These are my recent Pinboard.in links:

• TeX Live – TeXblog – Typography with TeX and LaTeX

  "If you manually change \paperwidth or \paperheight or use the landscape option of LaTeX classes like for instance article it could happen that the paper size of the resulting pdf differs."

  LaTeX if-many-users-call-it-a-bug-it's-a-bug to-remember

• Living and Working in the 1099 Economy | Newgeography.com

  "Regardless of how one classifies these workers, they remain largely invisible to policy makers and to economic and workforce developers.   That needs to change.  In addition to recognizing the importance of this part of the workforce, we also need to develop a more nuanced understanding of their concerns and needs.   At a minimum, providing a stronger safety net—as suggested by the Freelancer’s Union and others—makes sense.   It also makes sense to develop work spaces that support the 1099ers.   Here, the recent growth in co-work spaces is a positive trend.    Finally, we need new kinds of support and services for the 1099ers.  These might include traditional training in business development, but other supports, such as networking or peer-to-peer lending or on-line tools to find customers and partners should also be part of the mix.    It’s time to recognize that the 1099 economy is here to stay and will be an important part of every community’s workforce for decades to come."

  workantile-exchange coworking not-an-employee

• Eurozine – Bad for artists? – Leonhard Dobusch On digitization, remuneration and copyright

  "According to recent research, it is not illegal copying that is threatening the livelihood of artists, as record companies tell us, but an inequality built into the existing copyright system itself. Leonhard Dobusch on why, in a winner-takes-all culture, stronger copyright protection only benefits the few."

  intellectual-property copyright public-policy unexpected-consequences

• Open the Future: Not Giving Up

  "The Rejectionist and Posthumanist arguments are dangerous because they aren’t just dueling abstractions. They have increasing cultural weight, and are becoming more pervasive than ever. And while they superficially take opposite views on technology and change, they both lead to the same result: they tell us to give up.

  By positing these changes as massive forces beyond our control, these arguments tell us that we have no say in the future of the world, that we may not even have the right to a say in the future of the world. We have no agency; we are hapless victims of techno-destiny. We have no responsibility for outcomes, have no influence on the ethical choices embodied by these tools. The only choice we might be given is whether or not to slam on the brakes and put a halt to technological development — and there’s no guarantee that the brakes will work. There’s no possible future other than loss of control or stagnation."

  golden-ageism singularitarianism pragmatism that-was-the-future-do-you-want-another?

• ginandtacos.com » Blog Archive » NPF: WHY WE FIGHT

  "Wilde said that most of us live lives of quiet desperation. It's a good observation, and in my opinion it's the best reason to do whatever it is we choose to do with our lives. You spend so much time on the job you hate, listening to the boss who treats you like shit, and wondering why you bother to get out of bed anymore. So if you want to spend your time writing the great American novel, building birdhouses, attending Star Trek conventions in animal-themed S&M gear, or touring the country in a van with a band no one has ever heard of to play before tiny audiences, so be it. There are always risks, ranging from simple embarrassment to bodily harm depending on the nature of your pursuits. Hell, having any pursuits at all is a risk. Why not get a second job or work harder at your first one instead of wasting your time telling jokes at the Comedy Pouch in Possum Ridge, AR or playing math rock at the 4th Street Vomit Bucket in the worst neighborhood in Newark? Well, not only are some things more important than being practical, but what could be more practical than doing whatever is necessary to make yourself feel like your life is worthwhile? It's OK to remind yourself that you're not quite as worthless as the world makes you feel, even if there are considerable risks and opportunity costs involved."

  academic-culture worklife motivation inspiration disintermediation-targets

• Announcing the 2011 Locus Award Winners | Tor.com

  "The winners of 2011 Locus Awards were announced this afternoon in Seattle, Washington. Congratulations to all the nominees and winners. We are, of course, especially excited that Tor Books won for “Best Publisher.” All our thanks go out to this wonderful community of readers, authors, and artists."

  science-fiction Locus to-read

• Plato, from The Phaedrus

  "…I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer.…"

  Socrates dialog collaboration history foundationalism-depends-on-fact-checking

• Daily Kos: Michele Bachmann rejects the whole of conservative economic theory in one typed sentence

  "What to make of all this? First of all, it means that Michele Bachmann is a Keynesian. No, Michele, not a Kenyan: a Keynesian, an adherent to an economic theory loathed by conservatives but recognized as common sense by most others, and which supposes the need for government policy interventions in otherwise free markets. This very nearly makes Bachmann a Communist, according to her own party: luckily, Tea Party conservatives can count on the remarkable vapidity of their supporters in order to dodge such sticky political contradictions."

  culture-clash conservatism worldview economics public-policy all-words-are-water

• The Battle Beneath the Battle: Do Gay People Exist? | Sexuality/Gender | Religion Dispatches

  "What I feel like we are still fighting for, in the places where our freedom is still contested, is neither rights nor freedoms nor any particular bundle of privileges, but some more fundamental, and fundamentally religious, human right that has only begun to be articulated: the right to self-definition, to say that I exist—and to be believed."

  civil-rights self-definition foundationalism politics religion

• If You Haven’t Read the Article About German Moms Vacating the Workforce | The Hairpin

  "The German one sounds a lot more ominous, though, because it's all "Nazis chaining women to their stoves," instead of the Dutch piece, which was more "look at those lucky ladies, zipping around on their bicycles on their way to flower arranging class.""

  worklife demographics why-we-work commentary disintermediation-in-action

• If You Lived Here

  "How can you help? We're looking for readers' all-time favorite secondary worlds, from Middle Earth to Ring World, from Dune to Lankhmar and beyond…

  We're taking nominations now. Just fill out the form below and submit it. That simple. If you feel like waxing poetic about your favorite second world, we might ask you if we can use what you write when it's time to go to press. Regardless, we'll keep you updated about which worlds get picked, and about the book as it gets closer to publication."

  science-fiction collaboration writing worldbuilding history

• The single mother’s manifesto | J.K. Rowling – Times Online

  "I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.

  A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug."

  via:poormojo responsibility taxes politics conservatism-isn't-radical-foundationalism

• Why founding a three-person startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs. | AdGrok

  "Giving sophisticated models and fast computers to traders is like giving handguns and tequila to teenage boys. Only complete mayhem can result (and as we saw recently, complete mayhem did result) . The quants were there to make sure the guns were loaded, but also to make sure the traders didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.

  Not that we were terribly appreciated. In fact, we were basically the trader’s little bitches, and any quant who’s honest with himself realizes that. In time, we quants developed knee callouses from genuflecting to service the traders, on whose profits our livelihoods depended."

  via:pkedrosky financial-crisis worklife rocket-science startups workantile-exchange

• Rubik’s cubes of any size can now be solved – physics-math – 30 June 2011 – New Scientist

  "Suppose someone takes a solved 20x20x20 Rubik's cube and makes five moves – can you figure out [from that scrambled state] what those five moves were?" he asks. In other words, can you solve it in five moves? He suspects that you cannot, but has yet to prove it. "We don't know."

  mathematics mathematical-recreations operations-research algorithms nudge-targets

• Boehner’s Economic Terrorism – The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan – The Daily Beast

  "For the GOP to use the debt ceiling to put a gun to the head of the US and global economy until they get only massive spending cuts and no revenue enhancement is therefore the clearest sign yet of their abandonment of the last shreds of a conservative disposition. A conservative does not risk the entire economic system to score an ideological victory. That is what a fanatic does."

  Republicans economic-crisis Civil-War politics foundationalism

• The Power of Open

  "Below, the book is available for PDF download in a variety of languages. Check back soon, as more languages are on the way."

  open-access publishing book disintermediation-in-action to-do

• git remove oldest revisions of a file – Stack Overflow

  "Now, I don't think there is a way to directly tell git-filter-branch to skip any commits. However, since the commands are run in a shell context, it shouldn't be too difficult to use the shell to remove all but the last X number of revisions. Something like this:…"

  git version-control hints project-management fundamentalism-be-damned

• XeTeX and LaTeX: Author per chapter (a.k.a. Proceedings)

  "I never understood why there is no proper Latex class for typesetting proceedings or journals when Latex or Xetex is getting increasingly popular among scientists. The biggest trouble you will have whey you will try to typeset something like this is to get the authors' names into the Table of Contents and into the headers while having each author's contribution to the volume as a chapter which shall not appear numbered anywhere."

  typesetting XeTeX class memoir-class LaTeX templates

• typOasis says welcome!

  I had no idea this still existed.

  typography drop-caps free fonts

• Walking Around, a new urban walking game – Vacuum

  "Second – and here is what is novel, at least to me – is that there's a bonus structure in the game designed to award bonuses for when you have accomplished tasks. The first bonus award that I'm awarding myself looks at constructing a walk so that you make an orbit around the biggest possible chunk of territory; that is to say, repeated walks along the same path will get you zero bonus, but going out of your way on a detour will add to your score, and trekking through unfamiliar territory in a big loop is the best."

  great-weird-ideas gamification serious-games fitness walking diversity-as-boon

• Am I a science journalist? | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

  "And I think that all of this makes it one of the most exciting times to be a science journalist. It means a more diverse array of science journalism. The new approach doesn’t replace the old (that’s a straw man) but it does complement and enhance it. I call it to the Cambrian explosion of science journalism. I actually think that most people in this field get this and are excited by it."

  journalism credentialing blogging writing independence

• Kindle Publishing Programs

  "KindleGen is a command line tool used to build eBooks that can be sold through Amazon's Kindle platform. This tool is best for publishers and individuals who are familiar with HTML and want to convert their HTML, XHTML, XML (OPF/IDPF format), or ePub source into a Kindle Book."

  Amazon publishing Kindle ebooks toolkit

• Pandoc – Pandoc User’s Guide

  "There is, however, one respect in which pandoc’s aims are different from the original aims of markdown. Whereas markdown was originally designed with HTML generation in mind, pandoc is designed for multiple output formats. Thus, while pandoc allows the embedding of raw HTML, it discourages it, and provides other, non-HTMLish ways of representing important document elements like definition lists, tables, mathematics, and footnotes."

  typesetting markup markdown simplified-document-structure utilities

• Link languages for navigating through a landscape of words – Vacuum

  "An advantage of recognizing this as a command language and not just a syntax for easy linking is that you can avoid the naive assumption that everyone who reads the language interprets it the same way. The language describes links between two parts of an flexibly articulated wordscape, but it's up to the reader to resolve that link into something concrete. The modern web software fails to live up to the promise of understanding just how many variant interpretations there might be of one specific phrase, trading ease of linking for richness in expression."

  information-architecture surfing intertextuality links

• Lunch Roulette: Random Social Networking in the Office | Code for America

  "To counter this trend, and to encourage collaboration in the workplace, we built an internal tool called Lunch Roulette that selects random pairs of Fellows to join each other on impromptu lunch dates.…"

  social-capital communication community Workantile utilities

• A Day in the life of Cheap Impostor

  "This weekend I decided I wanted to learn about the new stuff in Java 1.5. Generics, auto-boxing/unboxing, etc. This is the kind of reading that works best for me in a printed book.

  Fortunately for me (and for Cheap Impostor), Sun's official Java Language Specification is available as a free PDF file, with license given to each user to print one copy."

  printing typesetting utilities MacOS imposition signatures

• Multivalent Tools: PDF Impose

  "Imposition arranges one or more existing pages onto another page. In its simplest form, it's n-up, such as shrinking 4 pages onto 1 to save paper when printing. It's easy to arrange pages and rotations for booklets. More sophisticated use of the tool can rearrange and rotate pages to produce complex layouts, as for folded brochures."

  typesetting printing utilities open-source

• Malaysian LaTeX User Group: Setting page size and margins

  "There's quite a bit of interest in the .tex code behind the Grid Computing Cluster report, but I think posting the raw code in its entirety would be a bit too overwhelming to quickly glean useful tips from it. (Also to avoid getting into any issues with my university… etc…) "

  LaTeX typesetting typography project-notes

• The TeX Catalogue OnLine, Entry for flowfram, Ctan Edition

  "The flowfram package enables you to create frames in a document such that the contents of the document environment flow from one frame to the next in the order in which they were defined. This is useful for creating posters or magazines, indeed any form of document that does not conform to the standard one or two column layout."

  LaTeX typesetting document-design typography library

• Mushrooms and Literature – Justin Erik Halldór Smith

  "Nabokov famously told the story of the Cornell student who beseeched him to divulge the secret of great writing. 'Learn the names of plants', Nabokov is said to have said. He surely did not mean the Linnean names (though those can help to add an extra flair of erudition); he meant the Russian-English-French names that turn the things into repositories of human lore and values and fears."

  names generalism nanohistory mindfulness advice writing

• Robert Nozick, father of libertarianism: Even he gave up on the movement he inspired. – By Stephen Metcalf – Slate Magazine

  "Libertarians will blanch at lumping their revered Vons—Mises and Hayek—in with the nutters and the shills. But between them, Von Hayek and Von Mises never seem to have held a single academic appointment that didn't involve a corporate sponsor. Even the renowned law and economics movement at the University of Chicago was, in its inception, heavily subsidized by business interests. ("Radical movements in capitalist societies," as Milton Friedman patiently explained, "have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals.") Within academia, the philosophy of free markets in extremis was rarely embraced freely—i.e., by someone not on the dole of a wealthy benefactor. It cannot be stressed enough: In the decades after the war, a kind of levee separated polite discourse from free-market economics. The attitude is well-captured by John Maynard Keynes, whose scribble in the margins of his copy of The Road to Serfdom reads: "An extraordinary example of how, starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end up in Bedlam.""

  libertarianism economics philosophy fads-and-fallacies politics Randianism

• A Camera That Could Care Less About Focus: Introducing Lytro

  The basic premise of Lytro’s technology is pretty simple: the camera captures all the information it possibly can about the field of light in front of it. You then get a digital photo that is adjustable in an almost infinite number of ways. You can focus anywhere in the picture, change the light levels — and presuming you’re using a device with a 3-D ready screen — even create a picture you can tilt and shift in three dimensions. (I got a demonstration of the camera’s 3-D photos on a laptop earlier today, and was blown away.)

  photography image-processing invention disintermediation-in-action camera want

• OCC Gives Banks Another Blow Job « naked capitalism

  Mr Levin said: “It is past time for the president to nominate new leadership at the OCC to protect American families and businesses from the excesses of Wall Street.”

  financial-crisis public-policy bankers-should-start-avoiding-lampposts-right-about-now