I'm pretty sure the first two links refer to something very different than the third:
The first two are about a way to encode maths using unicode, as in conventions and special characters allowing e.g. to write fractions, aligned equations, etc.
So, this would essentially furnish an alternative to the "math" subset of latex (think mathjax or katex) or mathml.
The third is a package for latex, and allows to use unicode symbols (greek letters, math symbols, etc.) in your math environments + something related to the use of unicode in the output (requiring compatible fonts); it seems the second part is the main one but I'm not sure what that means exactly.
The Latex package says "Maths input can also be simplified with Unicode since literal glyphs may be entered instead of control sequences in your document source." So it at least includes a similar idea.
Superficially similar, yes, but my point was just that it may seem from your bunching up the links together that all refer to the same thing, while they don't.
Fair enough, I've edited it. I just tried using the Latex package with a formula typed using Unicode symbols, and it does work, but doesn't follow all the UnicodeMath rules.
Something I'd like to see is a simple way to define “containers” on my desktop that would allow me to run sandboxed versions of my standard apps in bundles.
The plan would be something like the following.
You have a simple gui that would allow you to create new containers, for which you could define what it has access to (specific folders, internet, sound, etc).
You could then add apps to your container, and they would only be able to play with each other in the container with the restrictions given.
I think that would work with a simple app essentially based on bubblewrap.
For example:
* A "torrents" container, where the only apps would be firefox, deluge and vlc, and access to no folder in my home directory, but the container would have its own home directory.
* An "admin" container, with only firefox and thunderbird and libreoffice, say, and access to my ~/Downloads and ~/Documents folders.
You should be able to run the admin.firefox and torrents.firefox side by side, since they'd have different profiles.
By default, each container would have its own "virtual filesystem" with no accesss to anything outside (modulo what's really needed), and only by toggling "links" would it be able to access your actual fs tree.
The GUI would be easy enough for computer "illiterate" people to work with it.
And the GUI would be smart enough to create desktop files with each new application I add to a container, with customized icons.
I don't expect it would be too complicated (essentially bookkeeping on top of bubblewrap).
If anyone is interested, I'd happily discuss it more!
> I am generally suspicious of anyone who voluntary pursues academia
That's very unfair imo.
The majority of people I know in academia don't fit this profile at all.
There is obviously disappointing stuff happening, but people generally still are working/teaching in good faith.
>but people generally still are working/teaching in good faith.
It depends on university. On mine, most professors just see it as a job, something that one must endure until it's over. And when you bring to attention that what they're lecturing is incorrect or not proven they don't really care, again not all, but most, at least on my university. Just today I reminded the professor that there is a difference between a theory and hypothesis, their response was that they don't know if the theories they're teaching were tested or proven, but they are teaching this because that's what's written in the book...
That made me really sad, it's already hard to stay motivated to not leave the university because you need a certificate of a higher education to be taken seriously, but such behaviour from professors makes it even harder.
I've already expressed my worries to those in control of courses and they say that they understand but can't do much to change things because the curriculum that we have was accepted by the government.
Here in Slovenia people that work in the universities are paid by the government regardless of how happy or unhappy the students are, which is probably the reason for the situation in which we are...
As a fellow Slovenian, former student and now someone who's spent years professionally in academia, let me try to show your experience from a different perspective. I don't know anything about your professor except the anecdote you shared, so I'm not defending them. I'm just trying to shine a different light "on the situation in which we are" that you as a student perhaps didn't (yet) have a chance to see. I'm also writing this because I feel like your view is pretty common among our students.
How our universities work is that as a researcher a part of your duty to the university is teaching students. Unfortunately, fields of research and study subjects in most cases aren't aligned. Nobody will be researching basic subjects that must be taught to the students, and on the other hand a very specialized field of research might not be taught to anything but a small post-graduate course. This means that often professors will end up teaching an undergraduate course that has next to nothing to do with their field of study. In the end, someone must be teaching those introductory courses and for some subjects being taught the university might not have any professional researchers at all.
Professors are researchers first and teachers second. This is most likely the reason why it appears that teaching is "something that one must endure until it's over". Your professor might be a brilliant world-class researcher in their field and they pursue it with passion, but they might be teaching e.g. linear algebra to undergraduates twice a week based on "what's written in the book" to keep their job. As it turns out, teaching and research are quite different skills and they often don't coincide. When they do, you get some really amazing professors and I'm sure you have some on your course as well.
It's not a perfect system, but I've spent enough time in foreign universities where research staff was on-the-hook all the time and liable to get fired if students weren't happy with them. It's such a constantly stressful environment that I was amazed that people managed to do any kind of research at all. In the end, it's a trade-off. You can't have a university without either top-end research or teaching and we might have chosen a slightly different trade-off between these two than the countries you seem to look up to.
Anyway, I hope I've given you a new way to look at things and I hope you will stay at your university for more than just to get the "take me seriously" papers.
> people still can be harmful even being in good faith
That's a general truth.
You make it sound like people choose academia to somehow cheat the system and profit from free student's work or whatever.
Make a real case for you thesis then.
People choose academia to be within (zero-sum) system and project the same expectations to students, while real life success is about being out of any system.
Hence the harm.
People don't 'choose academia to be within a zero-sum system and project the same expectations to students'. My partner and most of my friends are or have been in academia and the one common thing is a real passion for their subject of choice and industry doesn't offer the same flexibility to focus on it.
Being suspicious of those who voluntarily become academics is odd.
Real life results of academia are largely propaganda (tuition billions well spent).
They are not even good in figuring out why/how things work and replicating success (additionally proven by Soviets).
Your language of choice - Clojure according to your HN bio - works on a product where important parts (e.g. Generics and the Java collection framework) were done by academia. One of the most popular compilers (LLVM) was done in academia (and still is in parts!). Most of the optimizations compilers use were done by academia.
Your work stands on the work of countless academic researchers and you run around "What did academia EVER do for us?" - the Monty Python sketch about Romans comes to mind.
This is especially laughable, since I have seen how that works on practice: take something everyone already does, write 1000 of PhDs on that, add to academic history book, now wikipedia and voila.
If any of IT projects came from academia to the market, it's only because certain people were picked up by businesses that were onto something already.
I don't mean this in a derogatory way but from your bio it sounds like you work in full-stack web development - maybe with some data processing. Sure, this stuff doesn't really come from academia. But there are other bits of tech where academia does play a large part and your viewpoint is just not correct. One example that contradicts your second paragraph away is I spent several years at a consultancy that helped academics commericalise their own research - mostly medical tech but some computer vision stuff too. There's loads of great work businesses coming out of academia - you might just not be in a position to see it.
Coincidentally, before current full stack freelancing stuff, I've spent around two years in augmented reality, often having to dig through tons of published research, only to realize pretentious lab methods do not work outside. We ended up adopting some methods from hacky teens on DIY forums, but never that..
> To me, the question that springs to mind then is: does that kind of attitude work as well for “lesser” mathematicians/people?
My grades shot upwards when I stopped caring about them and decided to focus on what interested me (i.e. I like subject X and want to learn it well and will not use the grade as a metric of how well I learned it).
If work means to live a happy and meaningful life- absolutely.
If work means to gain the prestige of a man like Conway- probably not. But I can rest assured that I likely wouldnt achieve that with other attitudes either
They may not become famous in their fields, but they're not going to be worrying about that stuff anyway, so will probably be happier. Which, it turned out for me, was a better goal all along.
It's not necessarily about becoming famous.
If you're good enough, you can just work on what you enjoy doing, and it will probably yield something research worthy anyway, and your bosses will be happy, etc.
Otherwise, you might end up simply having fun on dead-end stuff, which are harder to sell, academically.
But that's just my impression… mind sharing your story?
I'd also recommend book that's developed the ideas of the Permaculture further to suit better for farming: https://www.regenerativeagriculture.co/ Just bought the book and it's a very thorough and practical guide on how to run small farm profitabily while building new soil and implementing Permaculture patterns. Richard Perkings who has written the book is a pioneer in regenerative agriculture and runs his own farm at Sweden (https://youtu.be/J_htLIUKX1Y) He explains the principles and theories behind his farm in this great lecture he kept at food-related hackaton: https://youtu.be/3Knn7ZH4Tiw
Keep in mind that building an ecosystem up is sort of a lifetime-scale project, so we're mostly talking about rather un-controlled experiments running for decades. A more recent book I'm going through that I like is Martin Crawford's
"Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops"
In the section on soil fertility, you can find tables quantified in terms of pees per area, depending on the breakdown of what you already have planted.
He avoids the term "Permaculture" because like "organic" or "bio" it's turned into this whole badly defined spiritual thing, instead of just being about growing as much food as possible, with as few inputs as possible, with perennial plants.
+1 re "lifetime-scale project" nature of the work.
> it's turned into this whole badly defined spiritual thing, instead of just being about growing as much food as possible, with as few inputs as possible, with perennial plants.
I recently purchased Bill Mollison's designers manual. From this book, it's clear that the spiritual/ethical component has been integral to permaculture since the beginning.
"growing as much food as possible...with perennial plants" is great, but it's a subset of what permaculture is or was about.
Gaia's Garden is great for beginners and is what I tend to gift people as an on-ramp. Edible Forest Gardens, Volume 2 is a comprehensive and complimentary to Permaculture - A Designers Manual, which is also comprehensive and rather timeless.
“Restoration Agriculture” by Mark Shepard is a great book. It’s about his project, “New Forest Farm”, and is heavily influenced by Permaculture. He pulls from a lot of references like “One Straw Revolution”, etc, with a heavy focus on agroforestry (where tree crops and more traditional crops are grown in a mixed system).
“The Resilient Farm and Homestead”, by Ben Falk is another great one — full of illustrations and practical ideas (like using a compost pile to power a radiant heat system.)
