Attention readers of Terry Tao’s blog

This should be relevant to everyone.

What's New in Google Reader

Dear Google Reader,

I am not subscribed to this blog because I can’t read all of its entries in google reader. I’m not sure whose fault this is, but until this is sorted, I’m just going to have to continue visiting What’s new directly.

[note this picture is a few days old, and if anyone could offer technical support to make it more viewable, that would be appreciated.]

Keyboard Remapping for Latex

It is patently obvious that the keyboard was designed for English typing, as opposed to typing or anything else that heavily relies on non-alphanumeric characters (like coding). Frustrated by the ergonomics and speed of this, I have finally decided to take matters into my own hands, I have used the Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (I use the XP virus) to obtain a partial solution (not original) to the problem.

Essentially, I looked at the keyboard and asked myself which keys are pressed more commonly in the shifted position than the unshifted position. My answer (not backed up by any actual data) is the seven keys.

$ ^ ( ) _ { }

So I remapped those to swap their shifted and unshifted modes.

For good measure I swapped the popular \ with the unpopular and far away ;.

This I believe is still only a partial solution, for example the characters 0 – + should probably replace ` 7 8 as being unshifted, though this has not been carried through as yet for some bizarre desire to not have my keyboard behaving too differently from how it looks.

There are unfortunately some drawbacks, I’ve noticed that typing \p is awkward, and that it makes me noticeably slower now when typing on other machines, but I try to do all my texing on my laptop. This remapping also solves the asthetic problem I always had with a keyboard which was that the minus sign was considered more important than the plus sign (who cares about hyphens anyway?) and now I have them on an even footing, although as noted above, they really should both become unshifted.

The difference betweeen zed and zee

Back in the day when I was a student at mathscamp, one thing that I was taught and have taken on board since is the advice to always cross one’s zeds when handwriting mathematics, to ensure that they are distinguishable from the numeral 2. I continue to favour this practice and try to promote it myself to any students that I teach, for I find it really makes a difference (and this is probably also the reason why I started to get into the habit of crossing one’s 7s).

Being in the USA, I get a lot of mispronounciation of zed as zee, and I would like to argue that it is an inferior pronunciation for a similar reason. If one enunciates zee, then (this varies with the person, their accent and the context) it can require some thought and/or guesswork to eludicate the difference between (or or and (or or ). And it is for this reason why I believe that zed is the superior pronounciation of the twenty-sixth letter of the alphabet, and will advocate for its adoption across the english speaking world.

MADip discussion forum

This post exists to allow people to comment on this post at MADip.

What Obama should do

With apologies to Joseph Heller

Scene: The plebian security line at a major US domestic airport. Obama walks up to the screening point, heavily armed with a variety of liquids and gels.

TSA dude: You’re going to have to surrender those liquids and gels.
Obama: Let me take the liquids and gels onto the plane.
TSA dude: You’re going to have to surrender those liquids and gels.
Obama: Let me take the liquids and gels onto the plane.

[repeated with onlookers until TSA dude realises he is talking to the president. He goes off to receive instructions from his supervisor, and eventually, not knowing what to do, they allow Obama through unmolested.]

Obama: Let everybody take liquids and gels onto the plane.

Exeunt

Major – de Coverly, you are a genius.

And there’s cricket on the radio

It’s disappointing to have to say this, but it looks like the kiwis are leading by example in showing the ABC how to behave. After obvious grumpiness at the ABC’s peurile decision to discriminate against non-Australian IP addresses (ranted about previously), it’s nice to see that one can find streaming of cricket on the radio via radiosport.co.nz.

Fuck you ABC

Australian IPs only

presumably, this should be and/or the ACB.

Also, the ABC people or their program isn’t very bright:

I don't think we bowled New Zealand out for 6

No Clean Feed

Disturbing signs abound as there has suddenly been a frenzy about Chairman Rudd’s latest plan to censor the internet in Australia. As part of our mandarin-speaking PM’s attempt to turn Australia into an offshoot of the Chinese Communist Party, online dissent is scheduled to be terminated with the implementation of the Great Firewall of Australia. This project is backed by idiotic Senator Conroy and his PEADOPHILE chants to silence opposition.

It appears that the centralised site for information about this is No Clean Feed.

And on a not exactly unrelated topic, with both Conroy and Fielding senators from Victoria, this confirms my belief that Victoria should be stripped of its upper house representation.

Muxtape vs RIAA

Wanted: One person proficient in hacking to change the RIAA website so that the following graphic appears:

(background available by looking at Muxtape or Wikipedia.)

Quote of the Day

One can also obtain a lower bound: there exists no algorithm which needs less than sous certaines restrictions naturelles on peut démontrer qu’il n’existe pas d’algorithme de multiplication des nombres à chiffres avec le temps d’exécution inférieur à bit-operations for the multiplication of two general -bit numbers.

This is from the first page of the first chapter of Introduction to Modern Number Theory, by Yuri Manin and Alexi Panchishkin. And you can see this for yourself at Google Books.