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.