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.