clintonc

I get at least that good with

    DEFINT A-Z

http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ may be your best friend, in this case :) Here you can write in markdown and include TeX, thereafter converting to many different formats (using, for example, mimeTeX, MathJax, etc).

This does a couple of things -- rendering TeX, and plotting graphs. As has been pointed out, [MathJax](http://www.mathjax.org/) is really excellent, has thorough support for many of the TeX-isms which you may ever need, and is really simple to include by CDN. I suppose that the competition here is really [mimeTeX](http://www.forkosh.com/mimetex.html), since they both operate on the server-side, but MathJax is so very nice...

The plotting is interesting. These are REALLY basic plots, but I do not know of any other web service out there which implements plotting functionality on the server side. (There seem to be a few defunct gnuplot services; I cannot find a working one.) There are many client-side libraries for charts, but none which concentrate on plotting functions. I'm glad to see it here, but I would like to see it improved as well.

As you suggest, size is not necessarily the appropriate quantity to consider. The general idea would be that each player has "valuations" of slices, and that a player chooses based on this valuation. This might result in a sort of sliding scale: a player might choose one piece over another, even though it's smaller, because he prefers the toppings strongly enough.

There's an open textbook (David Lippman's Math in Society -- "a survey of mathematics for the liberal arts major") which covers several topics like this. The chapter on fair division is bite-sized, so you can read it without investing a lot of time.

The book's page is

http://www.opentextbookstore.com/mathinsociety/

from whence you can download the entire book or just the fair division chapter. The method discussed in the post and a separate method discussed in a comment are both covered by this book.

The way I see it, ADA is not paying -- Github is donating. This is, actually, much less incendiary than the headline would lead us to believe...

I'm actually pretty angry about this. A much better plan would have been to offer free private repositories to any not-for-profit entity. Offering exclusively to women seems, to me, discriminatory.

Edit: Reading the article more closely, I'm not as bothered as as I was. Technically, Github granted unlimited private repositories to the Ada organization, who (I suppose) delegates their use to its members. It's not as though you can go to github.com and say, "I'm a woman, give me free private repositories."

The bit about taking the safety demonstration out of the cabin is not quite so simple. The author suggests a sort of "driver's license" for planes, so that a person only has to learn about the safety features and procedures once. Unfortunately, there are many different planes out there, and the safety features might be substantially different from one plane to another. (Is there a slide? Is the seat cushion your flotation device, or is there something under the seat? Is there an exit in the back?) One would need more standardization among airplanes before one can do away with repeated safety demonstrations entirely.