Sohcahtoa!

Mathematics can ask you to remember things that have no obvious connection to common sense. Either because it’s arbitrary (the name of a function in respect to what it computes) or because you haven’t quite figured all the details out. In either cases, a few mnemonics are always useful!

Lost+Found: Ghostly Geometry

Lusine – “Two Dots” from Ghostly International on Vimeo.

Wallpaper: Believe… or don’t

Believe, or dont. 1920×1200

Wallpaper: Peace

Peace. 1920×1200

Code Style: Vertical vs Horizontal?

The only difference between coding styles and religion discussions is that coding styles have claimed fewer victims—at least until now. A few post back I discussed color schemes, and this week I’ll be discussing code geometry for enhanced clarity.

What’s a Good Color Scheme?

Although EMACS is growing old, filled with passé idiosyncrasies, and rather complicated to tweak, I grew accustomed to it and is now my main editor. I use it for shell scripting, C++, HTML, even. But to use EMACS properly, or a least make it enjoyable a little bit, one must do a fair bit of configuration. Key bindings to match modern keyboards, adding the macros you’re using the most, and, finally, adjusting the color scheme so that your eyes do not bleed after a few hours of work.

But what is a good color scheme?

Can you survive your Data Hiroshima?

Even expensive and top-of-the-line hardware is fallible. Last night (at the time of writing) my main workstation’s PSU burned. I mean, not soft-failed and powered down, I mean burned. With the acrid smell filling the room, I knew something went very wrong the instant I entered my study. I found my computer powered down, non-responsive. I wasn’t too worried because I knew that even if the computer went dead for good, I would not loose much data since, you know, I have backups.

Are you capable of surviving your own little Data Hiroshima?

Suggested Reading:The LATEX Companion

Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens, Johannes Braams, David Carlisle, Chris Rowley — The LATEX Companion — 2^nd ed, Addison Wesley, 2006, 1090 pp. ISBN 0-201-36299-6

(Buy at Amazon)

I should have told you about this book a long time ago. The LaTeX Companion is the definitive guide to LaTeX, ideal for anyone using it on a daily basis (or almost, as I do) or anyone wanting to learn LaTex. LaTeX is a complex and sophisticated mark-up language aimed at producing better typography for mathematics and scientific work—in which it totally succeeds. As for Linux, LaTeX (and TeX) comes in many distributions, some more geared toward the humanities, other for science, and still other for exquisite “art” typesetting.

A must read for graduate students.

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On the web:

• Latex for Humans
• The Beauty of LaTeX
• The IRC channel #latex on irc.freenode.net

Suggested Reading: The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives

Leonard Mlodinow — The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules our Lives — Vintage, 2008, 252 pp. ISBN 978-0-307-27517-2

(Buy at Amazon.com)

For those who are interested in (but not already familiar with) probabilities and statistics, I would most certainly recommand this book. Mlodinow presents the basic concepts of probability and statistics by concrete everyday examples—and visually, whenever possibile, rather than through classical mathematical notation. He discusses psychological factors that make us so bad at estimating probabilities and understanding statistics. The concepts he presents are deep but the style is fluid and makes The Drunkard’s Walk an easy read.

[…]the human understanding, once it has adopted an opinion, collects any instances that confirms it, and though the contrary instances may be more numerous and more weighty, it either does not notice them or else rejects them, in order that this opinion will remain unshaken.

Francis Bacon, 1620

Suggested Reading:The UNIX-HATERS Handbook

Simson Garfinkel, Daniel Weise, Steven Strassman — The UNIX-HATERS Handbook International Data Group, 1994, 360. pp ISBN 1-56884-203-1

(Download, free)

This is one of the funniest piece of UNIX literature I have come across in a very long time. This book makes thoroughly fun of all the bizarre quirks and general user hostile friendly unfriendliness of Unix and all the stupid things the unexperimented (and sometimes experimented) users can do. Full of FUD and stupidity, this is a classic must read.

Not unrelated: Linux Hater’s Blog.