# Sound and Fury

Signifying nothing

## LaTeX

So you can use $\LaTeX$ code in wordpress posts. (Oddly, I can’t get \tex to display…[edit: use \LaTeX which I haven’t seen before…]) That is cool and I thought I’d try it out.

$e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0$

I wonder if you can use Dirac notation

$\left | \Psi \right >t$

[edit, nope. not with \bra and \ket. you have to use |, \left, \right and > which just isn’t the same…]

I don’t really have a purpose in writing this. I seldom have the need to write formulae in this blog. Maybe I should write more formulae. Although I do dislike the use of mathematics to legitimise something that might otherwise be considered “soft.” A prime example of this is where you say that Organisms change as a function of their environment and themselves, and the environment changes dependent on the state of the environment. Then the following meaningless equations are used. Apparently to justify the proposition:

$\frac{dO}{dt} = f(O,E)$

$\frac{dE}{dt} = f(E)$

Ignoring the fact that I’m pretty sure that should read $g(E)$ rather than $f(E)$ (because they are clearly not supposed to be the same function…) and I believe that organisms affect how their environment changes, these equations mean nothing! What exactly is $\frac{dO}{dt}$ supposed to mean? Yes it’s obvious they are angling for “change in organisms through time” or something like that, but why not say that? Why shoehorn in some fancy looking maths? $O$ isn’t something that has time-derivatives in any meaningful sense. It’s purely an attempt to make the thing look more “scientific” which is crazy. There’s nothing unscientific about using words to express your ideas.

Anyway. That turned into a bit of a rant when it was supposed to me just testing out the LaTeX functions of wordpress…

I have edited this several times to make it all work. I don’t normally edit posts, but this is just a sandbox for my messing with $\LaTeX$ messing…