Simple Country Physicist

This is rather a difficult time to go to the gym. Temperatures have been fluctuating – highs – between high eighties and low one hundreds, which gives us some cause for pause at the claim that global warming slope should be zero for the next five years or so. Also, shul – the public type – is about to commence and so all of the territorial teachers are seeping back in to monopolize the equipment and try to intimidate those who aren’t of their particular fraternity. But my chief bother is that this is the null time of several of the podcasts I listen to, notably Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s “In Our Time” and Garrison Keeler’s “News from Lake Woebegone”, both in cessation for vacation. On the other hand this does give me occasion to catch up on some of those podcasts I subscribe to but can’t quite get around to listening to.

This of course adds somewhat to my reputation as a bit of a something else. Most of the seniors have no interest in podcasts or MP3 players; indeed, I believe even the young folks who have MP3 players – young means forty and under these days – just listen to music, which given the diversity of music types makes me glad for the privacy of MP3 players so that I am only inflicted with what I want to listen to, and, of course, whatever is being watched on the television. It is rather amazing just how much crap is on television at 0400 in the morning, and I don’t mean exclusively infomercials for exercise videos, scrap booking kits, or absurd claimed diet preparations. No, even the news programs are crap. So from my perspective, especially since I can’t read a book when I am using the ergometer, podcasts and an MP3 player are what keeps me from plotting evil scientist plans.

All of which puts me in mind of how I have said several times – and will continue to do so as long as I adhere to the theory – that computer requirements are increasingly defined by what clients we use. This theory has come home to me as I search for equivalents to my “necessary” clients in Ubuntu, and a LaTeX processor is central to that problem.

First of all, LaTeX is of the class of social things that may be referred to as Listerine. To use the old advertising slogan, “it’s the taste you hate twice a day.” The price one pays with Listerine was a hideously bad taste (now much abated by modern flavor chemistry) and a righteous burning action in the mouth for the benefit of deferment and deterrence of tooth decay and gum disease. Hence the rather classical manifestation of a Freudian Love-Hate relationship.

LaTeX is much the same. It leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth and getting it to compile is often a burning sensation, down time at best when everything moves smoothly. The result is the best formatting and presentation of nerd information – equations, tables, and figures – that one can find. The beast also has the singular advantage of completely decoupling the composition aspect from the formatting aspect. Having said that, it has a learning curve that is characterized by a series of Dirac delta functions on a stochastic basis of distribution. The only good thing about learning how to use LaTeX is that it is significantly easier than learning how to build a LaTeX theme or style. It is gain through pain intellectualized.

The fundamental problem is that one may significantly short circuit this if one only wishes to be a fairly simple parasitic user – you only make use of canned styles and never have to depart from them – is that you can use Scientific Word or WorkPlace. This entails swapping several pictures of dead presidents for a pseudo-WYSIWYG front end to a LaTeX processor. It has the singular effect of permitting other than LaTeX nerds be LaTeX geeks and write productively.