Social Bookmarking and Content Creation

I realised today, for some reason, that I hadn't made use of Pocket in quite a while. The last site I saved dated from January 22nd, 2017. Once upon a time, I used to use it quite regularly to save interesting websites that I came across. That got me thinking ever further back to when I used to use delicious for the same purpose. I thought it might be interesting to look back at my old delicious bookmarks. My late bookmark shown in Figure 1 was on October 15th 2012.

Figure 1

The content about an ancient Samsung phone is hardly relevant now except for historical research. I don't know why I stopped using delicious but the bookmarks are still there, all 1841 of them. Here is quote from Wikipedia about the service:

Delicious was a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter and Peter Gadjokov in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. Yahoo sold Delicious to AVOS Systems in April 2011, and the site relaunched in a "back to beta" state on September 27 that year. In May 2014, AVOS sold the site to Science Inc. In January 2016 Delicious Media, a new alliance, reported it had assumed control of the service. On June 1, 2017, Delicious was acquired by Pinboard, and the bookmarking service was discontinued in favour of Pinboard's paid subscription-based service. As of August 2019, the site is inactive.

I remember after delicious that I used StumbleUpon for a while. It has also passed into oblivion as well. To quote again from Wikipedia:

StumbleUpon was a discovery and advertisement engine (a form of web search engine) that pushed web content recommendations to its users. Its features allowed users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalised to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing, social-networking and advertising (sponsored pages) principles. The service shut down in June 2018. 

The site has been taken over by mix.com and even though I was able to reset my StumbleUpon password (that I'd forgotten), I wasn't able to access my old bookmarks. They are gone forever. The new site is pretty much the same as Flipboard. Anyway, I signed up to the new site for whatever reason and here is the URL, although I doubt that I'll make any use of it.

Should I try to rekindle by interest in saving to Pocket? I have a "Save to Pocket" icon on my Google Chrome toolbar and the Pocket app is installed on my Samsung phone. What I've tended to do recently is to save links to interesting sites to one of my Twitter accounts, specifically to twitter@voodooguru1949. Figure 2 shows my latest post.

Figure 2

Of course, as the post reveals, the link refers to Flipboard and I could easily have saved the link to that site because, as well as providing content curation for the categories you've expressed an interest in, it allows for social bookmarking (your own personalised content curation). I've created categories (called Magazines) within Flipboard into which to save sites. However, even for ICT, the category with the most stories, my last save was 247 days ago. 

I've always found it difficult to coordinate the use of Flipboard on my phone with its use my desktop computer. Today I fiddled around for quite some and in the end lost access to my original account on the phone. In frustration, I deleted the Flipboard app and have decided not to use it anymore. I've been disappointed in the content that the app had been serving up for quite some time now and so it's not a difficult break.

Having dispensed with Flipboard, that leaves Pocket and Pinterest. With the latter, as with the former, I went through a period of heavy use and then seemed to lose interest. Maybe it's time to review the two services. Here is what Wikipedia says about Pocket:

Pocket, previously known as Read It Later, is an application and web service for managing a reading list of articles and videos from the Internet. Released in 2007, the application was originally only for desktop and laptop computers, and is now available for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Kobo eReaders, and web browsers. Pocket was taken over by Mozilla, the developers of the Firefox web browser, in 2017. The application allows the user to save an article or web page to remote servers for later reading. The article is then sent to the user's Pocket list (synced to all of their devices) for offline reading. Pocket removes clutter from articles, and allows the user to add tags to their articles and to adjust text settings for easier reading.

So Pocket has been around for quite a while and doesn't look like it's going away anytime soon. What about Pinterest? Well, as I wrote in a post on my Alternative Media blog, Pinterest is leading the fight against misinformation. Here is an excerpt:

Pinterest to direct vaccine searches to health sites  

 

Pinterest users searching for vaccine-related information will be directed to results from "public health organisations". Last year, the social platform stopped showing results for vaccine searches to tackle the spread of misinformation. Social media companies are facing increasing scrutiny over how they moderate content on their sites. In recent months, other firms including Facebook have taken some steps to address vaccine misinformation.   

Under the new policy, Pinterest said searches for "measles," "vaccine safety" and other related health terms will return results from public health bodies including the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centres for Disease Control  (CDC) and the WHO-established Vaccine Safety Net. "We're taking this approach because we believe that showing vaccine misinformation alongside resources from public health experts isn't responsible," the firm said in a statement. "As we continue to tackle health misinformation, we remove it and the accounts that spread it from our service," Pinterest said. The firm also said it won't show ads, comments or recommendations on results pages for vaccine searches.

So Pinterest is definitely NOT a site that I'll continue to use. Of course, all of the big players in this field will be applying this sort of censorship sooner or later. An alternative is to simply bookmark websites. These bookmarks can be organised into categories and access can be synchronised across multiple devices. This only works if you use the one browser most of the time, as I do. My use of Google Chrome is simply out of habit and I'm well aware of less intrusive browsers like Brave, although even the latter has come in for its fair share of criticism. Bookmarks can generally be imported from one browser to another.
The problem with bookmarks is that you have to open each one and that's another open tab. With a service like Pocket, you can scroll through your list of saved sites with just one tab open or search via tags. Pocket in particular provides a simplified view of the website, in a manner similar to Clearly, and this making reading a saved article very easy. I'll think I'll try using Pocket again for a while. At least until I hear that it's starting to impose censorship similar to pinterest. There is a Pocket Premium that costs a few dollars a month but there's no way I'm paying any money. I should also look at Google Bookmarks more closely because there is probably an easy link between that and Google Keep that I use quite frequently.

In the Groove

Sometimes you get into a groove, habits form and you don't go beyond the prescribed limits that you yourself have set. For some years, I've been using the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS) when examining the mathematical significance of the number associated with my diurnal age. Now that my numbered days are approaching 26,000, I long ago realised that I was missing out on some important sequences because the number wasn't listed in the OEIS display.

25406 is a good example of what I mean. This number is a member of OEIS A025414:

a(n) is the smallest number that is the sum of 3 nonzero squares in exactly n ways

3, 27, 54, 129, 194, 209, 341, 374, 614, 594, 854, 1106, 1314, 1154, 1286, 1746, 1634, 1881, 2141, 2246, 2609, 2889, 3461, 3366, 3449, 3506, 4241, 4289, 5066, 4826, 5381, 5606, 6569, 5561, 6254, 7601, 8186, 8069, 8714, 8126, 9434, 8921, 8774, 11066, 11574

Clearly 25406 is well short of making an appearance in the above list. However, it is listed in a Table of n, a(n) for n = 1..1000 where it is the 72nd entrant and thus the smallest number that can be represented as a sum of two nonzero squares in 72 different ways. But how to discover this when a search for 25406 using the OEIS search bar does not bring up this sequence?

The secret was to click on Hints and then reading through the contents of this page, one discovers the following little pearl of wisdom:

To search for a single large number in the OEIS, try Google, because Google has searched all the .txt files in the OEIS, and so may do a better job than the OEIS search engine.

Sure enough, this approach throws up a whole lot of other OEIS results that don't appear in the normal search, among them being OEIS A025414. This is a significant discovery because it increases the likelihood of finding an interesting sequence for large numbers such as 25406. The pedagogical principle at play here is to poke around and don't stay stuck within the same comfortable but limited perimeter. This is what had happened to me with the OEIS searching.

Terence Tao's Software Listings

Having just now stumbled upon Terence Tao's WordPress blog, aptly named https://terrytao.wordpress.com/, I noticed that he has a panel titled software in which he lists the following:

• Detexify
• GmailTeX
• Inverse Symbolic Calculator
• jfig
• LaTeX to Wordpress
• Online LaTeX Equation Editor
• Sage: Open Source Mathematical Software
• Subverting the system

I thought it might be a good idea to check out some of these links. I'm already familiar with the Online LaTeX Equation Editor and Sage but the latter links to William Stein's Blogger blog site. Stein is the guy who started Sage in the first place. He only made one entry in 2019, on May 1st. It's a rather long post so I'll just quote the first and last paragraphs. 

Nearly 3 years ago, I gave a talk at a Harvard mathematics conference announcing that “I am leaving academia to build a company”. What I really did is go on unpaid leave for three years from my tenured Full Professor position. No further extensions of that leave is possible, so I finally have to decide whether or not to go back to academia or resign ...

I have decided to resign. I’m worried about issues of intellectual property; it would be extremely unfair to my employees, investors and customers if I took a 50% UW position, and then later got sued by UW as a result. Having a 50% paid appointment at UW subjects one to a lot of legal jeopardy, which is precisely why I have been on 100% unpaid leave for the last three years. But more importantly, I feel very good about continuing to focus 100% on the development of CoCalc, which is going to have an incredible year going forward. I genuinely love building this (non-VC funded) company, and feel very good about it.

I'd actually read this earlier in the year and I was saddened once again to read of his struggles. Why can't philanthropists give a million dollars to a guy like this rather than to useless NGOs as they are wont to do?

I've used the Online LaTeX Equation Editor before and it does a good job for one line expressions. Figure 1 shows a screenshot. The site also generates the HTML code that can then be inserted into a web page.

Figure 1

I used Detexify the day before I wrote this after following a link I saw somewhere. It's better suited to devices that support touch input or, better still, a digital pen. It will show you the command (let's say for the integral symbol) and what package to download. An example is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2

The LaTeX to Wordpress link leads to a blog post with a link to another post that contains a link for downloading this free software. As the author writes:

LaTeX2WP is written in Python, so you’ll need a Python interpreter. 

If you are using Linux/Unix or OS X, then you already have it. If you are running Windows, go here and get the Windows installer for 2.6.1.

Uncompress the files of the LaTeX2WP distribution in the directory in which you are going to write your posts in LaTeX. 

On OS X, double click on the file latex2wp.0.6.2.zip after saving it; on Linux unzip latex2wp.0.6.2.zip. If your Windows machine says it doesn’t know what to do with a .zip file, get 7zip. 

Write your LaTeX post, say you call it spam.tex. When you are done writing your post, type from the command line: python latex2wp.py spam.tex 

This will produce a file spam.html. Open it with a text editor, copy and paste it into the WordPress editor, and here is your post. 

This is simple enough and something that I might test out in the future. I've gotten used to using Blogger for my mathematical posts but I much prefer the look and feel of WordPress as opposed to Blogger, so I may be tempted.

GmailTeX is a Chrome Extension that enables the creation and sending of emails containing mathematical notation created using LaTeX. The creator says that "the other person does not have to have TeX for Gmail installed or to use Gmail. Math is viewable in most mail readers and browsers, including mobile ones." Figure 3 shows the result when I tried it.

Figure 3

This could be quite useful, so I'm happy to have discovered it.

The Inverse Symbolic Calculator link doesn't appear to working or is loading very slowly. It's purpose is to change a floating point decimal into a symbolic expression. The jfig link is also a dead-end. It is a java applet designed to draw xfig-like figures. The site can be found but the latest Java versions seem to present problems with its implementation. The link Subverting the system describes a collaborative software for mathematicians so it's not applicable for me in my current situation.

Overall, the GMailTex chrome extension was the main takeaway from all of this. Of course, there's lots of other interesting stuff on Terence Tao's site. For example, he writes in a post on September 4th 2019:

In the fall quarter (starting Sep 27) I will be teaching a graduate course on analytic prime number theory.  This will be similar to a graduate course I taught in 2015, and in particular will reuse several of the lecture notes from that course, though it will also incorporate some new material (and omit some material covered in the previous course, to compensate).  I anticipate covering the following topics:

• Elementary multiplicative number theory

• Complex-analytic multiplicative number theory

• The entropy decrement argument

• Bounds for exponential sums

• Zero density theorems

• Halasz’s theorem and the Matomaki-Radziwill theorem

• The circle method

• (If time permits) Chowla’s conjecture and the Erdos discrepancy problem

• Lecture notes for topics 3, 6, and 8 will be forthcoming.

The notes he has provided so far for the course are quite comprehensive. He has links to lots of other interesting stuff so it's a good site to just poke in and see what you find.

SketchUp

In my years of teaching, I used the free version of SketchUp from time to time, running on my computer. I always found it easy to use. Nowadays I use it only occasionally but when I do, I find the downloadable version difficult to use. In my frustration, I sought an online version and fortunately one is now available at:

https://www.sketchup.com/products/sketchup-for-web

Happily, it's an easier to use as the earlier downloadable versions were and I was able to come up with the graphic shown in Figure 1, using text added using OS X's Preview:

Figure 1

It's creation came about via a friend who texted me in Messenger about various ways to come to terms with the concept of a trillion. Here is what he wrote:

If you can live 1 trillion seconds you would live to be about 31,709 years old. If you take an inch and decide to walk 1 trillion inches you would have to walk around the earth, from the equator 633 times (1 lap is just under 25,000 miles). If frequent flyer miles offered unlimited flights if you had 1 trillion miles you would need to make 107 round trips from the Earth to Pluto.

This got me thinking about the microcosmic equivalent of a trillion, namely a trillionth. I wrote in response:

Figure 2 

Moving from the macrocosm to the microcosm, a trillionth of a meter is called a picometer. The diameter of a helium atom is about 62 picometers.

From there, I went to look at some visual ways of representing one trillion and come across this site that was quite helpful. The site included the visualisation shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

I think I'll make more use of the online SketchUp when creating visualisations of numbers that come up in my daily analysis of my diurnal age.

Veganism

An article that appeared recently in The Guardian recently came as a shock to me. It contained the following news:

An estimated 4-6 billion male chicks are slaughtered globally every year because they serve no economic purpose. Some are suffocated, others are fed alive into grinding or shredding machines to be processed into reptile food. 

The culling is a messy solution to a thorny problem of modern poultry farming. Humans have bred chickens for one of two purposes: to produce eggs, or meat. Yet half of all the animals bred for this purpose are considered useless. Male chicks lay no eggs and don’t grow fast enough to justify the cost of feeding them up for meat. So, they are simply destroyed.

As a vegetarian who still eats eggs, I have always been careful to select free range eggs when shopping at the supermarket and I'd never thought about how the hens were separated from the roosters. Now I know. I'm embarrassed to admit my ignorance. However, the article did contain some good news:

The world’s first ever no-kill eggs are now on sale in Berlin after German scientists found an easy way to determine a chick’s sex before it hatches, in a breakthrough that could put an end to the annual live shredding of billions of male chicks worldwide. 

The patented “Seleggt” process can determine the sex of a chick just nine days after an egg has been fertilised. Male eggs are processed into animal feed, leaving only female chicks to hatch at the end of a 21-day incubation period. 

“If you can determine the sex of a hatching egg you can entirely dispense with the culling of live male chicks,” said Seleggt managing director Dr Ludger Breloh, who spearheaded the four-year programme by German supermarket Rewe Group to make its own-brand eggs more sustainable. 

This article appeared on Saturday 22nd December 2018 and at the time it appeared, there were plans to "roll out" the eggs to supermarkets throughout Germany during 2019, and then later to Europe. The eggs will be a respeggt label and supermarkets will be expected to pay a few cents cents more for them than for normal eggs. In the meantime, I'm ambivalent about continuing to consume eggs, knowing what I now know. Here is a video in which one of the developers talks about the process:

On a different note, there was a long story on the BBC's website titled The St Petersburg vegans cooking up a revolution and a restaurant called Horizontal is described as follows:

The restaurant adheres to the principles of anti-racism, feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, the abolition of borders, and animal liberation. In a country where people who are gender non-confirming or trans are shunned, and even sometimes attacked, Horizontal is a space where anyone's preferred pronouns will be respected ... Horizontal is one of about a dozen similar spaces across St Petersburg, promoting vegan anarchism - "veganarchism" - by cooking up delicious vegan food.

In a vegan grocery shop called Llamas, there is inside:

... rainbow-flag tote bags, feminist stickers and vegan condoms are sold alongside plant-based Napoleon cakes and reusable straws.

Furthermore, a week before the couple who run Llamas were interviewed for the story:

Anya and Igor from Llamas had taken part in an annual festival in the city called Znak Ravenstva - meaning Equal Sign. It promotes not only veganism, but also feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ rights and environmentalism, and tries to show how all of these movements are connected.

All this is disturbing for the cause of veganism. Associating veganism with anarchism, feminism, anti-racism, LGBTQ+ and environmentalism is a very bad idea. Let's single out LGBTQ+ to start with. This is a well-funded and orchestrated movement that does not care about the people it purports to represent. It is cleverly using them to foment social unrest by taking a marginalised group of people and pitting them against mainstream society.

In the West, resistance to LGBTQ+ has largely collapsed and the indoctrination of the young into acceptance of the LGBTQ+ lifestyle is well underway via the education system. In more conservative countries, this push has resulted in a backlash against the LGBTQ+ community, so that this community is marginalised more. Even in the West, there is still resistance to the LGBTQ+ agenda but regrettably terms like "soy and sodomy" and "soy boy" (for an effeminate male) have entered the vocabulary of those who are pushing back. Veganism and LGBTQ+ have nothing in common.

The environmental movement has been hijacked by corporate interests who manufactured the myth of anthropogenic global warming and are making big profits from alternative energy sources and carbon offsets. Ultimately, these interests are not about stopping the destruction of the Amazonian rainforests or other laudable causes. They are about making money but such is the influence of the mass media that most people, especially young people, have been completely taken in. Vegans should avoid this trap.

Given the social disruption caused by militant vegans recently in Australia and elsewhere in the world, it might be time to retreat from even using the terms vegan and veganism. Both terms are inherently divisive. The former implies a dichotomy (vegan versus carnivore) while the latter involves adherence to yet another "ism". It might be better to say that I am a human who does not eat meat (vegetarian) or I am a human who only eats plant-based foods (vegan). That's enough. Don't proselytise, don't criticise. Be what are and be content in that.

Propaganda and the Food We Eat

Figure 1: source

The Online Etymology Dictionary has this to say about the word propaganda:

propaganda (noun): 1718, "committee of cardinals in charge of Catholic missionary work," short for Congregatio de Propaganda Fide "congregation for propagating the faith," a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV to supervise foreign missions. The word is properly the ablative fem. gerundive of Latin propagare. Hence, "any movement to propagate some practice or ideology" (1790). Modern political sense dates from World War I, not originally pejorative. Meaning "material or information propagated to advance a cause, etc." is from 1929.

Figure 1 shows a propaganda poster created by the dairy industry to encourage consumption of milk. In primary school in the 1950's, I remember small bottles of milk being made available for free to students who would rush out of their classrooms at "little lunch" to consume one or more of the bottles. I wasn't one of them however, as I never relished to taste of milk. In the middle of the twentieth century, milk was regarded as essential for the development of healthy bones and teeth in children. The dairy lobby was very influential in those days and there was very little criticism of milk as a food source.

Figure 2: source

Notice how propaganda, as shown in Figure 1 and Figure 2 often uses rhyme as a means of reinforcing the message. However, there is a difference. The milk promotion of Figure 1 is very old-fashioned compared to the meat promotion of Figure 2. The latter uses humour and inverts the popular vegan message of "save an animal - eat a salad". To be effective, propaganda must evolve to match its audience. People nowadays are more cynical and critical than they were even fifty years ago.

Nonetheless, the purpose of propaganda is to short-circuit thinking. Slogans like "milk packs a punch with every lunch" and "Herbivores are prey, Carnivore's the way" do not encourage deeper reflection upon or investigation into the nature of the milk and meat industry. Sometimes propaganda that is intended as insulting can be used against its originators to draw attention to its silliness. For example, the use of the term soyboy. Here is a definition from dictionary.com:

What does soyboy mean? 

Associated with the alt-right, soyboy is an insult used online for men seen as effeminate liberals. It comes from the myth that consuming soy products lowers testerone levels in a man.

Figure 3: source

Justin Trudeau is perhaps the most prominent example of such an "effeminate liberal". The T-shirt shown in Figure 3 can be purchased at a site promoting veganism and so can be worn as a badge of honour. As well as rhyme, alliteration is also popular as in the phrase "soy and sodomy". There are those of course who really do see soy products as undermining and eroding masculinity. Figure 4 shows an example of this sort of "possible" propaganda. I say "possible" because I'm not sure how serious the intent is here.

Figure 4: source

 However, there's no doubt about the seriousness the Hasidic Jewish group "Gur Hasidim" shown in Figure 5:

Figure 5

I guess those who are justifiably disturbed by the inroads being made by the LGBT movement into society are looking for scapegoats and, unfortunately, soy products seem to have become an easy target. Again, like most propaganda, this linkage avoids looking at the deeper issues and reasons behind the successes of the LGBT agenda. The meat lobby will be secretly delighting in this development. It wasn't so long ago that it was responsible for the sort of propaganda shown in Figure 6:

Figure 6

It would seem that food is a real propaganda battleground and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. With the discovery of the importance of the human gut biome, the issue is also about what sort of food is best for maintaining a healthy gut biome? There's also the issue of foods derived from GMO's but these are issues too big to tackle here.

My general point that throughout our lives we are bombarded with propaganda regarding what we should eat, who we should fear, who we should admire, how we should vote and what we should buy. Propaganda doesn't just mean slogans on T-shirts. It can be achieved by repetition and the questioning of alternatives. For years, the influence of the meat lobby meant that mainstream media articles generally promoted the benefits of eating meat and either ignored or questioned the adequacy of alternative non-animal sources of protein. Doctors and dieticians generally supported the meat lobby. This type of propaganda is especially insidious because it is persistent and ubiquitous.

Of course the purpose of education is not to alert children to the way that propaganda shapes their attitudes and choices. It should be an integral part of their education. They should be taught to ask the simple question: cui bono (who benefits)? Who benefits from the drinking of milk and the eating of meat? This then leads to an examination of the various interest groups that promote these products and benefit from their purchase. Ideally, we would want children to make informed choices and not be swayed by simplistic slogans and slick advertising campaigns.

Nimbyism

There's always more words to learn in the English language. Since I was a teenager and used to sit down and study the dictionary, I've always been interested in expanding my vocabulary. Recently, when watching a video on the negative effects of wind turbines, I heard mention of a word that I hadn't heard before. I wasn't sure how to spell it but it was either   or nimbyism. Turns out it was the latter and the word is an acronym whose letters derive from the phrase not in my back yard.

Here is a definition from dictionary.com:

nimbyism: opposition by local citizens to the locating in their neighbourhood of a civic project, as a jail, garbage dump, or drug rehabilitation centre, that, though needed by the larger community, is considered unsightly, dangerous, or likely to lead to decreased property values.

The term nimby can be used to describe a person who practised nimbyism:

nimby: a person who resists unwanted development, such as manufacturing plants, prisons, power companies, or chemical companies in his or her own neighbourhood or town. 

The term has its own entry in Wikipedia where the observation is made that the term is usually applied to opponents of a development, implying that they have narrow, selfish, or myopic views. Its use is often pejorative. It also states that the acronym, as opposed to the phrase for which it stands, seems to have into use around 1980.

Figure 1

It's the sort of concept that lends itself to humour, as the cartoons in Figure 1 and Figure 2 illustrate.

Figure 2

WiFi Problems with MacBook Pro

My somewhat dated MacBook Pro is still serving me faithfully but I've had problems with getting it to connect with WiFi repeaters. 

I have a TP-LINK TL-WA855RE N300 Wi-Fi Wall Plug Range Extender/Repeater/Access Point and was having no end of trouble getting my MacBook Pro to maintain a WiFi connection to it. It would connect but soon an IP conflict message would appear and the connection would be broken. Having become so reliant on WiFi, I'd forgotten that this repeater has an Ethernet port. 

When I remembered, I then used a wired connection. My MacBook was assigned an IP address and that was the end of my problems. I need the repeater in my study, which is a little out of range of the TP-Link router, and so the lack of mobility is not a problem. I can simply turn the WiFi back on when I'm elsewhere in the house. 

The problem only occurred with the MacBook. My Samsung smartphone experienced no such problems. So the WiFi connectivity problem was never resolved but an alternative connectivity solution came to the rescue. Whether this same problem occurs with the latest MacBooks I don't know. 

Of course I don't have a dedicated Ethernet port on my MacBook Pro and so I needed to use a dongle, which fortunately I already had in my possession. With that and an Ethernet cable, I've had no further problems. It's just a reminder that, even in the world of technology, everything old can be new again. Once upon a time, there was no WiFi and Internet connectivity, when there was an Internet to connect to, was achieved via cables. Now, in my study, I'm living in the past.

Our Andy's Gone With Cattle Now

Taken from here

I was thinking of words that rhyme with sandy and was reminded of Henry Lawson's poem "Andy's Gone With Cattle" that I first encountered when I was in high school. I don't know what a non-native speaker, or even an American, would make of some of this verse. Apart from the place names, there's terms like squatter and Blucher that would be rather challenging, although one might suspect that Blucher is a dog since it "howls all night". According to Wikipedia, the poem was first published in The Australian Town & Country Journal on 13 October 1888.

Anyway, the poem was brought to mind because the name Andy rhymes with sandy. What are some other words that rhyme? RhymeZone provides 79 examples of words and phrases that rhyme with Andy. These are:

Words of two syllables:

andee, andie, bandi, bandie, bandy, blandy, brandee, brandi, brandie, brandy, candi, candie, candy, chandi, dandi, dandie, dandy, gandee, gandi, gandy, grandee, grandi, grandy, handi, handy, hand he, kandi, kandy, landi, landy, land he, lan di, mandi, mandie, mandy, pandi, pandy, plan d, randi, randy, sandee, sandhi, sandi, sandie, sandy, shandi, shandy, standee, tandy, vandy, zandi, zandy

Words of three syllables:

brigandi, burgandy, discandy, fernande, fortran d, hard candy, islandy, jimdandy, leylandii, mint candy, mutande, rock candy, unhandy, verdandi, verthandi, viande

Words of four syllables:

alibrandi, barley candy, chocolate candy, come in handy, cotton candy, operandi, sugar candy, vallegrande

Words of five syllables:

peppermint candy

Words of six syllables:

modus-operandi, modus operandi

I've marked in bold the words that would be familiar to most native speakers (I've not bothered marking all the terms relating to the different types of candies, although I should mention here that a candyman once referred to a person who sold illicit drugs - the term is a little dated now). I had to look up some of the other terms and many are not really English words at all or they are archaic. Some that are in use either as given names or words include:

Figure 1: Andie MacDowell, aged 25

• Andie seems to be used as the female equivalent of "Andy" e.g. the actress Andie MacDowell (see Figure 1).
• Brandi is a fairly popular female given name (1 in 1818 females; popularity rank in the U.S. is 320) e.g. the singer Brandi Carlile
• Mandy is a somewhat popular female given name (1 in 3448 females; popularity rank in the U.S. is 475) e.g. the model Mandy Rice-Davies (associated with the Profumo scandal in 1960's British politics)
• standee is a lifesize cardboard cutout (usually of a celebrity) e.g. he had his picture taken with a standee of the president"; also someone who stands in a place where one might otherwise sit (as a spectator who uses standing room in a theatre or a passenger on a crowded bus or train) e.g. the allowed number of standees is posted".
• jimdandy is something excellent of its kind e.g. the bike was a jimdandy or he's a jimdandy of a soldier" (the term is maybe a little old-fashioned nowadays)

One phrase that's left out is fine and dandy explained as:

All right, excellent, as in What you're proposing is fine and dandy with the rest of us. This redundant colloquialism (fine and dandy both mean “excellent”) today is more often used sarcastically in the sense of “not all right” or “bad,” as in You don't want to play bridge? Fine and dandy, you've left me without a partner. Source

This post, like others, if part of my effort to make the learning of the English language more interesting via rhymes, alliteration and word games. Before leaving however, I'll return to the beginning of this post and make further mention of blucher, defined as a strong, leather half boot (see Figure 2).

Figure 2

The use of the term to describe a typeof shoe is perhaps due to the tough old Prussian general of the same name who fought against Napoleon. Wikipedia has an entry about him. Figure 3 shows a photo of him sporting his Star of the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross: Blücher and Hindenburg are the only German military officers to have been awarded this honour).

Figure 3

The term squatter in the context of the Lawson's poem can only be understood in terms of Australian history. Here is a link to the Wikipedia article about the subject but the key point is that:

... the term ‘squatter’ came to refer to a person of high social prestige who grazes livestock on a large scale (whether the station was held by leasehold or freehold title).  In Australia the term is still used to describe large landowners, especially in rural areas with a history of pastoral occupation.

So in the poem, the squatter is more or less the landlord.

Double Double, Toil and Trouble

As part of my preparation for perhaps teaching English to non-native speakers at some point in the future, I've prepared another unit that has rhyme as its foundation and that then goes on to explore the occurrences of a very common and versatile word in the language, namely "double".

Song of the Witches:
“Double, double toil and trouble”
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (from Macbeth)

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.

Investigation: Who was William Shakespeare and when did he write this poem?

Other words that rhyme with double, trouble and bubble:

hubble

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a space telescope named after renowned astronomer Edwin Hubble. It was launched in 1990 and is one of the great observatories of NASA.

redouble

make or become much greater, more intense, or more numerous e.g."we will redouble our efforts to reform agricultural policy".

rubble

waste or rough fragments of stone, brick, concrete, etc., especially as the debris from the demolition of buildings e.g. "two buildings collapsed, trapping scores of people in the rubble"

stubble

the cut stalks of cereal plants left sticking out of the ground after the grain is harvested e.g. "a field of stubble" or short, stiff hairs growing on a part of the body that has not been shaved for a while, especially on a man’s face e.g. "she ran her fingers over the dark stubble on his cheeks".

Phrases involving the word double:

double trouble as opposed to simply trouble.

What's the difference between regular trouble and double trouble?

double down is an intransitive verb.

If I double down in an effort to get a job done, what am I doing?

double up / double over

If I double up or over in pain, what is happening to me?

double back

If I double back to retrieve something that I left behind, what am I doing?

double take

If I glance at someone and then do a double take, what am I doing?

double-A

I bought some double-A batteries. What type of batteries are these?

double agent as opposed to a regular agent.

What is the difference between a regular agent and a double agent?

double or nothing

I'm gambling and I decide to go for double or nothing. What am I doing?

double-action as opposed to a regular action.

What is the difference between a double-action gun and a regular one?

double-edged

What does it mean to say that the consequences of my actions can be double-edged?

double-dare as opposed to a regular dare.

What is the difference between a double-dare and a regular dare?

double-barrelled

What characterises a double-barrelled question?

double-breasted

What does a double-breasted suit look like?

double-parked

What do it mean if I say I'm double-parked?

double-check

If I double-check to make sure a complicated device is in working order, what am I doing?

double-quick

If I change my clothes in double-quick time what am a doing?

double life as opposed to a regular life.

If I lead of live a double life, how is this different from leading or living a normal life?

double bed as opposed to a single bed

How does a double bed differ from a single bed?

double standard

If I'm accused of having double standards, what might I be guilty of?

double time

If I'm paid double time on public holidays, what characterises this rate of pay?

on the double

If I'm told to clean up my room on the double, what am I meant to do?

time and trouble

If I take a lot of time and trouble to do something, what am doing?

stunt double

If an actor uses a stunt double in an action scene, what is the actor doing?

double entendre

Accidental humour sometimes involves a double entendre. For example, "The children made nutritious snacks" can be interpreted in two different ways. What are they?

CodeCogs

I noticed that Google Docs was using CodeCogs to render LaTeX into image gifs. CodeCogs at https://www.codecogs.com/latex/eqneditor.php provides an interface whereby LaTeX code can be generated quite easily together with an image of what the code would produce if rendered properly (and therefore to be used when the code can't be rendered properly). Here is the interface:

Figure 1: interface that meets the user on CodeCogs

The code can be copied into a document that interprets the LaTeX code and the result is as shown here --> \( \int_{0}^{1}x^3 dx=\bigg [\frac{x^4}{4} \bigg]_0^1\).

The image produced on the site can be simply dragged and dropped:

Alternatively, the HTML code can be inserted into the web page and the image called up from CodeCogs. The result is the same except for the pop up text box that appears when you hover over the image:

These sorts of services are useful for those who lack confidence in creating LaTeX code but there are limitations to what can be produced. There's no substitute for being able to code directly. One site that provides this facility is Overleaf, an online LaTeX editor. Projects that are created can be stored on the site and printed out if desired. The free plan only allows for solo use, no collaborators. There are paid plans that allow for collaboration and provided additional features such as synching with Dropbox and GitHub, full document history, track changes etc. Of course, if you're using a Mac like me, you can download the free program TeXShop to your computer and simply work from there, no online access required. Questions can be posed and solutions hopefully provided on StackExchange.

Dark Days for Dark Matter?

Photo from https://www.zazzle.com/dark+matter+clothing

The article below appeared in The Conversation on February 1, 2019. I was drawn to it because I've always been suspicious of the notions of dark matter and dark energy. The article below proposes that a modification to how gravity works may eliminate the need to include unseen and undetected dark matter and energy in cosmological modelling. 

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Dark matter may not actually exist – and our alternative theory can be put to the test

Juri Smirnov, University of Southern Denmark

The bullet cluster. NASA/CXC/M. Weiss

Scientists have been searching for “dark matter” – an unknown and invisible substance thought to make up the vast majority of matter in the universe – for nearly a century. The reason for this persistence is that dark matter is needed to account for the fact that galaxies don’t seem to obey the fundamental laws of physics. However, dark matter searches have remained unsuccessful.

But there are other approaches to make sense of why galaxies behave so strangely. Our new study, published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, shows that, by tweaking the laws of gravity on the enormous scales of galaxies, we may not actually need dark matter after all.

The Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky discovered in the 1930s that velocities in galaxy clusters were too high to account for how much matter we could see. A similar phenomenon was described by several groups of astronomers, such as Vera Rubin and Kent Ford, when they studied the motion of stars at the far edges of the Andromeda Galaxy.

The velocities of the stars far from its centre were expected to decrease, as they experience less gravitational force. That’s because, according to Newton’s second law of motion, the gravitational pull on orbiting matter can be equated to a product of its mass and acceleration (which is related to velocity).

Rotation curve of spiral galaxy Messier Triangulum. 

Mario De Leo/wikipedia, CC BY-SA

However, the measurements showed that there was no such decrease in velocities with distance. That led scientists to believe there must be some invisible matter there to create a stronger gravitational pull and faster stellar motion. In the past decades, countless other probes of gravitating systems at very large length scales indicated the same problem.

Beyond dark matter

The mystery of what dark matter actually is remains the ultimate challenge of modern fundamental physics. The core question is whether it is indeed a missing mass source, such as a new type of matter, or whether the gravitational law is simply different at gigantic length scales.

While the first option seems very tempting, we haven’t actually found any dark matter yet. Also, while gravity laws are well tested within the solar system, one has to be careful extrapolating this to scales which are at least one billion times larger.

One well known attempt to get rid of the need for dark matter is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), which suggests that Newton’s law of gravity becomes irregular when the gravitational pull is very weak – as is the case in the outer regions of the galaxy. But this theory, although successful in many respects, hasn’t passed the same stringent tests as our standard model of cosmology, which includes dark matter.

The main problem is that MOND cannot explain the missing mass problem in galaxies and galaxy clusters at the same time. Another very strong argument against MOND is based on the observation of colliding galaxy clusters, where the stars of each galaxy pass through each other, but the gas clouds stick together and stay behind. A famous example is the Bullet Cluster, which consists of two such colliding clusters. Observations suggest that dark matter follows the stars in these events, which have a lower total mass than the gas cloud. MOND cannot explain why that is.

Space bubbles

We set out to tweak the laws of gravity in a different way. Our approach assumed that a phenomenon known as Vainshtein screening is at work. This suggests that each sufficiently dense, compact object in space generates an invisible sphere around it which determines how the laws of physics behave with growing distance. This sphere is a theoretical concept to help us understand the difference between small and big scales, rather than an actual physical membrane.

According to our theory, within this bubble the laws of ordinary Newtonian gravity that we see in our solar system hold for objects interacting with the massive body at the centre. Outside the bubble, the theory suggests that the gravitational pull by the central object can be significantly enhanced – even though there is not more mass present.

The bubble size would be proportional to the mass of the central object. If, for example, in a galaxy this sphere has a radius of a few thousand light years – a typical distance at which signs of dark matter is observed – the corresponding sphere of our sun would have a radius of 50.000 astronomical units (one such unit is the distance between the sun and the Earth). However, the edge of the solar system is only 50 astronomical units away. In other words, there are no objects we could observe that far from the sun to test whether the sun has a different gravitational pull on them than it has on Earth. Only the observation of entire systems very far away allows us to do that.

The surprising effect is that the size of the Newtonian bubble grows with the enclosed mass in a particular way. This means that the law of gravity changes at different length scales in galaxies and clusters of galaxies respectively and therefore it can explain the apparent dark matter in both systems simultaneously. That’s not possible with MOND. Furthermore, it is consistent with the observation of the Bullet Cluster. That’s because the gas clouds left behind in the collision are not compact enough to generate a sphere around them – meaning that the apparent dark matter is only notable around the more compact stars. MOND doesn’t distinguish between stars and gas clouds.

To our big surprise, our theory allowed us to explain the stellar velocities in galaxies a lot better than with Einstein’s general relativity, which allows for dark matter to exist. So there may actually be less mysterious dark matter out there than we think – and maybe even none at all.

Gravitational lens mirage around a galaxy. NASA

We plan to further investigate this interesting phenomenon. It could also be responsible for the high variability of galactic motion, for which we gather more and more evidence.
Any massive body warps the space and time around it, according to general relativity. As a result, light rays take an apparent turn around the object rather than travelling in a straight line – an effect dubbed gravitational lensing. An extremely interesting test of our finding would be the observation of precise gravitational light deflection by individual galaxies, which is albeit a difficult measurement. Our theory predicts a stronger light deflection for very compact galaxies so, excitingly, it could one day be falsified or confirmed by such a measurement.

Juri Smirnov, Post doctoral researcher of Physics, University of Southern Denmark
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Read the original article.

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ADDENDUM
Monday 18th February 2019

Only today I came across another theory called Quantised Inertia that also does away with dark matter. In this YouTube video, the originator of the theory (Mike McCulloch) explains a little about it:

There's quite a lot of information out there about this theory and now that I'm aware of it I can investigate further.

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ADDITIONAL ADDENDUM

Thursday 4th April 2019

This interesting article titled It's Real: Astronomers Just Discovered a Second Galaxy With No Dark Matter and mentions that both galaxies are "ultra-diffuse galaxy - quite large, spread-out, and faint to observe ... about the size of the Milky Way, but with 100 to 1,000 times fewer stars". The findings are said to strengthen the case for dark matter but I'm at a loss to see that. To me, it strengthens the argument that one of the two alternative theories described in this article might be right.