MO hits the big time September 28, 2010
Posted by Ben Webster in Math Overflow.3 comments
It’s not just MathOverflow’s birthday. It also got its own article on the Atlantic’s website. It probably won’t tell you much you don’t know if you’re a user of the site (and I hope you all are), but hey, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, right?
I’m also fairly amused that they managed to actually come up a photo of overflowing math to illustrate the article. It’s much more illustrative than any of MO’s official graphics.
Happy Birthday MO September 28, 2010
Posted by Chris Schommer-Pries in Uncategorized.add a comment
Today is the Birthday of MathOverflow. So go celebrate by asking or answering a question!
Making xfig, as installed by fink, happy September 7, 2010
Posted by David Speyer in Uncategorized.9 comments
I got a new Mac laptop last winter, and am still in the process of getting all of my old software installed on it. I spent most of the evening struggling with xfig, and want to record this my discovery for anyone else who is having the same problem.
I installed xfig using fink, and got the message
Either you have a very old app-defaults file installed (Fig),
or there is none installed at all.
You should install the correct version or you may lose some features.
This may be done with "make install" in the xfig source directory"
Running “make install” was useless. I found the solution here. In summary, if you are in the habit of running xfig by bringing up an X11 terminal and typing “xfig”, you probably want to be typing source /sw/bin/init.sh ; xfig instead.
I know very little about what’s going on here, so I won’t try to explain more, but I found quite a number of message boards where this bug was discussed before finding one where it as solved, so I thought it might be useful to disseminate the solution. All credit goes to Alexander Hansen, whomever he may be, for figuring this out.
The Law of Small Numbers September 3, 2010
Posted by Ben Webster in Paper Advertisement.3 comments
This states:
There aren’t enough small numbers to meet all the demands made of them.
While that quote was good enough to post on its own, read the whole paper.
