Just a quick reminder: the second Carnival of Mathematics is coming up this friday, to be hosted here at GM/BM. If you’ve written any math related articles, get me a link by thursday at the latest. You can either send it to me here at markcc at gmail.com, or via the carnival submission form.
Finally, the math geeks of the blogosphere are going to have a carnival of our own!
Alon Levy of Abstract Nonsense (which I really need to add to my blogroll!) has taken the initiative and started the Carnival of Mathematics. The very
first edition will appear on February 9th.
If you’ve got any math-related posts, send them to Alon with “Carnival of Mathematics” on the subject line.
I’ve gotten complaints from a bunch of commenters about problems with comments getting thrown into the moderation queue by the spam filter. Things with too many links, or with certain text properties, were getting caught even though they are clearly not spam.
In order to get around this, I’ve re-enable typekey authentication. You don’t have to login via typekey to post comments – it’s entirely voluntary. But you’re welcome to if you want, and if you do, your posts will be almost guaranteed to get posted without being pushed into the mod queue. (If you write a post containing links to viagra-selling websites, you’ll still get trapped by the spamfilter. But anything less egregious than that should go right through.
Here at ScienceBlogs, we’ve got our own back-channel forums for the bloggers to chat with each other. An idea that came up, which a bunch of us are interested in, is doing some posts about basic definitions and basic concepts.
There are many people who read various blogs around here who’ve had problems with definitions of some basic ideas. For example, there’s the word vector – there are at least two very different uses of the word vector around here at SB: there’s the form that people like me use (the mathematical vector), and there’s the form that epidemiologists/biologists use.
For another example, there are things like the logic and proofs – a lot of people just aren’t familiar with the concept of a proof, or how to tell whether an argument is a proper mathematical proof, or whether a conclusion follows logically from an argument.
So the question: what kinds of basic ideas or terms would you like to see a very basic-level introductory post about?
GM/BM has been pretty slow overall this week, both in new posts and in my responses to comments on previous posts. It was both bigtime deadline week on my project at work; and a very bad week for family health issues.
My dad, who I’ve mentioned on this blog a lot of times because of the fact that he’s the one who
got me started on math and geekery, has had some serious medical trouble lately, and he wound up
in the hospital this week with gangrene and a related blood infection. So I’ve been running to NJ to see him and help my mom, and back to NY to my own family and work. That hasn’t left much time for blogging, and
the time I’ve had, I’ve been rather distracted.
In particular, I really shouldn’t have posted part two of the sheaves posts. I’d just started writing it when I got the news about my dad, and I tried to just finish it up quickly so I could post it, and not leave part one hanging without part two. Unfortunately, the result showed how distracted I was. It’s definitely not up to the kind of quality that I aim for. When I have time, I’ll rewrite that one so that it actually makes sense.
Things should, most likely, be back to normal by next week. In the meantime, thanks for all of the votes in the blog awards! Last I checked, GM/BM was in *fourth place*! Coming in fourth in a group of people like
that is simple amazing.
Don’t forgot: GM/BM is a finalist in the weblog competition for best science blog. I’ve got no chance of winning, but there’s a slim chance that I could make third or fourth. You can vote once per day.
So, Goodmath/Badmath was nominated for a weblog award for the best science blog. I was actually planning on ignoring it for two reasons. First, Pharyngula was nominated in the same category, and there is absolutely no way that I can *hope* to complete with PZ. And second, the Weblogs are kind of goofy, with very strange voting rules (for example, you’re allowed to vote once per day).
But people keep emailing me and asking why I haven’t said anything. So, if you feel like voting for this
blog, please do. Maybe I’ll manage to come in third or fourth 🙂
And many thanks to the folks who nominated me. It’s really nice to know that people have such a positive opinion of my blog. It’s incredibly flattering to be nominated alongside people like PZ and Phil.
As you may have noticed, lately, I’ve been fascinated by Haskell. I haven’t done anything much in it until quite recently; it’s been sitting in my to-do queue for a long time. This weekend, I was hacking away on a Haskell implementation of an interesting (but currently unimplemented) language from the Esolang wiki. For the most part, it went astonishingly smoothly, until I got to the point of putting things together, when I ran into a problem combining two monads, which is one of the typically difficult problems in real Haskell programming.
What surprised me a bit when I hit this is how hard it is to find an approachable source for the more advanced issues. If it’s hard on a language geek like me, it’s bound to be as bad or worse for a lot of other
people who might be interested in Haskell.
So the thought hit me. If enough readers are interested, I can write an intermittent series of articles
to teach Haskell, starting from the very early basics, all the way through to the messiest issues of monad transformers.
Are you interested? Interested enough that you’d be willing to accept a bit of a slowdown of the (already slow) topology posts to give me time to write it?
Let me know what you think, either in the comments below, or through email to markcc@gmail.com.
*Ok, folks, I get the hint, you can stop emailing me! :-)*
*Since posting the question on a holiday weekend saturday night, I’ve gotten 50 responses, and they’re unanimously in favor. I **will** start working on it, and the first parts should appear on the blog later this week.*
As you may have heard from some of the other ScienceBlogs, our SciBling Shelley Batts, of [Retrospectacle](http://www.scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/) is competing for a scholarship being
given to bloggers. Shelley’s a great writer, and on her way to becoming a great scientist. Please head
over to the [Blogger Scholarships voting](http://www.scholarships-ar-us.org/blog/2006/10/31/vote-for-the-winner-of-the-blogging-scholarship/),
take a look at the finalist, and if you agree with us SBers that Shelley deserves to be the winner, put in a vote for her!
