Miscellany

Blogger has finally implemented a backtracking feature (now if only they'll add categories, I can be content), and I've replaced the Technorati trackback link at the bottom of each post with a Blogger 'backlink'. Just in time, as it turns out, for my last post to actually get linked to. Thanks Suresh and Anthony. Of course, you guys realize that my post was not about P vs. NP proofs. I have a real affection for these, flawed or otherwise. The hypercomputationalists are another matter; I may have more to say about them in the future. I'm still mulling over a few things (sorry, I think slowly). In the meantime, here are a few miscellaneous thoughts I need to unload because they're clogging up the works...

Elsevier:

In the comments to my last post, Chris Leonard at Elsevier responds to a remark I made about the journal Theoretical Computer Science. Not being a part of academia, and never having published a research article, I am not familiar with the issues surrounding scientific publishing. But Chris seems to be genuinely interested in receiving feedback from people in the field, so I would encourage you to take advantage of that and send your suggestions or gripes to him. And although I absolutely do NOT recommend it, I can't help mentioning that if you are feeling angry and at a loss for words, you might want to check out this article first (thanks to Bora Zivkovic). (Seriously, though, I'm only joking. Please be polite.)

Cosma's notebooks:

I was trying to find an online copy of an old Claude Shannon article, and in the process came across these notebooks of Cosma Shalizi's. Now evidently Cosma is well known in these parts, at least to people who have been around longer than I have. All I can say is, as someone who loves books and thought he had a nice little collection, I feel so, so inadequate now.

Backlash against editor who published ID:

This story, Intelligent Design and Academic Freedom was on NPR's All Things Considered program two days ago. I haven't noticed any feedback yet about this on the Web, and I'm curious about people's reaction to it. Are academics really this petty and vindictive?

ASCIIMathML and Blogger

Finally, here is a little technical issue I noticed with the new backlink feature: The Blogger backlink display can be garbled by ASCIIMathML. The Blogger template uses variable tags like <$BlogBacklinkTitle$>. Most of these get resolved on the server side, so your browser (and ASCIIMathML) never see them. But the backlinks get resolved on the browser, and evidently ASCIIMathML gets to them before the Blogger script does. So <$BlogBacklinkTitle$> can turn into something like <BlogBackl∈ktit≤>.

According to ASCIIMathML's creator, Peter Jipsen, the easiest workaround is to just remove the dollar sign as a potential delimiter and use the backquote instead. To make this change in the script, find the line near the top of the file that looks like so:

var AMdelimiter2 = "$", AMescape2 = "\\\\\\$", AMdelimiter2regexp = "\\$";

and change the delimiter sequences to something that will never appear in the page, such as the following:

var AMdelimiter2 = "NeverInText", AMescape2 = "NeverInText", AMdelimiter2regexp = "NeverInText";

Happy coding!