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The “Motion 6” Bind
I’ve been following the 2009 Annual General Meeting of the Canadian Federation of Students, where (more-or-less) 2/3 of the delegates voted in favor of Motion 6, a motion that make members defederation much more difficult. The first clause of Motion 6 is “Raising the petition requirement from 10% to 20% of students in the member…
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Spellchecking LaTeX in MacOSX
How to spell-check a LaTeX document with specialized dictionary in TeXShop. TeXshop makes use of the default spell-check service of OSX, and this is somewhat problematic when you’re writing manuscripts. Between keywords and specialized vocabulary, just about every word is underlined: What would be nice is if we can: I think both are possible…
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Writing Chemistry with LaTeX (1/3)
Branching from the core series of LaTeX introduction, here is a specialized series on writing chemistry papers and dissertations in . In this part, we will download, open, and clean up a RSC template, yielding a cleaner framework for writing. Joseph Wright has published some amazing tools for writing chemistry with LaTeX, and they make…
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Bests-and-Messes: Best Reading in 2009
Best Books I read ~100 books a year for pleasure. These are the best books I’ve read this year (not necessarily published in 2009). Hugo Heclo, On Thinking Institutionally.My favorite book of the year, Heclo articulated many things central to my world-view that I did not have a name for. The following quote illustrates the…
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Bests-and-Messes: Bests of 2009
And continuing the first post, here are some best of the year. I’ll keep the blunders to the last post! Concept of the Year: Heavy-Tailed Distributions Medieval people prior to 1660 have no concepts of probability (in fact, the word probability meant something else to them: authoritative, as with probity**), and would be astonished to…
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Writing with LaTeX (2/5): Installation & Resources
Now that you have a sense of why could be useful, we will move straight to practice. It’s easier to make sense of when you’ve seen it in action, so theory will come in the next part. This post helps you get up-and-running (for MacOSX and Windows), and points out resources when things are not…
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LaTeX Embedded Python (1/2)
One of the attraction of LaTeX is that it is extensible. Using Martin Ehmsen’s python.sty, it is possible to embed python into LaTeX code to prepare dynamic, living documents. Embedding python in LaTeX is made possible by use of python.sty written by Martin Ehmsen. Simply place this in the same directory as your LaTeX file,…
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3D Bar Histograms in Python
Attempts to prepare 3D (XYZ) histograms in python using the mplot3d package (part of matplotlib). Plotting a XYZ-histogram turned out to be less trivial than anticipated. The premise: I have datasets which are scattered with over a 2-dimensional grid, and I needed the (3D) histograms. This is an exploratory effort, and we would like like…
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Balloon Bird with Flower
“Squack? Squack? What do you mean you finished the draft?” Happy day indeed 🙂 Goofing off after the paper… uses 5 partial 260 and 1 partial 160 (for the eyes). The legs would be nicer if they’re orange and not tied together… next time.
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Scientific Data Visualization: Learning Enthought Traits (3)
In the last two sections we’ve looked at what the Traits package does, and customizing the interface. Today we’ll look at how to do some simple data plots with the Chaco package included with the Enthought distribution. (Some of you may be wondering whether to use Chaco or Matplotlib for plotting data in python. In…