Home Updated +Created
Check out: OurBigBook.com, the best way to publish your scientific knowledge. It's an open source note taking system that can publish from lightweight markup files in your computer both to a multi-user mind melding dynamic website, or as a static website. It's like Wikipedia + GitHub + Stack Overflow + Obsidian mashed up. Source code: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook.
Sponsor me to work on this project: 100k USD = I quit me job and work on it one year full time. Status: ~144k / 200k USD reached: 1st year locked-in, 2nd year stretch goal open at 200k USD. 1M USD = I retire and do it forever. How to donate: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com".
I reached 100k USD after a 1000 Monero donation, so I quit my job for 1 year starting 1st June 2024 to solve as many STEM courses as I can from a world leading university to try and kickstart The Higher Education Revolution. If I reach 200k USD, then I'll do it for two years instead. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I solve a bunch of courses, year two I come guns blazing with the content and expand further.
Mission: to live in a world where you can learn university-level mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering from perfect free open source books that anyone can write to get famous. More rationale: Section "OurBigBook.com"
Explaining things is my superpower, e.g. I was top user #39 on Stack Overflow in 2023[ref][ref] and I have a few 1k+ star educational GitHub repositories[ref][ref][ref][ref]. Now I want to bring that level of awesomeness to masters level Mathematics and Physics. But I can't do it alone! So I created OurBigBook.com to allow everyone to work together towards the perfect book of everything.
My life's goal is to bring hardcore university-level STEM open educational content to all ages. Sponsor me at github.com/sponsors/cirosantilli starting from 1$/month so I can work full time on it. Further information: Section "Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com". Achieving what I call "free gifted education" is my Nirvana.
This website is written in OurBigBook Markup, and it is published on both cirosantilli.com (static website) and outbigbook.om/cirosantilli (multi-user OurBigBook Web instance). Its source code is located at: github.com/cirosantilli/cirosantilli.github.io and also at cirosantilli.com/_dir and it is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise noted.
To contact Ciro, see: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli". He likes to talk with random people of the Internet.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/ID_photo_of_Ciro_Santilli_taken_in_2013.jpg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/media/master/Ciro_Santilli's_learn_teach_apply_logo.png
Besides that, I'm also a freedom of speech slacktivist and recreational cyclist. I like Chinese traditional music and classic Brazilian pop. Opinions are my own, but they could be yours too. Tax the rich.
I offer:
My approach is to:
For minors, parents are welcome to join video calls, and all interactions with the student will be recorded and made available to parents.
I have a proven track of explaining complex concepts in an interesting and useful way. I work for the learner. Teaching statement at: Section "How to teach". Pricing to be discussed. Contact details at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli".
I am particularly excited about pointing people to the potential next big things, my top picks these days are:I am also generally interested in:
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli's amazing Stack Overflow profile
. Ciro contributes almost exclusively by answering question he Googles into out of his own need, and never by refreshing the newest question of big tags for low hanging fruit! More information at: Section "Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions".
Video 1.
Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
. Source.
Video 2.
OurBigBook Web topics demo
. Source. The OurBigBook topic feature allows users to "merge their minds" in a "sort by upvote"-stack overflow-like manner for each subject. This is the killer feature of OurBigBook Web. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-topics.
Video 3.
OurBigBook dynamic article tree demo
. Source. The OurBigBook dynamic tree feature allows any of your headers to be the toplevel h1 header of a page, while still displaying its descendants. SEO loves this, and it also allows users to always get their content on the correct granularity. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/ourbigbook-web-dynamic-article-tree.
Video 4.
OurBigBook local editing and publishing demo
. Source. With OurBigBook you can store your content as plaintext files in a Lightweight markup, and then publish that to either OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features, or as a static website where you are in full control. More information at: docs.ourbigbook.com/publish-your-content.
Video 5. Source. More information: Section "Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games". This is Ciro's underwhelming stab at the fundamental question: Can AGI be trained in simulations?. This project could be taken much further.
Figure 2. . Source code: github.com/cirosantilli/x86-bare-metal-examples. Ciro's Linux Kernel Module Cheat is a closely related and much more important project that covers the Linux kernel and assembly language.
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|  Force of Will               3 U U  |
|  ---------------------------------  |
| |                  ////////////   | |
| |                ////() ()\////\  | |
| |               ///_\ (--) \///\  | |
| |        )      ////  \_____///\\ | |
| |       ) \      /   /   /    /   | |
| |    ) /   \     |   |  /   _/    | |
| |   ) \  (  (   /   / /   / \     | |
| |  / ) ( )  / (    )/(    )  \    | |
| |  \(_)/(_)/  /UUUU \  \\\/   |   | |
| .---------------------------------. |
| Interrupt                           |
| ,---------------------------------, |
| | You may pay 1 life and remove a | |
| | blue card in your hand from the | |
| | game instead of paying Force of | |
| | Will's casting cost.  Effects   | |
| | that prevent or redirect damage | |
| | cannot be used to counter this  | |
| | loss of life.                   | |
| | Counter target spell.           | |
| `---------------------------------` |
|                                     l
| Illus.  Terese Nelsen               |
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Code 1. .
Artist unknown, uploaded December 2014. Part of Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" where Ciro Santilli maintains a curated list of such interesting inscriptions.
This was a small project done by Ciro for artistic purposes that received some attention due to the incredible hype surrounding cryptocurrencies at the time. Ciro Santilli's views on cryptocurrencies are summarized at: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?".
Figure 3.
YellowRobot.jpg
. Source.
JPG image fully embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain depicting some kind of cut material art depicting a yellow robot, inscribed on January 29, 2017.
Ciro Santilli found this image and others during his research for Section "Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain" by searching for image fingerprints on every transaction payload of the blockchain with a script.
The image was uploaded by EMBII, co-creator of the AtomSea & EMBII upload mechanism, which was responsible for a large part of the image inscriptions in the Bitcoin blockchain.
The associated message reads:
Chiharu [EMBII's Japanese wife] and I found this little yellow robot while exploring Chicago. It will be covered by tar or eventually removed but this tribute will remain. N 41.880778 E -87.629210
This is one of Ciro Santilli's favorite AtomSea & EMBII uploads, as it perfectly encapsules the "medium as an art form" approach to blockchain art, where even non-novel works can be recontextualized into something interesting, here depicting an opposition between the ephemeral and the immutable.
At twitter.com/EMBII4U/status/1615389973343268871 EMBII announced that he would be giving off shares of that image on Sup!?, a Bitcoin-backed NFT system he was; making. In December 2023, he gave some shares of the robot to Ciro Santilli.
Figure 4. .
This website was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites, a covert system the CIA used to communicate with its assets. More details at: Section "CIA 2010 covert communication websites".
Ciro Santilli had some naughty OSINT fun finding some of the websites of this defunct network in 2023 after he heard about the 2022 Reuters report on the matter, which for the first time gave away 7 concrete websites out of a claimed 885 total found. As of November 2023, Ciro had found about 350 of them.
Figure 5. .
This is another website that was used as one of the CIA 2010 covert communication websites. This website is written in Brazilian Portuguese, and therefore suggests that the CIA had assets in Brazil at the time, and thus was spying on a "fellow democracy".
Although Snowden's revelations made it extremely obvious to the world that the USA spies upon everyone outside of the Five Eyes, including fellow democracies, it is rare to have such a direct a concrete proof of it visible live right on the Wayback Machine. Other targeted democracies include France, Germany, Italy and Spain. More details at: USA spying on its own allies.
Video 8. . Source. Quick and direct explanation of the statement of the BSD conjecture for people who know basic university mathematics. This is one of the Millennium Prize Problems, and you will get a million dollars if you can solve it! This therefore falls in the Simple to state but hard to prove of Ciro Santilli's the beauty of mathematics aesthetics.
Figure 9.
Top view of an open Oxford Nanopore MinION
. Source. This is Ciro Santilli's hand on the Wikipedia article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Nanopore_Technologies. He put it there after working a bit on Section "How to use an Oxford Nanopore MinION to extract DNA from river water and determine which bacteria live in it" :-) And he would love to document more experiments like that one Section "Videos of all key physics experiments", but opportunities are extremely rare.
A quick 2D continuous AI game prototype for reinforcement learning written in Matter.js, you can view it on a separate page at cirosantilli.com/_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport. This is a for-fun-only prototype for Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games, C++ or maybe Python (for the deep learning ecosystem) seems inevitable for a serious version of such a project. But it is cute how much you can do with a few lines of Matter.js!
HTML snippet:
<iframe src="_raw/js/matterjs/examples.html#top-down-asdw-fixed-viewport" width="1000" height="850"></iframe>
Dietterich Labs Updated +Created
Covers some specific hardcore subjects, notably quantum electrodynamics, in full mathematical detail, e.g.: "Quantum Field Theory Lecture Series" playlist: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSpklniGdSfSsk7BSZjONcfhRGKNa2uou
Unfortunately the channel is too obsessed with mathematical detail (which it does amazingly), and does not give enough examples/application/intuition, which is what would be useful to most people, thus falling too much on the hardcore side of the missing link between basic and advanced.
This channel does have on merit however: compared to other university courses, it is much more direct, which might mean that you get to something interesting before you got bored to death, Section "You can learn more from older students than from faculty" comes to mind.
Videos generally involves short talks + a detailed read-through of a pre-prepared PDF. Dietterich has refused however giving the PDF or LaTeX source as of 2020 on comments unfortunately... what a wasted opportunity for society. TODO find the comment. Sam, if you ever Google yourself to this page, let's make a collab on OurBigBook.com and fucking change education forever man.
Full name as shown in channel content: Samuel Dietterich. Other accounts:
Video 1.
The Ultimate Goal Of My YouTube Channel by Dietterich Labs (2020)
Source. In this video Dietterich gives his ideal for the channel. Notably, he describes how the few experimental videos he has managed to make were done in a opportunistic way from experiments that were happening around him. This resonated with Ciro Santilli's ideas from videos of all key physics experiments.
Video 2.
Sam Dietterich interview by Dietterich Labs (2022)
Source. TODO find patience to watch and summarize key points.
Video 3.
The Sting Of Soft Corruption: My College Experience by Dietterich Labs
. Source. Academia is broken video.
Text is cheaper than video Updated +Created
Text materials are generally superior to video because they:
  • are faster to create and edit
  • uses less disk space and network bandwidth
  • is easier to search: Ctrl + F on the browser and off you go. And then grep if you have superpowers.
Only produce video material if:
  • it shows an experiment, physical technique, natural phenomena or location that is of interest. See also: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments"
  • it gives fundamental geometric insight on the subject
  • you are filming a human transmitting their passion about the subject, and the speaker is amazing, and does not speak for too long
Never create videos of people just speaking hardcore content for long amounts of time.
If you have to use videos, make them as short as possible, and index them with a textual table of contents.
Also consider using sequences of images or GIFs instead of videos, since those are cheaper.
Figure 1.
Textbooks Y U NO HAVE CTRL-F meme
. Source. Same applies to videos.
Motivation Updated +Created
Many subjects have changed very little in the last hundred years, and so it is mind-blowing that people have to pay for books that teach them!
If computers are bicycles for the mind, Ciro wants this website to be the Ferrari of the mind.
Since Ciro Santilli was young, he has been bewildered by the natural sciences and mathematics due to his bad memory.
The beauty of those subjects has always felt like intense sunlight in a fresh morning to Ciro. Sometimes it gets covered by clouds and obscured by less important things, but it always comes back again and again, weaker or stronger with its warmth, guiding Ciro's life path.
As a result, he has always suffered a lot at school: his grades were good, but he wasn't really learning those beautiful things that he wanted to learn!
School, instead of helping him, was just wasting his time with superficial knowledge.
First, before university, school organization had only one goal: put you into the best universities, to make a poster out of you and get publicity, so that more parents will be willing to pay them money to put their kids into good university.
Ciro once asked a chemistry teacher some "deeper question" after course was over, related to the superficial vision of the topic they were learning to get grades in university entry exams. The teacher replied something like:
You remind me of a friend of mine. He always wanted to understand the deeper reason for things. He now works at NASA.
Ciro feels that this was one of the greatest compliments he has ever received in his life. This teacher, understood him. Funny how some things stick, while all the rest fades.
Another interesting anecdote is how Ciro Santilli's mother recalls that she always found out about exams in the same way: when the phone started ringing as Ciro's friends started asking for help with the subjects just before the exam. Sometimes it was already too hopelessly late, but Ciro almost always tried. Nothing shows how much better you are than someone than teaching them.
Then, after entering university, although things got way better because were are able to learn things that are borderline useful.
Ciro still felt a strong emotion of nostalgia when after university his mother asked if she could throw away his high school books, and Ciro started tearing them all down for recycling. Such is life.
University teachers were still to a large extent researchers who didn't want to, know how to and above all have enough time and institutional freedom to teach things properly and make you see their beauty, some good relate articles:
The very fact that you had very little choice of what to learn so that a large group can get a "Diploma", makes it impossible for people to deeply learn what the really want.
This is especially true because Ciro was in Brazil, a third world country, where the opportunities are comparatively extremely limited to the first world.
Also extremely frustrating is how you might have to wait for years to get to the subject you really want. For example, on a physics course, quantum mechanics is normally only taught on the third year! While there is value to knowing the pre-requisites, holding people back for years is just too sad, and Ciro much prefers backward design. And just like the university entry exams, this creates an entry barrier situation where you might in the end find that "hey, that's not what I wanted to learn after all", see also: students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.
We've created a system where people just wait, and wait, and wait, never really doing what they really want. They wait through school to get into university. They wait through university to get to masters. They wait through masters to get to PhD. They wait through PhD to become a PI. And for the minuscule fraction of those that make it, they become fund proposal writers. And if you make any wrong choice along the, it's all over, you can't continue anymore, the cost would be too great. So you just become software engineer or a consultant. Is this the society that we really want?
And all of this is considering that he was very lucky to not be in a poor family, and was already in some of the best educational institutions locally available already, and had comparatively awesome teachers, without which he wouldn't be where he is today if he hadn't had such advantages in the first place.
But no matter how awesome one teacher is, no single person can overcome a system so large and broken. Without technological innovation that is.
The key problem all along the way is the Society's/Government's belief that everyone has to learn the same things, and that grades in exams mean anything.
Ciro believes however, that exams are useless, and that there are only two meaningful metrics:
  • how much money you make
  • fame for doing for doing useful work for society without earning money, which notably includes creating new or better free knowledge such as in academic papers, either novel or review
Even if you wanted to really learn natural sciences and had the time available, it is just too hard to find good resources to properly learn it. Even attending university courses are hit and miss between amazing and mediocre teachers.
If you go into a large book shop, the science section is tiny, and useless popular science books dominate it without precise experiment descriptions. And then, the only few "serious" books are a huge list of formulas without any experimental motivation.
And if you are lucky to have access to an university library that has open doors, most books are likely to be old and boring as well. Googling for PDFs from university courses is the best bet.
Around 2012 however, he finally saw the light, and started his path to Ciro Santilli's Open Source Enlightenment. University was not needed anymore. He could learn whatever he wanted. A vision was born.
To make things worse, for a long time he was tired of seeing poor people begging on the streets every day and not doing anything about it. He thought:
He who teaches one thousand, saves one million.
which like everything else is likely derived subconsciously from something else, here Schindler's list possibly adapted quote from the Talmud:
He who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.
So, by the time he left University, instead of pursuing a PhD in theoretical Mathematics or Physics just for the beauty of it as he had once considered, he had new plans.
We needed a new educational system. One that would allow people to fulfill their potential and desires, and truly improve society as a result, both in rich and poor countries.
And he found out that programming and applied mathematics could also be fun, so he might as well have some fun while doing this! ;-)
So he started Booktree in 2014, a GitLab fork, worked on it for an year, noticed the approach was dumb, and a few years later started building this new version. The repo github.com/booktree/booktree is a small snapshot of Ciro's 2014 brain on the area, there were quite a few similar projects at the time, and most have died.
Ciro is basically a librarian at heart, and wants to be the next:
Video 1.
"Jimmy Wales: How a ragtag band created Wikipedia" 2005 TED talk
. Source. Original source: www.ted.com/talks/jimmy_wales_the_birth_of_wikipedia.
Video 2.
"Brewster Kahle: A digital library, free to the world." 2007 TED Talk
. Source. Talks about the Internet Archive which he created.
Video 3.
Sal Khan from Khan Academy 2016 TED talk
. Source. Ciro is not a big fan of the "basis on top of basis focus" because of his obsession with backward design, but "learn to mastery at your own pace" and "everyone can be a world class innovator" are obviously good.
Quantum Hall effect Updated +Created
Quantum version of the Hall effect.
As you increase the magnetic field, you can see the Hall resistance increase, but it does so in discrete steps.
Figure 1.
Hall resistance as a function of the applied magnetic field showing the Quantum Hall effect
. Source. As we can see, the blue line of the Hall resistance TODO material, temperature, etc. It is unclear if this is just
Gotta understand this because the name sounds cool. Maybe also because it is used to define the fucking ampere in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units.
At least the experiment description itself is easy to understand. The hard part is the physical theory behind.
The effect can be separated into two modes:
Video 1.
Integer and fractional quantum Hall effects by Matthew A. Grayson
. Source. Presented 2015. This dude did good.
Replication crisis Updated +Created
Of course, if academic journals require greater reproducibility for publication, then the cost per paper increases.
However, the total cost has to be smaller than the cost everyone who reads the paper spends to reproduce, no?
The truth is, part of the replication crisis is also due to research groups not wanting to share their precious secrets with others, so they can keep ahead of the publication curve, or maybe spin off a startup.
And when it comes to papers, things are even crazier: big companies manage to publish white papers in peer reviewed journals.
Ciro Santilli wants to help in this area with his videos of all key physics experiments project idea.
Cool initiative. Papers that do not share source code should be banned from peer reviewed academic journals.
Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Updated +Created
Ciro Santilli is actively looking for donations and contracts so he can continue to work full time on OurBigBook.com sustainably, and develop free hardcore university-level STEM education for all ages!
At 100k USD, I quit my job to work full time on it for one year. During this year I will use my contacts with STEM students of a world leading university near where I live and solve as many of their problem sheets as possible, mostly by referring to OurBigBook.com articles I'll be writing. The goal is to get as much STEM knowledge as possible into the world, and highlight how flawed presencial and sequential Higher Education is, while positioning OurBigBook.com as an alternative way to organize humanity's knowledge. Quite grand.
Status: ~144k / 200k USD reached. 1st year locked in and started 1st June 2024 to 31st May 2025[ref], 2nd year stretch goal open. A second year greatly improve chances of success: year one I solve a bunch of courses, year two I come guns blazing with the content and expand further. Donation breakdown:
  • 2024-03-18: $126,352 (!!!): anonymous 1000 Monero donation to self-custody wallet. Further comments: 1000 Monero donation.
  • 2024-03-13: $1,375: anonymous 10 Monero donation to self-custody wallet
  • 2023-11-20: $14.563: anonymous 100 Monero donation to Binance wallet
  • 2023-09: $810: anonymous 0.032 Bitcoin donation to Coinbase wallet
  • subscriptions up to 2024-01: $143,795
More details: Section "Accounting method"
At 1M USD I retire and work on open STEM education forever.
Note to potential anonymous crypto donors: anonymous donations incur a regulatory risk. I cash out most of such donations and announce it very clearly to the government and banks. For example, at one point Barclays even froze my UK account. But things seem manageable for now. On one hand, such donations serve as a fun test of the financial system. But on the other, if all banks reject my money or if the government decides to take it, I will write off the anonymous donation at zero.
How to give:
  • one time donations:
    • cryptocurrency: note that Ciro is not a regular crypto user, so you might want to make a smaller test donation and confirm that it worked by contacting Ciro before going for colossal amounts (one can dream):
      • Monero address: 4A1KK4uyLQX7EBgN7uFgUeGt6PPksi91e87xobNq7bT2j4V6LqZHKnkGJTUuCC7TjDNnKpxDd8b9DeNBpSxim8wpSczQvzf. Secret view key: 7ccaf885ff5540b0ff18927e6ac5da30130afb1eaee09ad95d3c4536a6337e0f. This is a self-custody wallet on a "clean" dedicated Monero laptop connected the Internet. I check for incoming transactions from my dirty main laptop via a view-only wallet each weekend. The cash out method used is latest simplest thing that wasn't yet blocked in my country on a given week, the last time that was centralized swappers[ref]. The fact that the cash out method changes weekly confirms that Monero privacy hadn't yet been broken by countries and that Monero is still one of the most useful cryptocurrencies: Section "Are cryptocurrencies useful?". For transparency, I announce all non-trivial transactions on social media, and the full list of transactions can be seen by anyone with the secret view key provided. I previously had different addresses, so pre-existing donations on older addresses will not be visible there.
      • Bitcoin address: 3KRk7f2JgekF6x7QBqPHdZ3pPDuMdY3eWR. This is a Coinbase wallet, off-chain transactions with no transaction fees accepted from other Coinbase users. This method has been tested, I have been able to receive funds from this address in 2023. Fees: non-fixed trading fees[ref] + 0% withdrawal fee on top of any Bitcoin network for on-chain transactions[ref]
      • Ethereum address: 0x44cF8C9C015F46d3b2Df730b6492823FD7A91044. Test transaction recommended.
      • Solana address: DjdaGawoVFdqxJEqpBGsSWuR4G4MVFNiNkAEu89HuKcE. Test transaction recommended.
    • TransferWise tag: wise.com/pay/me/cirod3. It shows as "Ciro Duran Santilli" and that's correct. No fees apparently? Love it!
    • PayPal: paypal.me/cirosantilli. Note that dots in Gmail address are ignored, and it is perfectly normal if the email you see has some extra dots in it. Fees: 2.9% + 0.30 GBP[ref].
  • monthly subscriptions of 1$/month or more on either:
    Symbolic 1 dollar/month donation are extremely welcome to signal your interest! This way if a certain critical mass of sponsors is ever reached (~100?), Ciro can start to more actively asking slightly higher amounts to really try to achieve full time self sufficiency.
  • larger grants/contracts from filthy rich individuals or organizations: contact Ciro as mentioned at: Section "How to contact Ciro Santilli" to discuss.
    Ciro is interested in contracts/voluntary work that would be compatible/synergic with the OurBigBook.com project. Some possibilities include:
    • interacting directly with classes of university students to help them learn the class subject, while at the same time spreading the university knowledge outside of the university walls
    • one-to-one mentoring of individuals of any age that are looking to make an impact in the world, and not just pass their exams
    • fixing specific bugs in related projects Ciro has experience in. These could be either via one-off contracts, or on platforms such as:
And if you have a different preferred payment mechanism not listed above, please contact Ciro, and he will set it up.
Ciro's current ambitions require him to remain in developed countries, because Ciro wants to document advanced science and technology by liaising with top universities, and there is not nearly as much high technology in poor countries. Remaining in developed countries is also a required due to family reasons.
If you would like public acknowledgement for your support, Ciro will very gladly give it, just let Ciro know how you'd prefer it. Due to Ciro Santilli's campaign for freedom of speech in China, many supporters have chosen to be anonymous, and that is totally fine, not everyone is interested in politics, or has a situation where going public is acceptable, so we don't have a standard setup yet, let's build it together. A acknowledgement section at the bottom of this page would be a minimum, but I for larger donations we could add a your advertisement in a locations such as:
100k USD/year is a semi arbitrary amount that sounds nice. My last day job total compensation as of 2024 was about 150k USD/year.
Video 2.
OpenGL GPU GLSL fragment shader real time v4l2 Linux webcam computer vision box blur vs CPU
. Source.
Figure 1.
Ciro Santilli playing with a pipette at the University of Cambridge circa 2017
. Although totally disqualified for it, Ciro would really like to understand and explain cool scientific experiments in insane detail much as he does with computer software, related:Maybe if he ever gets enough credibility, such opportunities would actually materialize. It could be a bit like Periodic Videos, but for molecular biology and physics, and backed by OurBigBook text/tree with minimal openly licensed videos. The fact that such opportunities are essentially impossible outside of the boredom of the university system is something we should really change about education.
The only reason for universities to exist should be the laboratories Updated +Created
Besides of course sexual selection, considering in this section only "formal learning" activities.
Consider e.g. the 2020 University of Oxford, where many many people are taking courses without any laboratory work (and also without much use at all) like literature and history, and they are paying about 9k pounds/year for it: how much it costs to study at the University of Oxford?.
Basically all of this could be done online from books.
Laboratories are impossible however, because expendables of every experiment you do cost from hundreds to thousands of dollars, not to mention crazy upfront equipment costs.
For this reason, the brick and mortar aspect universities should focus exclusively on laboratories, and ensuring that the students with the most relevant knowledge (which can be readily obtained online) get access to those laboratories. Students should of course fully master every aspect of theory pertinent to their experiments. principal investigators should hand pick whichever criteria they want to select their students, possibly based partly on exam as a service if they find it a useful metric.
Furthermore, the use of laboratories should put great focus on novel research. A lot of laboratory instruction could be done from video of an experiments. As much as possible, we should use laboratories for novel research. Related: Section "Videos of all key physics experiments".