ID photo of Ciro Santilli taken in 2013 right eyeCiro Santilli OurBigBook logoOurBigBook.com  Sponsor 中国独裁统治 China Dictatorship 新疆改造中心、六四事件、法轮功、郝海东、709大抓捕、2015巴拿马文件 邓家贵、低端人口、西藏骚乱
This section contains the a list of cool things Ciro Santilli has been up to in chronological order, including small quick ones. Many/most of those are also posted on Ciro Santilli's accounts controlled by Ciro Santillis such as:
For a more theme-oriented version of the best results see: Section "The best articles by Ciro Santilli".
For OurBigBook Project updates see: docs.ourbigbook.com/news
opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/1560/how-can-i-get-a-list-of-currencies-from-wikidata/21839#21839
I've had a bit more fun with SPARQL and Wikidata.
This one was way harder than my previous fun with "find the oldest people who won a given prize" (Nobel Prize/Oscar) mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/112689376315990248 because unlike those prizes where all the decisions are centralized, countries are much more complicated beasts, with changing currencies and international recognition.
This was a good experience to see a few ways in which Wikidata is inconsistent, with the same concept being expressed in multiple different ways, e.g. "end time" property of the current vs the superior "end time" qualifier.
Particularly bad is the notion of a "deprecated rank", that should really not exist.
This is exactly the type of semi interactive data munching that I like to do, a bit in the same vein as CIA 2010 covert communication websites and Cool data embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain.
As you might imagine, the secret services use exactly this type of knowledge modelling to do their dirty business, e.g. Gaffer by the GCHQ.
If only I weren't such a rebel, I'd be a perfect fit for the intelligence agencies.
This is the best monstrosity I had the patience to come up with:
SELECT
  ?currency
  (GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT ?currencyIsoCode; SEPARATOR=", ") AS ?currencyIsoCodes)
  ?currencyLabel
  (GROUP_CONCAT(DISTINCT ?countryLabel; SEPARATOR=", ") AS ?countries)
WHERE {
  ?country wdt:P31/wdt:P279* wd:Q6256. # is country
  ?country p:P38 ?countryHasCurrency.
  ?countryHasCurrency ps:P38 ?currency.
  ?countryHasCurrency wikibase:rank ?countryHasCurrencyRank.
  OPTIONAL {
    ?currency p:P498 ?currencyHasIsoCode.
    ?currencyHasIsoCode ps:P498 ?currencyIsoCode.
  }
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?country wdt:P576 ?countryAbolished}
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?currency wdt:P576 ?currencyAbolished}
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?currency wdt:P582 ?currencyEndTime}
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?countryHasCurrency pq:P582 ?countryHasCurrencyEndtime}
  FILTER (?countryHasCurrencyRank != wikibase:DeprecatedRank)
  FILTER (!bound(?currencyHasIsoCode) || ?currencyHasIsoCode != wikibase:DeprecatedRank)
  # TODO makes query take timeout? Why? Needed to exclude PLZ.
  FILTER NOT EXISTS {?currencyHasIsoCode pq:P582 ?currencyHasIsoCodeEndtime}
  SERVICE wikibase:label {
    bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en".
    ?currency rdfs:label ?currencyLabel .
    ?country rdfs:label ?countryLabel .
  }
}
GROUP BY ?currency ?currencyLabel
ORDER BY ?currencyIsoCodes ?currencyLabel
It got quite close to the ISO 4217 list.
I was drawn into this waste of time after I noticed that someone had managed to create the Wikipedia of PsiQuantum which I had tried earlier but got deleted: mastodon.social/@cirosantilli/113488891292906243, and then I made the mistake of having a look at the Wikidata page of PsiQuantum.
Figure 1.
500,000 Transnistrian ruble banknote 1997 series
. This is one of the most widely used currencies which does not have an ISO 4217 code.
Announcements:
I also had one more fun with: opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/15750/structured-data-for-nobel-prizes/21847#21847 getting some basic info about Nobel Prize winners, and noticed one, John Sulston, 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine laureate, who likely has the wrong place of birth on his Nobel Prize profile: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2002/sulston/facts/ which is funny. I suggested the change now. Edit they fixed it after I pointed it out:
Another highlight was 1913 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate Alfred Werner who born either in Mulhouse in Alsace, France, or in "Yo no sé qué me pasó" ("I don't know what happened to me" in Spanish), a 1986 song by Mexican singer Juan Gabriel.
Announcements:
Figure 2. Source.
Also at opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/21849/how-to-get-a-list-of-all-nobel-prize-winners-who-never-had-a-doctorate-from-wiki/21850#21850 I tried to get the list of Nobel Prize laureates who don't have a PhD. I think the query was correct, but Wikidata data is just too incomplete. Related:
I edited the VOD of the talk Aratu Week 2024 Talk by Ciro Santilli: My Best Random Projects about the CIA 2010 covert communication websites a bit and published it at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWL7l-5r1a4.
Video 1.
How I found a Star Wars website made by the CIA by Ciro Santilli
. Source.
Announcements:
github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/1330
GitHub forbade our China Dictatorship auto-reply bot, the reason given is because they forbid comment reply bots in general. Though it was cool to see a junior support staff person giving out what obviously triggered the action:
We've received a large volume of complaints from other users indicating that the comments and issues are unrelated to the projects they were working on.
before a more senior one took over.
Ciro was slightly saddened but not totally surprized by the bloodbath against him on the Reddit the threads he created:
So we observe once again the stupidity of deletionism towards anything that is considered controversial. The West is discussion fatigued, and would rather delete discussion than have it.
We also se people against you having freedom to moderate your own repositories as you like it, with bots or otherwise. Giving up freedoms for nothing, because "bot is evil".
Announcements:
academia.stackexchange.com/questions/213576/do-copyright-transfer-of-papers-to-publishers-affect-when-the-paper-enters-the-p Do copyright transfer of papers to publishers affect when the paper enters the public domain since copyright belongs to a corporation and not persons?
I'm asking a law question for a change, because I enjoy skimming through important old papers and uploading parts of them where everyone can legally enjoy them.
Announcements:
I like the Falun Mine for two reasons:
Announcements:
Whenever a user creates an issue or comment on China Dictatorship, the bot now automatically creates a new issue with one of the latest news from Duty Machine: github.com/duty-machine/duty-machine
Sample created issue: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/1322 Script: github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/blob/ab6a46c511afaaf6c9e68ba8813c2b2cf9d9638c/action.js#L195
Duty Machine is a bot repo that automatically scrapes Chinese language news from major news outlets such as the New York Times or Radio Free Asia which ensures that China Dictatorship news will always be new.
It's the war of the anonymous bots against the little pinks, part of asymmetric information warfare: cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship/asymmetric-information-warfare
Announcements:
superuser.com/questions/420885/is-there-a-face-recognition-command-line-tool/1852394#1852394 played with the face_recognition Python package: github.com/ageitgey/face_recognition Cute CLI API, but disappointing accuracy. Also at:
Thanks Adam Geitgey for putting that repo up.
Figure 3. Source.
Announcements:
Under Section "Publication by Marie Curie" I did a quick overview of the papers in which Marie Curie and collaborators publish the existence of new elements polonium and radium. Both are very understandable (except the chemistry), and have some cute terminology. I also cited those papers on her Wikipedia page: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Marie_Curie&diff=1240252528&oldid=1238097626 Another good exercise in "old paper finding" + "Wikipedia markup/rules" as I looked at the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences a bit.
Figure 4. Source.
This was kickstarted by YouTube recommending me the following good video:
Video 2.
The RaLa Experiment by Our Own Devices
. Source.
which led me into yet a quick nuclear physics binge. I shouldn't do this to myself. I also ended up writing some tentative answers on Quora:
Announcements:
askubuntu.com/questions/501910/how-to-text-to-speech-output-using-command-line/1522885#1522885
I tried to use every single free offline text-to-speech engine that would run on Ubuntu 24.04 without too much hassle to see if any of them sounded natural. pico2wave was the overall winner so far, but it is not perfect.
I've been noticing a gap between the "AI" SOTA and what is actually packaged well enough to be usable by a general audience.
Also played a bit more with OpenAI Whisper: askubuntu.com/questions/24059/automatically-generate-subtitles-close-caption-from-a-video-using-speech-to-text/1522895#1522895 Mind blowing performance and perfect packaging as well, kudos.
Announcements:

Older updates

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