstruction/ecoli/flat/foldChanges.tsv in terms of type "if this is present, such protein is expressed 10x more". Transcription units are not implemented at all it appears.
Everything in this section refers to version 7e4cc9e57de76752df0f4e32eca95fb653ea64e4, the code drop from November 2020, and was tested on Ubuntu 21.04 with a docker install of
docker.pkg.github.com/covertlab/wholecellecolirelease/wcm-full with image id 502c3e604265, unless otherwise noted.One of the causes Ciro Santilli care the most about: motivation.
How to improve education? Simple:
- tax the fuck out of the rich people and companies: wealth tax and invest it in education
- invest intelligently as mentioned at what poor countries have to do to get richer:
- focus on fewer higher excellence schools that select the most promising poor students, rather than giving crappy average to everyone
- use OurBigBook.com
Whenever Ciro Santilli walks in front of a school and sees the tall gates it makes him sad. Maybe 8 year olds need gates. But do we need to protect 15 year olds like that? Students should be going out to see the world, both good and evil not hiding from it! We should instead be guiding them to the world. But instead, we are locking them up in brainwashing centers.
Video "The Purpose of Education by Noam Chomsky (2012)" puts it well, education can be either be:He has spoken about that infinitely, e.g. from when he was thin: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVqMAlgAnlo
- a brainwashing to make people comply with The Establishment
- a way to get people genuinely interested and help them to reach their life goals
Bibliography:
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts7CEFQM2bE How Education Became Indoctrination: Dr Stephen Hicks (2021) Interview by www.youtube.com/c/KnowlandKnows Interesting channel. "Are you sick of woke-washing in education? Free speech distinguishes education from indoctrination" and "I taught at Eton College before I was fired because 'The Patriarchy Paradox' caused offence.".
Ciro Santilli feels that all really important and productive activities come spontaneously, without being internally forced upon people.
You may say that this is because Ciro is lazy and irresponsible, but Bill thinks this isn't necessarily always bad:This is yet another manifestation of YAGNI.
I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
As another way to put it, Ciro has very little "self-discipline", and acts very heavily based on small passions that take hold of him. Related: high flying bird vs gophers.
You may also say that Ciro is an idealist, because what to do when the food will run out and you have to hunt? To which Jesus replies at Matthew 6:25-34 "Do Not Worry" (archive):Also closely related: man shall not live by bread alone.
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you - you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, "What shall we eat?" or "What shall we drink?" or "What shall we wear?" For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Ciro is also fond of the description of the work method of Yukio Mishima presented in Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (TODO based on Mishima's self descriptions?). Ciro Santilli's father highlighted this to him, and Ciro had already watched that movie and thought it was amazing:
This is perfectly complemented by him making tea, as if suggesting:
Don't rush the work. Just let it happen. Every day at midnight, I would boil a teapot of tea. I would watch the steam rise, and with it feel my consciousness deepen. Everything was pure silence. When the hand was ready, it would, by itself, pick up the brush, and writing would start.
Ciro generally feels that many major developments in his life happened "by miracle", beyond his control. So when he saw the quote by Carl Jung:Ciro tends to do major decisions in his life due to uncontrollable passion rather than logic.
Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Ciro believes that this is linked to his self perceived creative personality, Because Ciro gives in to such uncontrollable passions, this leads him to do things which are more unusual/creative, because other more logical people would write such options off as weird.
Another type of laziness Ciro is to blame for is passionately seeking instrumental goals rather than hard end goals, in order to reach the hard goals more effectively. This is well put in the quote apocryphallyref attribute to Abraham Lincoln:For example, whenever joining a new company, Ciro would first try to improve any exceedingly shitty systems, like the build system or test system, rather than doing whatever random task the manager felt like doing that week. He was somewhat fired for that actually. But in the end, if your infrastructure sucks, your project will fail, so better be fired early and go work on something that might succeed than later when the enterprise goes bankrupt.
Related:
Alan Watts' wuwei talk
. Source. During this talk, Alan quotes Jesus: Matthew 18:3 "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.".Don't Try - The Philosophy of Charles Bukowski by Pursuit of Wonder (2019)
Source. www.openculture.com/2013/02/dont_try_charles_bukowskis_concise_philosophy_of_art_and_life.htmlWe work too hard. We try too hard. Don’t try. Don’t work. It’s there. It’s been looking right at us, aching to kick out of the closed womb. There’s been too much direction. It’s all free, we needn’t be told. Classes? Classes are for asses. Writing a poem is as easy as beating your meat or drinking a bottle of beer.
Electronic Ink such as that found on Amazon Kindle is the greatest invention ever made by man.
Once E Ink reaches reasonable refresh rates to replace liquid crystal displays, the world will finally be saved.
It would allow Ciro Santilli to spend his entire life in front of a screen rather in the real world without getting tired eyes, and even if it is sunny outside.
Ciro stopped reading non-code non-news a while back though, so the current refresh rates are useless, what a shame.
OMG, this is amazing: getfreewrite.com/
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 , , , , and instead of the usual letters , and .
Generally, if something is labelled as "e-learning", it's not a good sign, as it implies that it adheres to the "teacher"/"student" separation which Ciro Santilli much despises: E-learning websites must allow students to create learning content.
Ciro Santilli distinctly remembers being taught that at basic electrical engineering school during Ciro Santilli's undergrad studies at the University of São Paulo.
It really allows you to do alternating current calculations much as you'd do DC calculations with resistors, quite poweful. It must have been all the rage in the 1950s.
See also some remarks of Ciro Santilli's thoughts on the instrument Ciro Santilli's musical education.
Mostly interpreter of songs written by others. But she's just too amazing, many of her interpretations are better than the original.
God, even Ciro Santilli is slightly shocked by her death, which happened before he was born, can you imagine it at the time? She was MPB's golden girl...
Atrás da Porta performed by Elis Regina
. Source. Composed by Francis Hime and Chico Buarque.Águas de março performed by Elis Regina
. Source. From the 1972 eponymous album. Composed by Antônio Carlos Jobim.Respect on the technical side by Ciro Santilli.
But the way he treated his first wife Justine Musk, is very very weird, incomprehensible: www.marieclaire.com/sex-love/a5380/millionaire-starter-wife/
Positive Cirocoins for possibly going to reverse Twitter's unfair Trump ban if his Twitter acquisition goes through:
Ciro Santilli's email can be found by cloning one of his repositories on GitHub. It is also given at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
One of the things Ciro Santilli really likes, see: Linux Kernel Module Cheat.
Genius: Richard Feynman and Modern Physics by James Gleick (1994) mentions several times how Richard Feynman was a reader of the encyclopedia. E.g. in youtu.be/ivxkd98mDvc?t=50 Richard's sister also talks about it.
Then the Internet came along and killed it.
The motivation model for collaborators was simple: to get famous. To be able to be selected contribute an article meant that you knew something or two! There was some physicist Ciro read the biography of who was really glad to be able to write an article on the encyclopedia after having worshiped it for so long, TODO find the reference.
While this is somewhat a part of Wikipedia motivation, it is much less so because there is no single article authorship. This is something OurBigBook.com aims to improve.
Died of cancer at age 53. Ciro Santilli just can't help but speculate that it is linked to radioactivity exposure.
Gospel of Matthew 7:13:
Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it.
Ciro Santilli really likes this one, because he feels that where many people go, it is useless to go again. It is much better to explore that which few can do, but which many will need.