dynamic_sausage

Indeed, this is one misleading title. The Soviets were really fond of Steinbeck and especially the Grapes of Wrath (the book) up until the moment he wrote positively of the American troops in Vietnam in the 60s. After that, all his books were pulled from libraries and weren't reissued/published until Perestroika, when 6-volume collected works were released in 1989.

Another approach that does not show up in comments here is to use a reference manager, such as Zotero. It integrates nicely with browsers, so that saving webpages or pdfs is only one click away. Data is stored locally, so if a resource goes offline, you will still have access to it. And it has full-text indexing and search, so you can lookup terms from pages that you previously stored, even if you don't remember the metadata.

> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere

I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get your preferred keybindings:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension

> complete keyboard remapping such that macos keybindings work everywhere

I have some weird preferences in keybindings (alt-space=backspace etc), and Xkb could very easily handle everything I threw at it. If you are using X11, you should be able to get what you want, too:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/X_keyboard_extension

This text seems to quickly get rather technical, with theorems and stuff. I would suggest looking at Golomb's classical Polyominoes first https://archive.org/details/polyominoes00golo/page/n7/mode/2...

If you like playing with polyominoes, there is a really fun chesslike table game inspired by them called Blokus, and someone wrote an open-source engine for it: https://pentobi.sourceforge.io/

Of course, as already noted in another comment, there's the ultimate tetromino game: Tetris (literally defined as tetromino tennis)...

Annoying as it may be, this situation is somewhat ubiquitous in the history of human knowledge.

Transistors were invented by Lilienfeld, yet everyone knows about the work of Bardeen et al. at Bell Labs. Einstein in relativity is the Balto of Lorentz-Poincare, which is why his Nobel prize mentioned the photoelectric effect and not relativity.

Simple formulas of scientific credit tend to stick better; the path of scientific progress is usually anything but. This is ok. The main thing is the knowledge itself, not who came up with it after all.

And yet it is very frustrating!

The author seems to be unaware of the large market for travel data esims. Airalo and Ubigi are two examples of user-facing resellers of these, which make buying a physical prepaid sim near obsolete.

I would say that for travel, esim is much better than sim. Given that seamless data roaming is one of the main features of Google Fi, this opinion is not uncommon.

See, this is a really interesting point there: do we separate the speaker and the speech, or do we lump them together?

I.e., if a Hitler (you saw that coming) says something demonstrably true, while a Pope (yep) says something demonstrably false — who do we agree with? Working out an answer to this question in a clear form has repercussions for the cancel culture, institutions created by slave owners, etc, etc, etc. It isn't new either. People struggled with the oeuvre of writers who supported Nazism way back when: do we read them or do we forget them? Knut Hamsun comes to mind. Rolf Nevanlinna would be a similar example in mathematics.

This is a good point. Just like it should be ok to read Kipling for his literary merits, keeping in mind you don't have to agree with his politics.

Yep. Likewise for Solzhenitsyn who denied Ukraine and its language the right to existence in no uncertain terms. See e.g. the 1990 essay "How should we organize Russia": (link in Russian)

https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%B0%D0%BA_%D0%BD%D0...

Gogol is an interesting one though.

There being no Ukrainian state at the time, he was appropriated by the Russian literature as a quintessential Russian writer, but his sympathetic sentiment towards the Cossack tradition is well-known (and obvious in his texts), and one can make a good argument that in his early stuff he is more subversive about the entire Russian empire thing than a naive reader may think. (Ok, his late stuff is also subtle, but in a different way.) One has to realize that in an empire, with official censorship etc, one cannot be openly anti-czarist.

Here is a nice paper highlighting some of the subtleties in Taras Bulba: https://cius-archives.ca/items/show/1514

The note claimed to be found at these "terrorists'" place in the bottom photo of the link you posted goes: dedicated to blah-blah, kill to live and live to kill, signature not legible.

That is, the actual words "signature not legible" instead of what an FSB higher-up probably wanted to be an inscrutable scrawl masquerading as the signature. Some of these FSB guys come straight from a Monty Python sketch.

For a slightly different take on this problem (a calendar in plain text), calendar.vim plugin by itchyny provides a wrapper for Google calendar in Vim.

The option of viewing your calendars and tasks on the phone or anything with Google calendar gives a very considerable advantage, IMHO.

Twitter is great for threads posting science-related curiosities, you just need to follow the right people. Here are two awesome accounts of general interest

https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973

https://twitter.com/gunsnrosesgirl3

It also makes sense to follow experts in one's field. Gabriel Peyré regularly posts computational math stuff of superb quality:

https://twitter.com/gabrielpeyre

Some of the tales from my childhood that I hold very dear to this day looked at really tough topics: death, solitude, betrayal. "Ronia, the Robber's Daughter", "Timm Thaler, or the Traded Laughter", "The Adventures of Sajo and her Beaver People" by Lindgren, Krüss, and Grey Owl are some that come to mind. Their authors were interesting, complicated people who had something to say about the world they lived in. Proponents of the coddling style of child rearing would probably declare them "traumatizing" and "inappropriate" for the 7- or 8-year old kid that I was when I read them. What turned out to be really traumatizing though was the real world, not these fairy tales — which ended up teaching me some pretty helpful lessons after all.

zotfile plugin, mentioned above in this thread, makes file names user friendly.

I am always mystified by such emails. Does the addressee think they will receive messages automatically? Or does the sender think everybody has an email in their name? Very curious...

Some of the other pages on the site are in French, so perhaps the author's first language is French.

Thanks for posting these, they are very cool.

I was not trying to say he wasn't trustworthy, I am sure he means well. (plus, I am certainly not qualified to judge his advice)

What I am thinking about is this: how confident can you generally be with applying your expertise/giving advice, when you yourself learn about the circumstances from secondary sources? I mean, he's not on the ground, but he confidently describes very specific barricade shapes, etc. If I were a naive protester, I could set up these barricades — and immediately interfere with the regular army, with movement of our own troops, etc.

Not sure what this guy's credentials are, but here he tries to give advice to the people who have i) overthrown a corrupt government with little but baseball bats, tires, and home-made molotovs ii) stopped and maybe even reversed the progress of what has been hailed as the "2nd army in the world".

Dunno, wish I had his self-confidence.

Some of the issues in the article seem to have been caused by the push to make laptops smaller: internal battery, fewer ports. A natural solution would be to change the series you use to a larger one — e.g., go from X to T, etc.

I owned T440s (note the "s" for slim version), but later switched to T490 exactly for this reason. The non-slim T490 is actually thinner than the T440s was, because of the miniaturization trend, and has all the right ports (alas, still no external battery). Absolutely no power, suspend, etc issues at all under Arch.

Not all mathematicians are bad at arithmetic. Both Euler and Gauss were brilliant calculators. Another comment mentions Ramanujan. In more recent history, Arnold in his exams would give problems with plenty of arithmetic estimates, that had to be performed orally and be within 10% of the exact answer.

In a surprising turn of events, people studying mathematics are a large group, and some of them are indeed incapable of factoring 57.

The article also claims sex is fun without any corroborating data. Highly suspicious!

It seems this article actually measured how well people could use their editor of choice vs Word, which has nothing to do with LaTeX.

I especially liked the claim that "expert LaTeX users performed even worse than novice Word users", which classifies a user as expert if they used either typesetting system long enough. It is pretty clear though that most LaTeX users have exactly the knowledge required to typeset the exact kinds of documents they normally author with maximal efficiency, rather than to typeset all kinds of documents. For an alternative measure of expertise, how many of the "expert" users actually read, say, Knuth's TeXbook? (not that they need to, of course)

I've had some luck with looking up name pronunciations on forvo.com. For common names, you can sometimes get several different recordings by native speakers, which may also help with regional variations.

Non-English-based programming was common in the Soviet Union, but certainly not unique to it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

> I wish there was an option to make it more compact than the "compact" layout.

You can make the url bar smaller by setting the layout.css.devPixelsPerPx in your about:config to a value between 0 and 1. This can also be done by adding the following line to your user.js:

user_pref("layout.css.devPixelsPerPx", 0.8);

These are standard for a (graduate) course of real analysis — see for instance section 2.3 and exercises after it in Folland, "Real analysis".

The reason they are not usually covered in calculus is, to justify such differentiation, one needs the notions of Lebesgue integral and measure. The Riemann integral from calculus courses is just not robust enough. Of course, if the function inside the integral is nice enough, nothing bad happens, and the differentiation is valid.

My father (and me) would always recommend Zeldovich's "Higher mathematics for beginners" for learning analysis at the upper high-school level. This particular book does not seem to be available in translation, instead there is a reworked version with Yaglom (who was a brilliant science educator himself):

https://archive.org/details/MIRZeldovichYAndYaglomIHigherMat...

Zeldovich's book with Myshkis on applied mathematics is also excellent: https://archive.org/details/ZeldovichMyskisElementsOfApplied...

Subjectively, I prefer typesetting of the latter, but that is because it is closer to the original Russian edition. Zeldovich was a physicist, so these take an engineer's/physicist's approach, which is, in my opinion, the right entry point to analysis. The reader effectively has to follow the historic development of the subject, starting with some intuitive observations, and eventually developing quite delicate insights.

I read HMFB when I was about 17, and it was great. I remember making up questions of the sort "What level of soda in a can makes it the most stable", and the like, inspired by the book.