The standard way to do double spacing which everyone recommends as clean and neat is to use the setspace package since it doesn’t double-space your footnotes which is generally desired.

Turns out that (a) this isn’t the typographical standard of double-spacing (b) it’s not the same as Microsoft Word which everyone else’s extended essays/dissertations/theses will be written in.

So instead use this:

\usepackage[doublespacing]{setspace}
\setstretch{2}

and if you change the spacing be sure to do it again:

\singlespacing
[...]
\doublespacing\setstretch{2}

(source)

Posted Sun 02 Dec 2012 11:28:00 UTC Tags:

I just finished watching the new HBO series Girls written and directed by Lena Dunham. It follows a group of recently graduated university students, with arts degrees, as they fail to figure out how to live. I just had a search of reddit and found that many people think the show is just a shallow comedy, but being in a somewhat similar demographic as the characters from the show, I thought it insightful. Worth a look.

Posted Sun 02 Dec 2012 21:00:00 UTC Tags:

…when you can export your SSH host keys and connection profiles. Open regedit and export the SimonTatham tree. The exported file should import on any machine; I am hoping those that I use regularly are not too locked down.

Posted Tue 04 Dec 2012 17:32:00 UTC Tags:

6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person | Cracked.com

There’s some good thoughts in here, but I don’t think it can be taken too seriously because he doesn’t substantiate his thesis that ‘The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You’ to make it plausible. If he means the non-human world, then it doesn’t care about anything. If he means the human world we construct by living in a community, then his thesis seems prima facie false, though perhaps if explained better it might come out true.

Posted Wed 19 Dec 2012 12:17:00 UTC Tags:

I recently read Zen in the Art of Archery and then came across this critique of it as a reliable account of Eastern practices. Worth reading if you’ve read the book; it seems that Herrigel is, if well-meaningly, making up a lot of stuff.

The Myth of Zen in the Art of Archery

While Herrigel struggled to understand kyðjutsu rationally, Awa responded to him with words that transcended logic. Taken by itself, this conversation between Western culture and Japanese culture is extremely interesting and is a major reason why Herrigel’s book was such a great success from a literarypoint of view. At the same time, however, it is probably more appropriate to see Herrigel not so much as a logician but as a mystic who idolized Meister Eckhart. (p. 16)

Posted Fri 21 Dec 2012 14:53:00 UTC Tags:

The Obama Memos: The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency. | The New Yorker

Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps it—“Back from the OVAL”—and often e-mails an index of the President’s handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and their assistants. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question. (§3)

A President’s ability to change public opinion through rhetoric is extremely limited. George Edwards, after studying the successes of Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Ronald Reagan, concluded that their communications skills contributed almost nothing to their legislative victories. According to his study, “Presidents cannot reliably persuade the public to support their policies” and “are unlikely to change public opinion.”

Posted Fri 21 Dec 2012 14:56:00 UTC Tags:

… including a handy USB access extension cable behind the desk. While it has better performance than the NSLU2 it is less reliable when torrenting, often locking up for a minute or so. If my SSH session survives this lock up then I can see the upload and download rates drop to zero when it comes back and then slowly creep back up. The moral is that it can only handle so many active torrents. Apparently to do with the USB and ethernet being on the same bus.

Posted Tue 25 Dec 2012 12:53:00 UTC Tags:

If you had been praised for being motivated, early 20s (most of reddit) is when you become the most powerful. You’re a young adult, and you can finally get things done, and have an influence on the world. Moreover, early 20s is all about taking your life under your control. Those who were praised for being go-getters now shine bright.

But what if you were praised for being smart? When you’re in your early 20s, you’ve lost the amazing superlearning child brain that you used to have. You introspect on your mind, and feel dull. You begin to worry that your time is over, that you can no longer match the learning ability of your younger days, and that your worth has gone down. Now, more than ever, you shy away from trying very hard, to deny this reality and maintain the label.

source

Posted Wed 26 Dec 2012 22:12:00 UTC Tags:

Startpage Web Search

I realised that I was ignoring the DuckDuckGo box in Firefox because the results just aren’t good enough, and was instead banging in www.google.com into the address bar every time I wanted to search. Pleased to have discovered this, though frustrated that once again it’s non-Free Software so it could very easily go the way of Scroogle.

Posted Sun 30 Dec 2012 21:59:00 UTC Tags: