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Now hereโ€™s an idea

Published June 23, 2009 by lieven

Boy, do I feel stupid for having written close to 500 blog-posts hoping (in vain) they might eventually converge into a book project…

Gil Kalai is infinitely smarter. Get a fake gmail account, invent a fictitious character and start COMMENTING and provoking responses. That’s how “Gina” appeared on the scene, cut and pasted her comments (and the replies to them) and turned all of this into a book : “Gina says”, Adventures in the Blogsphere String War.

So, who’s Gina? On page 40 : “35 years of age, Gina is of Greek and Polish descent. Born in the quaint island of Crete, she currently resides in the USA, in quiet and somewhat uneventful Wichita, Kansas. Gina has a B.Sc in Mathematics (from the University of Athens, with Honors), and a Master’s Degree in Psychology (from the University of Florence, with Honors).
Currently in-between jobs (her last job was working with underprivileged children), she has a lot of free time on her hands, which gives her ample opportunities to roam the blogosphere.”

So far, the first 94 pages are there to download, the part of the book consisting of comments left at Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong. Judging from the table of contents, Gina left further traces at the n-category cafe and Asymptotia.

Having read the first 20 odd pages in full and skimmed the rest, two remarks : (1) it shouldn’t be too difficult to borrow this idea and make a much better book out of it and (2) it raises the question about copyrights on blog-comments…

If the noncommutative geometry blog could be persuaded to awake from its present dormant state, I’d love to get some discussions started, masquerading as AG. Or, given the fact that I’ll use the summer-break to re-educate myself as an n-categorist, the guys running the cafe are hereby warned…

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bloomsday, again

Published June 16, 2009 by lieven

Bloomsday has a tradition of bringing drastic changes to this blog.

Two years ago, it signaled a bloomsday-ending to the original neverendingbooks, giving birth (at least for a couple of months) to MoonshineMath.

Last year, the bloomsday 2 post was the first of several ‘conceptual’ blog proposals, voicing my conviction that a math-blog can only survive as a group-blog.

A few months later, I launched yet another proposal and promised that neverendingbooks would end on new-years eve, exactly five years after it started.

And, here we are again, half a year later, still struggling on … barely.

Well, don’t expect drastic statements from me today. I’ll continue to post when I do feel I’ve something to say (and won’t if I don’t) ((that is, apart from this silly post)). Also, there won’t be another pathetic cry-for-cooperation. I must have given up on that hope.

In fact, there isn’t much I can add to the post just mentioned (in particular my comment to it) to explain my present state of mind when it comes to blogging (and maths).

Let’s hope google wave will be released soon and that some of you will use it to make relevant waves. I promise to add blips when possible.

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math2.0-setup : final comments

Published February 26, 2009 by lieven

Last time I promised to come back explaining how to set-up LaTeX-support, figuring I had to tell you about a few modifications I had to make in order to get Latexrender run on my mac…

A few google searches made it plain how out of touch I am on these matters (details below). But first, there was this comment to this series by Link Starbureiy :

“I took part in Gowersโ€™ blog discussion. My input was to move things over to Google collaboration tools, like Google Knol, and perhaps Google Sites. However, those tools for large-scale collaboration may not be the best solution anymore. I like the NSN idea, but worry about itโ€™s very long-term stability. Would you consider porting the project over to the Google App Engine so that it can be played with in the orkut sandbox (http://sandbox.orkut.com)?”

I thought I made it clear from the outset that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life web-mastering a site such as NSN. All I wanted to show is that the technology is there free for the taking, and show that you do not have to be a wizard to get it running even on a mac…

I would really love it when some groups, or universities, on institutes, would set up something resembling this dedicated to a single arXiv-topic. Given our history, Antwerp University might be convinced to do this for math.RA but (a) I’m not going to maintain this on my own and (b) there may very well be a bandwidth problem if such a thing would become successful… (although, from past experiences and attempts I’ve made over the years, this is extremely unlikely for this target-group).

So please, if your group has some energy to spare, set-up your own math2.0-network, port it to Google Apps, Knol, Orkut or whatever, and I’d love to join and contribute to it.

As to LaTeX-support : this is trivial these days. First you need a working LaTeX-system on your virgin macbook. The best way is to download The MacTeX-2008 Distribution at work (it is a huge 1.19Gb download…). Next, install the fauxml-wordpress plugin (that is, download it to YourHome/Downloads and then drag the file faux-ml.php to the Library/WebServer/Documents/wp-content/plugins/ directory. Next, install likewise the WP-LateX plugin following the instructions, go to the configuring page and set the directory for latex and dvipng (if you follow my instructions they should be located at /usr/texbin/latex and /usr/texbin/dvipng), fill in the text color and background color you desire and clip your default latex-documentstyle/includepackages/newcommands section from your latest paper into the LaTeX Preamble window and believe me, you’re done!!!



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