These are my recent Pin​board​.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 | New​geog​ra​phy​.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?

• ginand​ta​cos​.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 4^th 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 20×20×20 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