This is actually one thing I've always been wondering about as a non-native speaker when reading English headlines. Is there any reason newspapers prefer this style? It sounds weird to me.
It's weird for us native speakers too, don't worry.
My guess is that it puts the information in the title in order from the most eye-grabbing to the least. (The more readable "Google Execs and James Cameron unveil Asteroid Mining Venture" puts the holy shit part of the title at the end.)
I don't think it's unreasonable for people to assume that = means equality, not assignment.
Edit:
In particular, the link posted in the second edit has a rather poor test using a and b, because it uses = in two different ways with no indication that the meaning of the symbol has changed. Maybe the problem with the test isn't just the people, it's the sloppy notation that assumes people with no programming background are able to infer when we mean equality and when we mean assignment.
The population that took that test were self selected computer science undergrads!
And even after three weeks of instruction most of the people who didn't understand it immediately never understood it. I'll quote from the article:
"Either you had a consistent model in your mind immediately upon first exposure to assignment, the first hurdle in programming-- or else you never developed one!"
My wife is a brilliant woman, fantastic at what she does. The GP I mentioned in my post is a very good doctor who had no problems getting into a medical school, passing his boards, or running a successful practice. But that doesn't mean that everybody is meant to be able to understand the abstract concepts you have to master in our line of work.
Unfortunately, the implementation is, in my experience, not very good, because it's not consistent. Sometimes it shows up, and other times it doesn't, so you can't rely on it, and you have to make sure that you click perfectly every time in case it doesn't pop up. Which effectively negates the usefulness of the feature.
instead, so that it's clear that it's a math constant instead of a local variable? Also, I suspect that the math.h pi constant is accurate to more than 8 decimal places, so this way you don't lose precision.
What I really mean is this: use it. If you're a tauist, but tau isn't in your header file / constant library / whatever you use, today might be a good day to put it there.
> Here’s the thing. The LRA is an incredibly complex issue. By simplifying down to a case of “Goodies versus Baddies” the Invisible Children campaign risks undermining the very real progress that is being made against the LRA. Also released on Tuesday, in a report completely ignored by social media, a spokesman for the UN High Commission for Refugees said that a recent spate of LRA attacks were “the last gasp of a dying organisation that's still trying to make a statement,” adding that there were only about 200 LRA fighters left. Progress is being made. There’s even a chance that Kony will be caught or killed by the end of 2012 – but this will have nothing to do with a YouTube video, however slick it is.
I don't think that the statement "African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years" is really accurate or fair. And that's one of the problems with this video -- it propagates this idea that Africans need Western powers to solve their problems for them.
And I guess I'd ask this: How does the attention of people in North America and Europe "force something to happen"? Force what to happen? Force Western military intervention? Give Ugandans more motivation to take out the LRA?
And, of course "Africa" isn't really the right word, anyways. It's an entire continent, after all, and the people in Uganda or South Sudan aren't the same as the people in, say, South Africa, or Botswana, or Somalia, etc., nor are the political/economic/social contexts necessarily the same.
Hey, this is really great (and a strange coincidence -- this afternoon I was thinking about building something similar).
Something I'm wondering about: I currently use vim-latexsuite which has a bunch of expansion features. For instance, if you type '^^' it expands to '^{<++>}<++>', where the '<++>' are jump markers, and then 'jumps' into the first marker. So if I wanted to type e.g., 'e^{-x/2}', the keystrokes I'd use would be 'e ^ ^ - x / 2 CTRL-J'.
I'm not sure how you'd do the something similar, but the combination of jump markers and user-defined expansions (e.g., I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{<++>}{<++>}<++>' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}' ) saves an enormous amount of time writing TeX.
> I can define 'QQ' -> '\mathbb{Q}', 'fN' -> 'function', '`/' -> '\frac{<++>}{<++>}<++>' or even 'pmABCD' -> '\begin{pmatrix} a & b \\ c& d \end{pmatrix}'
Out of curiosity, why do all these in your editor rather than in TeX? For example, `\def\QQ{\mathbb Q}` would work just fine, and be only one more keystroke. (The third example could be made into a parametrised macro, but `\frac` is already such a macro, so I guess that you're really valuing the keystrokes.)
It sort of depends. For the blackboard bold, it's not really much difference between doing it in the editor and doing it as TeX macros. I used to do them in TeX, but after I started doing other things in the editor I switched them for no particular reason outside of consistency. Also, expansions for words like function, holomorphic, 'the following are equivalent', 'if and only if', etc., are problematic to do as TeX macros, because of issues around spacing, and because it's simply more readable.
For the others, it is really about the keystrokes -- one has to be able to type really fast to keep up in a lecture or a talk, and then once you've optimized for speed, why not type that quickly all the time?
Pleased to hear it wasn't a mad idea to build the site! I don't personally write the vim command and tbh they are just vi movement bindings which come along with the ace editor - http://ace.ajax.org/
I am an avid vim user and I would also love more powerful bindings.
