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Henry Story (May 19 2020 at 09:29):Are there good blogging platforms (software to install or services) for Mathematicians?
Nathaniel Virgo (May 19 2020 at 09:35):There's this template for setting up a blog on github, which might be promising. It requires some minimal fiddling, but it's free, ad-free, and you can use MathJax. https://www.fast.ai/2020/01/16/fast_template/
Daniel Geisler (May 19 2020 at 09:56):I've been tasked to get the Instiki blog running for folks with and Tikz.
Jules Hedges (May 19 2020 at 10:03):I use wordpress-dot-com which supports basic LaTeX out of the box. It's not great, but it's functional
Oscar Cunningham (May 19 2020 at 11:18):I recently started a blog on WordPress, and I found that installing the Simple Mathjax plugin made everything 'just work'.
Oscar Cunningham (May 19 2020 at 11:27):I also managed to get working nicely in the comments, including a live preview of what people have typed. The trick was to install the WP-Markdown plugin, and then use the Plugin Editor to add the line editor.hooks.chain("onPreviewRefresh", MathJax.typeset); just before editor.run(); in the file js/markdown.js. You then have to run this file through a JavaScript minifier and use the result to replace the file js/markdown.min.js. (I believe that for this to work you might have to have your MathJax version set to 3 in the settings of Simple Mathjax, but this is the most recent version anyway.)
(=_=) (May 19 2020 at 13:46):I am still not going to start a blog, Henry. No publicity is good publicity. :sweat_smile:
But it's good to see the options out there.
Henry Story (May 19 2020 at 15:23):That's a pitty. You essentially had already written up a blog earlier in applied CT. As a blog post it would have more impact than on a private channel, and it is a good exercise: it forces one to think through a topic carefully. I could have cited it from my blog post on Covid.
Note: I am no longer touching that one: I wanted to spend a day on it, and it has grown into a week (as I incorporated feedback from different channels). But I understand the topic a lot better now.
Policy must be based on science. But science is based on peer review. And peer review requires open source. The tools used by scientists must be open to criticism and improvable. The lesson of the #Covid19 Model Code. #OpenSource #OpenScience #OpenData https://medium.com/@bblfish/open-source-and-covid-19-models-5e638f785514
- The 🐟 BabelFish (@bblfish) Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 19 2020 at 19:27):This conversation was enough for me. I'm starting one!
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 19 2020 at 19:30):Nathaniel Virgo said:
There's this template for setting up a blog on github, which might be promising. It requires some minimal fiddling, but it's free, ad-free, and you can use MathJax. https://www.fast.ai/2020/01/16/fast_template/
I'm trying this, but it's a little concerning that the first message that appeared when the repository was set up was: "We found a potential security vulnerability in one of your dependencies."
I don't know how to deal with this information :grimacing:
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 19 2020 at 19:48):It's okay, I was able to commit github's automatically suggested fix. I'm amused that the guide to setting up this blog explicitly encourages what I suspect to be bad coding practice :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:
Henry Story (May 19 2020 at 19:50):It will be interesting to find out how well that deals with comments, which are very important (as that is a good way to get feedback -- and sadly to get spammed too, though I doubt that is such a problem for blogging mathematics). One could just add a link at the end to a thread on Twitter for comments.
Henry Story (May 19 2020 at 19:52):Another useful thing in a blog is to know where people came from who read the blog (and then additionally a nice thing Medium does is provide statistics for how long they spent there). That helps work out which communities are alive to the subject you are writing about. (I find specialized mailing lists to be often a lot better than Facebook or Twitter).
Henry Story (May 19 2020 at 19:53):But I would rather myself host my own blog. It is only out of laziness that I ended up on Medium. One should be able to get the same info from a little script analyzing logs or for the time spent on the page a simple timer in the blog html.
Henry Story (May 19 2020 at 19:58):Perhaps @Tai-Danae Bradley has some tips. She has some amazingly beautiful blog posts, such as this one the Yoneda Lemma.
Tai-Danae Bradley (May 19 2020 at 23:16):Thanks for the compliment, @Henry Story. My blog is hosted through webflow.com, a really nice code-free web design platform. I use MathJax for LaTeX, Disqus for the comments section, Google Analytics for traffic info, and MailChimp for my mailing list. Before Webflow I used Squarespace, which was great for a beginner's blog. But after a while, I wanted freedom to redesign the site from scratch (Squarespace uses templates). I'm happy with Webflow so far.
(=_=) (May 20 2020 at 04:10):Henry Story said:
That's a pitty. You essentially had already written up a blog earlier in applied CT. As a blog post it would have more impact than on a private channel, and it is a good exercise: it forces one to think through a topic carefully. I could have cited it from my blog post on Covid.
Feel free to use those ideas to write another blog for yourself. No attribution or credit required.
In fact, Henry, I FORBID YOU to credit me for any of that.
I really mean it when I said no publicity is good publicity. That's the headache I'm trying to avoid, not the technicalities of setting up a blog.
(=_=) (May 20 2020 at 04:30):
Henry Story (May 20 2020 at 06:05):I understand. Especially as this topic (Open Source and Covid Models) has all of a sudden come to be highly politically charged. My father is prof of Political Science so I have an intuitive feel for this area, though I am probably also completely crazy to get involved in such a discussion. So I might have to draw upon some of your points in order to shore up the arguments in the blog post, before I talk to my supervisor (who out of the blue) so kindly organized a teleconference next week.
Henry Story (May 20 2020 at 06:09):There is a quote by Nietzsche on living dangerously that comes to mind.
Henry Story (May 20 2020 at 06:09):Otherwise for other folks wanting to start a blog, most of the time blogs on maths are a safe bet.
(A dangerous one could be: blogging a proof that P=NP for example (now there is a counterfactual to the liking of @sarahzrf ))
Alexander Kurz (May 20 2020 at 06:12):I use github, takes only one minute to set up. But I never got math to work. So if I want to typeset maths I link to a hackmd page.
Henry Story (May 20 2020 at 08:47):Thanks for your question on my Covid-19 blog post @Alexander Kurz . That has helped me extend the point regarding the software to an argument that not only do we need open source models, but we need highly interdisciplinary models as such phenomena are highly complex.
(=_=) (May 20 2020 at 08:49):Henry Story said:
There is a quote by Nietzsche on living dangerously that comes to mind.
That age has already passed, sadly. The 80s and 90s were that age perhaps.
(=_=) (May 20 2020 at 09:11):Henry Story said:
So I might have to draw upon some of your points in order to shore up the arguments in the blog post
Well, maybe you should shore up some of your references as well. Here's one by James Ball (who's written for the Guardian) that looks like it could be politically motivated, but actually makes a good case that scrutiny is good for science. I don't think the Telegraph is considered credible to the people who'd defend Ferguson on this. Certainly, the coverage in the newspapers is lopsided from what I can tell.
One of my points that got lost in the shuffle is that good practices tend to fall by the wayside when people face resource constraints. So Sue Denim's proposal actually aggravates the problem it purports to solve, by perpetuating the Matthew effect. As I've said earlier, the best defence is a good offence: the better route is to argue, through a detailed analysis of the causes that led to bad practices in scientific coding, that this problem justifies more funding, not less. Morgan's anecdotes in the other thread are a good place to start.
Henry Story (May 20 2020 at 09:26):One can learn many things from playing Go. One important one is to look at the big picture, and avoid fights when they are not necessary. So I'll keep your points @Rongmin Lu up my sleeve. The bigger picture here which I just found is that of thinking of interdisciplinary modeling as the future. That idea has many beneficial consequences: it is a new project that makes sense, it has to be open (source/data/protocols), and it can bring a lot of different disciplines into the project. So it leads to the same consequences but without needing to fight individuals personally.
(=_=) (May 20 2020 at 14:17):True, true. I just thought it's a bit of a missed opportunity that Bull didn't try to do something more constructive with his post. Its perpetuation of "scientists > software developers", which dates to the WWII era, is just astounding.
Anyway, I'm not very good at playing Go, so my favourite metaphor is Grothendieck's rising sea. It's similar to your Go insight, I think.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 20 2020 at 15:51):I wrote my first post! Thanks for the push.
Henry Story said:
It will be interesting to find out how well that deals with comments, which are very important (as that is a good way to get feedback -- and sadly to get spammed too, though I doubt that is such a problem for blogging mathematics). One could just add a link at the end to a thread on Twitter for comments.
Yeah, there's no automatic comment functionality as far as I can tell... I'll work out how to implement that later I suppose.
Morgan Rogers (he/him) (May 22 2020 at 12:01):Implemented! Hooray! Comments!