science
wikipedia: reliable sources
Here is what, for many, is a weak point in wikipedia: the sources. What is accepted as “true”. Here is a list of claims that may have been challenged in wikipedia, or not. See how many you get right!
About the katakana Japanese syllabary: in a manga, the speech of a foreign character or a robot [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Quick LaTeX posters
Quick and dirty, I was going to write, but the output is quite nice, actually.
My advice, in a nutshell: use the a0poster class. Then, modify the poster.tex file in Andrea’s site.
Friedman’s green fantasia
A demolishing opinion about Thomas L. Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded: (Why We Need a Green Revolution—and How It Can Renew America):
All this gear is so intelligent, in fact, that “when the sun is shining brightly and the wind is howling” (i.e., when your house is generating solar and wind power), your utility turns on [...]
The Onion on Science
Just a list of The Onion articles about science that I find funny:
Christian Right Lobbies To Overturn Second Law Of Thermodynamics. The second law of thermodynamics, a fundamental scientific principle stating that entropy increases over time as organized forms decay into greater states of randomness, has come under fire from conservative Christian groups, who are [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Get your units right with LaTeX
The LaTeX package SIunits (which seems to be a descendant from the units package that I once used) addresses one of the most nagging issues in physics and engineering: getting the units well typeset. While the source is a bit cumbersome, it is quite readable:
$R=8.314$ \joule\per(\mole\usk\kelvin)
There are prefixes, so that “\mega\ohm” is ok. Many ready-to-use [...]
TED, and Steven Strogatz
This is a very interesting website: TED. A collection of interesting talks, all of them downloadable and in the public domain (CC license). There isn’t much on physics yet, and certainly not in my area. There is a very nice talk, though, by Steven Strogatz on synchronization. Strogatz is a remarkable speaker, I had the [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Math fonts for (La)TeX
How could I have overlooked this Survey of Free Math Fonts for TeX and LaTeX! An excellent read, it shows the author has himself been involved in font design. As I mentioned in my entry on XeTeX, it is great to have many fonts for text (and XeTeX really takes a leap forward in this [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Natural coordinates
Here is an interesting application of Voronoi tesselations / Delaunay triangulations (see previous post The alpha shapes for another one.) Suppose you have a set of points carrying some information, let’s call them particles; the simplest case is just a scalar number representing some field whose value is only known for the particles. Then, [...]
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Beamer for latex
Incredible presentations in LaTeX!
Those of us used to LaTeX know of its incredible performance, but also of its limitations. It being a typesetting program, it basically does what it wants with your input. Thus, it is in principle hard to apply to obvious wysiwyg situations, such as posters (some other entry!) and presentations. Nevertheless, some [...]
awk
Ok, how is awk an underdog in scientific computing. Well, it is very well suited for performing simple tasks on data files.
E.g., you may run
awk ‘{print $1-45,$2/1800*0.82}’ intr.dat
To shift the x value from the first column of the data file, and scale the y value from the second. Or anything one could imagine. The result [...]
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