markgall

I never used Windows in my life, but I got an old ThinkPad on eBay a couple months ago that shipped with Windows 11. I didn't have time to set up Linux, so I used it a bit to browse and so on for about a month before I finally got around to wiping it.

It's really unpleasant. Aside from the ads, the battery life made me think I'd gotten a used computer with totally shot battery and I was ready to order a new one. Nope, after finally switching to Linux it lasts almost twice as long, with no special config whatsoever. I also kept getting random crashes requiring a reboot. I thought there might be bad memory or something. Nope, no issues whatsoever since putting Arch on.

Would not recommend.

I did kind of like the splash screen with world photos, I guess.

Yes, it was very cool (I had a student sit in), but it wasn't anything like an introduction to schemes course. They made it to the nullstellensatz in the last lecture. I love Vakil's book but my attempt to teach out of it was not so successful, there is just too much there.

It's surprising how little the list has changed since then, really, at the more advanced end: at my place we still teach real analysis from Rudin, complex from Ahlfors, commutative algebra from Atiyah-Macdonold, riemannian geometry from do Carmo, alg geo from Shafarevich and Hartshorne,.. There are good competitors to some of these now but inertia is strong. (And if anyone has figured out how to teach a good intro to schemes out of Vakil's behemoth of a book, let me know...)

Not exactly news then, is it?

I think this is the way to go. The only central database where I officially put my textbook choices on record is the bookstore order. The department collects syllabi, but they aren't centralized beyond that, and they make no effort to standardize the format.

If you are interested in just a small number of courses just Googling it will surely tell you what the book is. But for a school-wide list the bookstore is probably the only option.

I do it every day. Another tip maybe not mentioned yet is to make sure you get it good and hot before you put in the egg. I usually leave it on the burner for five minutes or so to preheat.

Although Kenji: "Whenever someone asks me why their cast iron seasoning is weak or flaky, I ask if they followed that popular (but wrong!) flaxseed seasoning guide [i.e. the linked article]. The answer has been yes 100% of the time."

Agreed. This article started a fad when it came out 10 years ago, and now everybody agrees flaxseed oil is a bad choice, "science-based" as this may claim to be.

This paper has been criticized in many places, because the way it's set up of course Word will win. People had to do things like very specific figure placement that is difficult in LaTeX.

But in reality, most people just accept how LaTeX handles the figure placement by default (which is usually quite good), and doesn't waste time fighting it. So it's not really a real-life comparison of the two.

If the challenge had been "Write a document formatted according to the norms of your field", which is what people are actually doing most of the time, LaTeX would win easily. For scientific papers the journal is going to redo all the formatting anyway (using their own custom LaTeX set-ups), so there's no reason to waste time on this.

I don't really believe this. Fund some open access initiatives or something and your money will go a lot further.

The vast majority just don't have a use case where "LaTeX-2030" is going to help, and this wouldn't make much difference to them. I'm a mathematician and I write papers in LaTeX every day. Sure I could benefit from programability occasionally, but it's just not a serious problem. If I need to automatically generate a table or something, I have a Python script output LaTeX, it takes me 30 seconds.

Obviously there are some uses cases where it would make a big difference, but there just aren't very many in the grand scheme. We already have LaTeX3 which lets you do scripting, and lualatex. The fact that basically nobody uses either gives you a sense of how much the general community wants this.

This example is made even sillier when one realizes that that "complex" and "symplectic" actually mean the same thing, but the former is Latin and the latter is Greek. It is essentially the same "everyday" description being applied two to quite different mathematical objects.

I agree that this article is basically preposterous. But there is a grain of truth in it.

The foundations of algebraic geometry were basically rewritten in the 1960s by Alexander Grothendieck, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the 20th century. He found names to be extremely important, and many of the basic objects that he developed have very carefully conceived and suggestive names: schemes, stacks, topoi, etale morphisms, dessins d'enfant,... none of which will I attempt to define here. But all of these have stuck.

On the other hand, things other than the foundations of the subject? Sure, name it after who did it. Suggestive names aren't really possible for most stuff.

To add to the list of state-specific complaints: there is no chance that the best hike in PA is in Delaware Water Gap. Maybe that should win the category of "best hike within 2 hours of NYC", but all the nicer parts of the state are further west.

"IMAX-sized views of New Jersey"? Pass.

I bet the most common choice would be the Falls Trail in Ricketts Glen, but I'd rather be on the Black Forest trail or somewhere on the Midstate.

A lot of people didn't believe it when it came out either; various debunkings of this were posted back at the time. The task was to reproduce a (formatted) page as quickly as possible -- obviously not what LaTeX is designed for.

Yeah, LaTeX pretty much covers this out of the box. Throw in bibtex and git and the bibliographic stuff and collaboration is done too, and probably done better. I guess this misses "cut-and-paste is replaced with drop-n-drag", but you could probably find a text editor that does that if you want.

Throw in emacs+auctex and latexdiff and I'm staying put for the time being.