Love the post. I'll take this opportunity to link to a favorite classic linear algebra paper in a similar vein: "Nineteen Dubious Ways to Compute the Exponential of a Matrix" [1]
It’s even stranger than the author makes out. When I got into coffee in the 80’s, being a coffee snob meant buying beans, grinding them in a $30 Braun chopper, and brewing them in a $50 Braun automatic drip machine. The beans were often from the grocery store, and normally roasted very dark. When a Peet’s opened in the town where I went to grad school, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
A Blue Bottle coffee opened up in that same town, and I had a cup last time I visited. It was almost unrecognizable as coffee. Light roasted, fruity, what is now called “specialty coffee”. I got that cup pour over, but coffee is very often made today on expensive espresso machines. I have a $500 machine. I have friends with $1000 machines and $600 burr grinders. People debate the merits of flat vs conical burrs in machines.
I was still buying dark roasted coffee, now from a coffee roaster subscription, but it hasn’t been tasting as good to me. I miss the taste of the dark roasted drip coffee I made in the 80’s, and I don’t seem to be able to recreate it with my manual burr grinder or my v60 pour over set. I think my taste as probably changed. I changed my coffee subscription to explore some of the lighter “specialty” roasts. Still doesn’t taste like coffee to me, but I’m starting to appreciate it more. There’s no Peet’s in my current state, and I find Starbuck’s drip coffee so strong as to be hard to appreciate.
Around 10 years ago I was in a diner and had a fantastic cup of coffee. It was full bodied and nearly perfect. I asked what kind of coffee it was and they said Maxwell House. I haven’t started buying Maxwell House (yet), but it made me realize how much of current coffee culture is fetishism around our addiction, and how little is about the ultimate taste.
A good cup of drip coffee can be amazing. I haven’t had one in a while, but am trying to find the beans and the grind that will bring me back to the excitement I had about coffee in the 80’s.
> Around 10 years ago I was in a diner and had a fantastic cup of coffee. It was full bodied and nearly perfect. I asked what kind of coffee it was and they said Maxwell House.
I find that I can get used to a type or method of coffee, and just drinking something different to change it up leads to it tasing delicious. After a couple weeks of dark roasted illy in a french press, a cup of Folger's in a drip maker will taste great, after a couple weeks of that, I switch types/methods and it's like rediscovering coffee.
Does anyone know how he writes his papers? His illustrations will forever be beyond my skills, but I’d like to up my paper mojo. Since his references are in bibtex, I assume he’s using some flavor of TeX, but this looks more sophisticated than LaTeX. In particular, he has small sub-illustrations next to his section headings that are really hard to get right using LaTeX. Is he using ConTeXt? Which fonts does he use? The ligatures are really nice, also hard to do using standard LaTeX available fonts.
The inset figures are probably placed using the “wrapfigure” LaTeX package. It’s janky and frustrating to use, but I agree the results look great!
EDIT: Incidentally the template changed recently and people within the graphics community complained about some aspects of it, e.g. the equation typesetting and how subsections and lists are formatted. It's good to hear that people outside the community like it.
Wow, you're correct, he uses ACM TOG for the paper. As a scientist, I mostly just use the REVTeX packages or tufts-latex. Evidently there's a brave new world of other templates out there that I need to learn about. Thanks.
I propose the word “gitiot” for an idiot who posts a “there oughta be…” without googling it first. (I can’t figure out how I missed this. I’ve been in a “lisp on the one hand and Julia on the other” bubble for years. It simply never occurred to me to look for this, and it never crossed my desktop. Gitiot!!)
To be fair to yourself, LispSyntax.jl is more of a proof of concept than something that anyone would want to actually do significant coding in as can be seen by the TODO list in the README[1]. It also hasn't seen any active development in several years.
Just tried it; sorta works; the most basic examples run, but the repl is broken; probably designed for an older version of Julia; I'll see what I can do with it. Anyway, thanks!
I had been intrigued by Lisp for years, but it was Julia's roots in Lisp that finally got me to explore the Lisp languages. I actually haven't used LispSyntax.jl, but it's close to what I'd like to have in a language.
Does anyone know of programming tools for better thinking? I used to be a very good programmer, and now I run a large research organization. One would think that there would be ample opportunity to use my programming skills to better manage the organization, but there's little more than exploring business data using Excel. The closest I've come is the Thinking in Systems stuff that Donella Meadows and her colleagues have done.
Are there other Thinking Tools for programmers who want an edge in managing large groups?
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/podcasts/transcript-ezra-...