mapierce2

Yeah I still use my good ol' TI-83+ occasionally, but I'm a math instructor, so obviously. Most often I'll just use GNU `bc` though.

We are getting away from them in the classroom though; just started piloting a program where students use the Desmos app on their phones (requested to be in airplane mode) in class, and we have a department set of air-gapped phones with Desmos pinned for students to use on exams.

I'm pretty sure zathura works with wayland just fine.

Wayland. But only on personal machines, and only because I like customizing my linux desktop as a hobby, and only because I have more than one machine in case an update borks the whole thing. If you want/need something that just works, Xorg just works.

The converse lesson here is also important: If you don't want a response to your email, barrage the recipient with text.

I've resigning myself to letting diagrams on the web be images. (1) Design the diagram in TikZ, or anything really, (2) screenshot/crop it, (3) make its background transparent with imagemagick, and (2) convert to .webp

If you're going to build something in JS, you'd have to decide how a wide diagram should adjust to render legibly on a narrower viewport (mobile), and that sounds rough.

> A ban with legal backing so schools can focus on education and not combating distraction.

Teaching how to combat distraction should maybe be a part of modern education.

But yeah you're quite right. Optimistically I'm hoping non-toy smartphones (like Light Phone, BoringPhone, WisePhone, etc) gain some market share.

I don't see a more elegant solution than this, but it's a bummer. Smartphones are so useful; the world's information AND a computer in your pocket! The ideal would be to give students and parents an avenue to remove/combat the addictive elements of their smartphones, but most students (and parents) don't see those elements as a problem, but a feature.

GalliumOS, running on two machines I keep in sync. Debian/Ubuntu based distro, but customized for Chromebooks. Tried to get arch running on a Chromebook, but couldn't get it working before I needed a functional machine ;)

Relevant:

https://personal.sron.nl/~pault/

For convenience, here are the RSS/Atom feeds for some of the publications mentioned in this thread:

Quanta https://api.quantamagazine.org/feed/

Noema Magazine https://www.noemamag.com/feed/

Aeon https://aeon.co/feed

Nautilus https://nautil.us/feed/

The Point Magazine https://thepointmag.com/feed/

Asterisk Magazine https://asteriskmag.com/feed

Symmetry Magazine https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/feed

n+1 Magazine https://www.nplusonemag.com/feed/

Harpers Magazine https://harpers.org/feed/

Low←Tech Magazine https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/feeds/all-en.atom.xml

Public Books Magazine http://www.publicbooks.org/feed

The New Atlantis https://www.thenewatlantis.com/feed

This is my curated list of Icecast / SHOUTcast / HLS / DASH internet radio stations. These streams can be played with mpd/ncmpcpp or VLC, or just through a web browser.

Maybe direct audio streaming will make a bit of a comeback like RSS recently has. :)

I agree, it's a response to websites being over-designed to the point of being less usable/accessible, but this feels like a dramatic over-correction.

This is another post illuminating the new minimalist trend in website design. The old minimalism was about "elegance", but this new trend is more about utility: we don't need CSS, just content, so why bother! I don't like this utilitarian take. It's fun to design a website.

CSS could also solve this website's problem of a visitor reading the page title as "FABIEN SANGLARD'S WEBSITE ABOUT EMAIL RSS DONATE" … I thought it was a website about email and RSS and donations for a second.

> If you’re in a group and talking about something factual like when a movie came out or a directors name

Check your phone, but lay the phone flat on the table or hold it so everyone can see the screen—this makes it about the group doing a fact check, instead of about one person diving into their phone away from the group.

Personal observation

That line was a flag for me. I doubt it's that simple, that admins are that corrupt. I think they're just basic: "Hire a new person to promote equity and inclusivity? That sounds great!" The good optics are irresistible.

Yeah, they are. Very much among faculty of math/physics/engineering departments. But the reason is that much of the white male faculty were hired decades ago, when white men still dominated academia. Change is slow.

It's more complicated than you describe. Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place, they just lack focus, and are ineffective and solving the problems that they see. They see large-scale social problems of inequity, but are trying to solve it with equity-focused policy at universities, which most folks would already consider "the top."

They aren't just for show, but the optics of a well-funded diversity departments is irresistably good.

I think the point is that it's not simply the case that universities have lost sight of their purpose of teaching people, but have broadened the scope of their mission beyond teaching … or broadened the definition of teaching? Broadened their mission? Certainly made their mission less focused/clear. And this leads to bureaucracy. See Harvard's Mission Statement.

https://college.harvard.edu/about/mission-vision-history

It's unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a diversity certificate at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it.

https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf

You're right. It's hard to teach in schools though because of standardized (often multiple-choice) tests; teachers are incentivized to teach "skills" that have objective correct answers that can be easily tested.

Then by the time students hit college, they're resistant to any sort of mathematics that doesn't have a correct answer. I've been trying to sell it as a means of error-correction, or as a sanity check. If they've gotta answer a question "Joe is 6'4" tall and, at the suggestion of an ergonomist, wants to build a desk 40% of his height. How tall should the desk be?" I urge them to not immediately go into math-brain and just think for a minute, and estimate a reasonable answer to match their calculations against. This mental workflow sticks for a few of them by the end of the class.

Reminds me of Detexify, a similar tool for learning the LaTeX codes for a symbol.

http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

I don't understand

Either KaTeX or MathJax has stepped in to support mathematical notation on the web.

https://katex.org https://www.mathjax.org

HTML/CSS, with KaTeX loaded to render mathematics using the same notation as (La)TeX.

https://katex.org

Working as a mathematician, the math notation is 100% why I use (La)TeX. Packages are just a bonus.

Arcane, but I wouldn't say hideous. What's wrong with \alpha for α or \sum for Σ? Do you have a better idea than this?

Microsoft recently improved the math notation support in Word. You can press [alt]+[=] on Windows or [control]+[=] on OSX to enter "Math Mode" and begin typing mathematical characters. Word tries to guess what you mean as you type, and it's still much more cumbersome that typing plain-text code in (La)TeX; you still have to reach for a mouse for some notation.

Here's what it looks like if you're interested:

https://org.coloradomesa.edu/~mapierce2/mathsampleguide