Links for 2009-08-15

"So all you lucky devils went to Worldcon and I didn't. And now I get to read panel reports, which are always both fun and tantalizingly vague.

So let's have a game of it. What fictional characters would you put on a panel, what would you have them talk about, and how would the panel go, do you think?"

"British essayist William Hazlitt once observed that only mankind is capable of noticing the difference between how things are and how they might have been. It's both our good fortune and our tragedy that humanity has been asking "What if?" since it developed language. Here in the 21st century, there are entire genres of both literature and history dedicated to imagining what the world might be like if specific historical events had gone one way instead of another; in fiction, this is known as "AH" or "alternate history," while in academics, it's called "counterfactual history." "

"Professor Orzel's contest reminded me of the famous coin-jar auction experiments that a psychologist and an economist conducted with their MBA students to illustrate the winner's curse phenomenon, an important concept in game theory, a branch of applied mathematics."

"GNU TeXmacs is a free wysiwyw (what you see is what you want) editing platform with special features for scientists. The software aims to provide a unified and user friendly framework for editing structured documents with different types of content (text, graphics, mathematics, interactive content, etc.). The rendering engine uses high-quality typesetting algorithms so as to produce professionally looking documents, which can either be printed out or presented from a laptop. "