I just discovered a cool little tool/site, MimeTeX. MimeTeX, the tool, renders TeX formulas into GIFs. The program does not itself use TeX or TeX fonts, but rather implements a subset. MimeTeX, the site, actually allows you to generate GIFs from TeX formulas directly at the site. This might be handy for creating the occasional image for weblog posts.
I will be out of town for a few days for Thanksgiving, so there won’t be any posts from me for the next few days.
Mathematical textbooks take pains to make their subject appear to form a unified whole. Is any such unity an illusion? Discuss.
Chris Hillman, creator of Entropy on the World Wide Web and Relativity on the World Wide Web, will be joining us as a poster on Ars Mathematica.
Either Murray Gell-Mann or Richard Feynman said “Physics is to mathematics as sex is masturbation.” Discuss.
We here at Ars Mathematica set back the course of complexity theory by several hours, and Scott Aaronson thanks us for it.
I’m back from vacation. With any luck, I’ll even think of something to say. Until that happens, I wanted to link to Peter Woit’s post, Open Access Publishing, which links to this CERN task force report on the subject. I haven’t read the report, but Peter’s description makes it sound pathetically timid. As he characterizes it:
The CERN task force doesn’t seem to me to be providing a viable long-term plan for moving to the kind of open access model they are supporting. It doesn’t address the fundamental problem of keeping a system where physicists hand over the scientific literature to Elsevier, then have to figure out how to buy it back.
I will be away from my computer for the Labor Day weekend here in the United States, so there will be no posts from me for the next couple of days.
I’ve just deleted about 200-300 spam comments that have appeared over the last day or two. I don’t think I accidentially deleted any actual comments, but if I did, please post again.
Trackbacks (and pingbacks) have now been disabled so there shouldn’t be any more spam and the comment RSS feeds should (hopefully) be safe to subscribe to again. I’d like to re-enable trackbacks again at some stage, but probably not until I’ve figured out how to block this bulk spam.
I’m back from vacation. Tragically, my laptop, one that I literally took with me around the world, has died. But my commitment to your mathematical pleasure is so high that I plan on breaking into my neighbors’ houses to use their computers to post to the site.
According to Steven Colbert on tonight’s Colbert Report, equations are the devil’s sentences. For the past couple of days, this site has been under relentless spam attack (the spam has been showing up in older posts, so no one sees them but me). Clearly, these two events are related.