Microblogging

Autism symptoms(?) nobody tells you about: Merging information one has about two different people into one extremely interesting person. I was vaguely disappointed to learn Ezra Klein, Playboy model that Tumblr keeps talking about, and Noah Smith, journalist that rationalists on Twitter keep retweeting, are actually two different people.

That feeling when you value various qualities in humans, so you seek out and associate with other humans with those qualities, and then you go "can I really think of myself as a this-quality-having person when I'm not above average at it for my social group?"

Generalizing from small amounts of data that isn't quite enough for you to be socially entitled to generalize from is fun. It's kind of awkward when you write "The really easy way we can tell that int(1, infinity, f(x)dx) probably diverges is that the hint you gave us tells us about a function that f(x) dominates. If int(1, infinity, f(x)dx) converged, knowing about functions that f(x) dominates wouldn't be useful for proving that" and then don't have the time to follow up and write a better proof, though.

One of the neat parts of being a girl is that everyone will constantly argue that it's prosocial and good for me to try to ask people out more, so that on the rare occasions I actually do it I … don't necessarily have confidence, but I feel good about doing it.

I need to find a good workflow for going from a collection of Markdown files with LaTeX equations embedded \[like this\] or \(like this\), as well as non-ASCII characters, to PDF/web/etc. In theory Pandoc should be able to handle this, but I haven't found the right combination of flags yet. This article on LaTeX seems annoyingly plausible and similar to my experiences, so just manually switching to LaTeX seems unfun.

I also seem to be developing an idiosyncratic markup scheme for my math homework and notes, which would also be neat to turn into a document, if harder because it's really not Markdown. (I'm using a * b for multiplication, a ** b for exponentiation, a_(n+1) for sequences, etc, so I can't really do in-text styling like that.) I need to be able to type math because I get hand pain from extended periods of writing very easily, and also because copy-pasting and being able to easily visually compare lines and stuff is very useful.

Syntax in my math notes and homework right now

The * operator represents multiplication: 3*2 = 6

the ** operator represents exponentiation: 3**2 = 9

the / operator represents division: 3/2 = 1.5

the sqrt() function represents the square root: sqrt(9) = 3

<= and ≤ represent 'less than or equal to': 2 <= 3

>= and ≥ represent 'greater than or equal to': 3 >= 2

"Answer:" represents my final answer to a problem.

the # symbol marks the beginning of a comment: #this might be too much documentation

e, ln(), d/dx, trigonometric functions, and so on have their usual meanings. log() is equivalent to ln()

exp() has its usual meaning.

the int() function represents integration. With one argument, it represents the indefinite integral of that function. With three arguments, it represents a definite integral, namely the integral from the first to the second argument of the third argument. Examples: int(x*dx) = 0.5*x**2, int(0, 1, x*dx) = 0.5

Limits will be written in the form lim(x->0, x/x**2)

[F(x)](a, b) represents F(b) - F(a). Note that I don't use brackets as parentheses, nor do I tend to do much implicit multiplication, so this should be unambiguous.

Line breaks are line breaks, not spaces.

Sequences & Series
==================

is a file title, and

Linear/arithmetic sequences
---------------------------

is a section title. Sometimes files and sections don't have their titles underlined or otherwise indicated, though. I'm not attached to this, it just seemed natural.

Right now, nothing divides equations from not-that in the text. If I had to do this in Markdown, I'd make equations be inline code or code blocks (because going from int(a,b,f(x)*dx to \int_a^b f(x)\ dx and so forth sounds difficult), but I'd want comments in equations to be rendered not in monospace and I'd possibly want to put inline code in comments.

Honestly, this stuff doesn't need to be rendered in monospace I guess, but most non-monospace fonts used raised asterisks, which is bad for this use case, and it might be easier on the eyes in monospace.

I can just submit homework as .txt files, which is good enough and means I shouldn't worry too much about this, but also in theory I should ever do a hobby programming project.