randform

Tim’s midi-osc article has now an explanation on How to sew the vmeter sleeve and a video which shows the wireless vmeter in action:

A sort of brief follow-up to the last two posts about simulations. Here a link to Tim’s simulation of a critter under the couch.

I am currently spending too much time with trying to get informations about
german tax laws. If you speak german you can read the discussions at
fragdenstaat.de, which sofar ended up with me writing an Income-tax calculator for 2012 (see image), which you can use at mathics.org without any guarantee of wether the calculations are correct.

The last blog post received quite some comments which I would like to answer. So reader Jared Khithim asked about the use of my proposals for a pre-preprint achive:

..this seems to be a quite clear violation of your copyrights! Are you going to sue Holtzbrinck?

Reader M. Boulangel saw this similarily and wondered wether I wouldn’t like to set up my own preprint archive and last but not least reader Mandy asked about the CC-10 birthday party:

…is boring talks the new berlin party scoop?

So regarding the copyright issue: No – I don’t want to sue Holtzbrinck. In fact it’s not only that I find my suggestions not overly original and rather intuitive but also that I think that it’s good that at least some people care about the issue. Moreover I don’t want to set up a preprint archive – I actually had already set up** and maintained a preprint archive for almost ten years at the former sfb288 which starts with lecture notes* by Ludvig Faddeev from autumn 1991.

I could also imagine that eventually some kind of pre-preprint archive may exist already at some institution, as there are meanwhile many institutional repositories. Or there may be related projects. Like for the Mimirix project we used trac for (amongst others) reading the students works and who knows wether there aren’t universities who already set up their own online dissertation pre-print archive. I still think it would be good to have something like this with a long term support offered by a global public institution like the arxiv.org. A company like Holtzbrinck has to keep its own business interest in focus and this may unfortunately turn out to be eventually at some point against the original idea of science.

Concluding – I eventually would use my “copyrights” passively, that is in case someone would e.g. try to forbid the arxiv.org to set up such a thing, because of copyright issues (there are still software patents in the US) then I could eventually try to help the arxiv with my timestamped proposals, which are distributed over the internet. But I don’t think that this is going to happen.

*the preprints have no licence, since back then a kind of creative commons share-a-like licence was sort of self-understood for preprints, I actually don’t know how the arxiv handles these new laws.
**with technical help from colleagues

Regarding the party… the party of course started after the talks, images after the click.
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Leonard Dobusch and John Weitzmann at the CC-10-birthday party

randform hasn’t yet reported on a rather new online tool in scientific publishing which is called figshare. The german reader may have already read about it in an article by Aleks Scholz at the blog Riesenmaschine, the scientific minded reader may have used it already.
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information fair for start-ups in Berlin

This is in part a little follow-up post to the last one concerning the WCIT conference.

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Tanz im Aufbauhaus inspired by 90′s hip hop music, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, Nina Hagen and the Megaphoneannouncements at S-Bahnhof Friedrichsfelde-Ost.

The song is about humans and machinization. Translation eventually later.

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Some time ago randform had a blogpost on the mathematical typesetting software LaTeX, however we sofar had not installed LaTeX. On one hand this was due to the fact that until somewhat recently it would have been necessary to install LaTeX on our server for that purpose. Moreover there was sofar no big need to have LaTeX here, because randform hasn’t sofar used too many math formulas. With the tool MathJax, which is offered as a WordPress plugin and with in particular the MathJax possibility to link to a javascript library (which considerably reduces serverspace) we now test the possibility to typeset LaTeX on this blog.

So here as the first typesetting experiment with MathJax: the formula for the suggested function in the petition “Reformvorschläge in der Sozialversicherung”

sideremark: A search with keyword “LaTeX” on openpetition.de, a website which is offering the possibility to launch petitions, which are not allowed on the official petition website of the german parliament (like the above petition) offered just some Google ads with the typical offers you get when you type in latex.

Reader F. Myschkin asked:

Do I get this right – your government is CENSORING YOUR COMMENT regarding health insurance tariffs ?!?!

My answer after the click.

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