Blog hiatus explanation

I do not post here very much, do I? In my defense, I have been posting:

• At the PhilTeX blog I mentioned
• At the TeX.stackexchange blog
• And at this philosophy of science blog

So I’ve not been slacking. Oh I’ve also had that whole “thesis” thing I’m supposed to be working on. I’ve nearly finished working on a paper about imprecise probabilities and decision making. It still needs some work, but once it’s out of the way, I hope to spend a little time working on the disagreement thing I mentioned in my last post…

PhilTeX

Just a quick update to say that I am a contributor to the PhilTeX group blog for philosophers who use LaTeX. If you fit into that (rather niche) category, chances are you’ve already heard of PhilTeX, so this update is almost certainly completely superfluous.

That is all.

Unaccustomed as I am to blog activism…

This story is thoroughly ridiculous.

I’m no anti-modern-art type, but Hirst is doing himself no favours with his reaction to this stuff. Seriously, grow a sense of humour.

I’ve recently started actually using twitter. It’s amusing. I like the hashtags thing. Two current favourites #hirstisacock and #lacklustreblockbusters

Geek poetry

I’ve not posted for a while: I’ve been busy doing things other than procrastinating! OK that’s a lie, but the procrastination hasn’t taken the form of blog posts for a while. My website looks much the same as ever, but lots has changed under the hood, as it were. It now validates as XHTML and the columns are the same height and extend to accommodate as much text as needed. Hoorah. I also have an essay I’m rather proud of. (Actual work, shock horror!) It is probably over long and not all that much of it can be adapted to fit into my literature review, but I’m still happy with the (almost) finished product. On an unrelated note, here are some poems that appealed to the geek in me.

Here is the halting problem proven in poem form.

A poem composed entirely of punctuation. (I may have linked to this before.)

I remember a maths lecturer at Warwick starting a lesson by telling us:
Integral t-squared dt
from 1 to the cube root of 3
times the cosine
of three pi over 9
equals log of the cube root of ‘e’.

More maths limericks here.

A history of Western philosophy in limerick form you say? Well why not?

And of course there’s limerickdb. The marked geeky charm of the top 150 indicates that this project is from the chap behind xkcd.

And while it’s not a poem, it’s certainly the same ballpark.

And finally my own contribution thanks to getting bored during measure theory lectures. I give you a haiku about basic measure spaces:

A finite union
of disjoint rectangles is
elementary

I have tons more of these on some scrap of paper in my old notes folder. I also wrote a limerick about Rene Magritte once… (I rhymed “Rene Magritte” with “ceci n’est pas une pipe”)

The start of something beautiful

Today is the official launch of my website! It took a looming essay deadline to motivate me into the epic procrastination that was this weekend. The links section isn’t working, I haven’t configured the stats things yet, and I haven’t migrated this blog over to its new home, but all that is stuff that I haven’t got time to do at the moment; I actually need to get back to writing my essay now…

Please notice the random quote generator in the footer – it took quite a while to get right… I’m afraid it’s a little too subtle and people might not notice it.

Wah wah. The internet knows my dog is called “Leeroy”

So that last post about words was not at all ranty. Here’s a proper old moan.

There’s something strange about people complaining that facebook has access to all this private data and is cynically selling it on to other evil internet type outfits. Even if you delete your profile all your information stays on their servers and can still be sold on to evil types. There are two things that are so very wrong with all this uproar. The first is that what do you care if someone knows that your favourite film is “Titanic (saw it 6 tiems n tha cinema. im obsessed lol!!!!11″ or that your favourite music is “erm, dont no really.”? So what if the ads you see are tailored to you by your web browsing habits? You’ll just ignore the ads anyway.

The second thing that bothers me about people complaining about privacy on facebook is this: IF YOU DON’T WANT FACEBOOK TO HAVE YOUR DETAILS, DON’T BLOODY WELL PUBLISH THEM ON THE FUCKING INTERNET. I mean, really. You can’t publish your phone number and home address on the internet and then hope the information remains a secret. That’s just stupid. My phone number and email address are not on my facebook profile precisely because I want to have some control over who is privy to that information. I’m happy to advertise that I liked blazing saddles and gladiator and I listen to Weezer and U2. I have put that sort of information up there because I don’t care who knows. Have some bloody common sense.

I also thing there’s a delicious irony in Facebook groups dedicated to complaining about Facebook’s privacy issues. If you’re so outraged, just delete your profile. (And email Facebook asking them to remove all your private data. You can ask them to do that, apparently)

Free Stuff!

This started as part two of my list of web resources for students. But it has kind of devolved into a list of free stuff available online. Basically, as far as I can tell I got most of the good sources for philosophy online the first time round…

Here are some more sources for free stuff on the net.

• John Baez has a great big list of free maths and physics texts available online. Be careful, there’s an animation on that page that crashes my browser.
• Project Gutenberg is a massive store of out-of-copyright texts in electronic formats. Lots of cool stuff available there.
• The Online Books page has lots of stuff on it. I don’t know if any of it is any good, though.
• Books about linux available online.
• Googling online free books gets you lots of hits. Most will probably be dubious however… Most search results always are…
• Here’s a book that looks interesting and is available for free by Alexandre Borovik of A dialogue on infinity fame. It’s called Mathematics under the Microscope.
• Another free book. It’s called God’s Debris and it is by Scott Adams of Dilbert fame. This one I have read. But I can’t really remember if it is any good…

Any suggestions as to other similar stuff is welcome.

I forgot to mention Cicero’s The Nature of the Gods which is kind of almost a dialogue. And while I’m linking to freely available stuff, The Elements is online for free. Read Digest and Be Impressed by the most successful maths textbook ever. 2000 years and still going strong.

“Read, digest and be impressed” I like that phrase. I shall use it regularly. Whether it is relevant or not.

Theme change and other procrastinatory gubbins

Hey look! I changed my blog’s theme again! This is a bit of a boring theme, but the plan is to mess with it a bit. Make it a little more colourful while still keeping true to the minimalist ethic. Or something like that. What this change certainly isn’t about is another way to avoid actually working.

Speaking of not working, I have been playing Conquer Club recently. It doesn’t take up that much time, which is nice. But I suck at risk. So it’s hard. But it’s fun. Another displacement activity will consist in part two of ‘how to avoid doing any work‘ so look out for that in the near future.

My concession to actual work today has been in the form of taking four weighty tomes out of the library and downloading about 8 articles from Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics. Incidentally, that is abbreviated to Stud. Hist. Phil. Mod. Phys. I have also decided to change my topic for Philosophy of Maths and use my old Maths topic as a possible dissertation subject.Oh and I read half a paper. And I’ll read the other half of that paper and maybe another one today. So I am getting something done… Sort of…

Google Groups; you are wrong!

‘Your message will appear in Linux Users Group momentarily’

No. It will appear in a moment. Groups whose postings appears only momentarily would be bugger all use to anyone. Take a moment to reflect on the fact that I used Google’s define: feature to define a word Google didn’t know how to use. According to answers.com: ‘many critics hold that the adverb should be reserved for the senses “for a moment,” and the extended usage is unacceptable‘

Incidentally, usenet groups are full of nutjobs claiming that physicists completely misunderstand general relativity or that Gödel’s incompleteness theorems are invalid or undermine the whole of maths. Weird.

I’ve spent most of today working out how bibtex works. I have another aborted essay attempt and a much greater understanding of how to get LaTeX to do what I want. Next thing on my agenda is to get some basic SVGs to display properly where I want them to. But this is a minor concern since I don’t really need pictures most of the time. I hope next week’s post-lecture essays will be longer and better, given that I am getting the hang of writing in LaTeX.

Experimenting with crap > Proper work

I have written a Draft Essay which isn’t particularly good, since I spent most of the time messing with LaTeX rather than getting anything worthwhile done. But since the essay is ‘experimental’ I thought I’d use it to try out WordPress’ upload features… This essay isn’t intended for submission so I feel I can publish it without fear. If I were planning to use this essay for one of my courses I would never publish it, since that leaves me open to accusations of plagiarism were someone to come across this ‘pre-print’ of the same material. But this is hardly a concern here since I don’t plan on expanding on this enough to submit it for a course and as it stands its pretty much worthless…

Basically, instead of working I have played about with LaTeX and now I’m writing about that. Meta-procrastination… I am now going to go and investigate how to add a Creative Commons license to my TeX files. Like, as metadata or something.