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Category: web

Books Ngram for your upcoming parties

Published December 19, 2010 by lievenlb

No christmas- or new-years family party without heated discussions. Often on quite silly topics.

For example, which late 19th-century bookcharacter turned out to be most influential in the 20th century? Dracula, from the 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes who made his first appearance in 1887?

Well, this year you can spice up such futile discussions by going over to Google Labs Books Ngram Viewer, specify the time period of interest to you and the relevant search terms and in no time it spits back a graph comparing the number of books mentioning these terms.

Here’s the 20th-century graph for ‘Dracula’ (blue), compared to ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (red).

The verdict being that Sherlock was the more popular of the two for the better part of the century, but in the end the vampire bit the detective. Such graphs lead to lots of new questions, such as : why was Holmes so popular in the early 30ties? and in WW2? why did Dracula become popular in the late 90ties? etc. etc.

Clearly, once you’ve used Books Ngram it’s a dangerous time-waster. Below, the graphs in the time-frame 1980-2008 for Alain Connes (blue), noncommutative geometry (red), Hopf algebras (green) and quantum groups (yellow).

It illustrates the simultaneous rise and fall of both quantum groups and Hopf algebras, whereas the noncommutative geometry-graph follows that of Alain Connes with a delay of about 2 years. I’m sure you’ll find a good use for this splendid tool…

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WikiLeaks’ collateral damage : web-anarchy?

Published December 13, 2010 by lievenlb

NeB’s web-stats are orders of magnitude out of normal behavior, something must be going on…

  • Spam filter : normally between 10 and 20 spam-comments are trapped. They are removed automatically every 14 days so I only look at them when someone complains a valid comment didn’t get through. This moment, there are 1007 spam-comments held (already 1020 by the time I post this).
  • Akismet-plugin : for those who don’t run a blog, Akismet is an extremely useful WordPress-plugin getting rid of most spam-comments (before entering the spam-filter). I must admit I don’t check Akismet-stats regularly but today the message reads : ‘Akismet has protected your site from 104,145 spam comments already’ (which is about 10% of all visits…).
  • Mail-notifications : this week my email-account is bombarded with spam-comments to approve. Usually there are 1 to 2 such comments a week, now about 20 a day. Part of the problem was that the Akismet-servers were obstructed earlier this week, but the problem persists.
  • Today’s stats show more than 4000 hits, 500 uniques. About 3 times average.

Do we all really need to get caught in the cross-fire between WikiLeaks- and government-hackers?

I have no intention to post my take on WikiLeaks, simply because it won’t be original. As to Assange’s problems with justice : until further evidence comes to light I’m with Naomi Wolf on this (thanks Kea for the link).

If NeB goes off-line for a while, you know why…

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Link problems : Markdown versus latex2wp.py

Published December 7, 2010 by lievenlb

As John Baez (and hopefully others) noticed most links here on NeB are now screwed up.

For years I’ve used the Markdown syntax to include links in posts (that is something like [this is what you see](and here is the URL)). NeB used an older version ( Version 1.0.1k) of php Markdown to convert these to proper links (as I did have problems with the newer version).

Ever since the Return to LaTeX post, I’m trying to re-educate myself to write posts in LaTeX and convert them into wp-format using the Latex2WP python script.

Unfortunately this script doesn’t go together nicely with the Markdown-syntax, forcing me to go over the converted latex-file almost line by line fixing errors in order to be able to post. Not the time-saver I had in mind…

I hope to post a lot of new material once the semester finishes and therefore disabled the Markdown-plugin. This causes all links to remain in Markdown-format, which is a nuisance but, if you really want to follow the link it is still there for you to copy-paste. Depending on how exciting the christmas-break will be I’ll try to hard-code the links in some of the more popular posts.

If someone knows of an elegant solution, such as a micro-markdown wp-plugin only parsing links, please drop a comment.

UPDATE : I have downloaded the Markdown quicktags plugin. It replaces the standard HTML-editor of WordPress with a Markdown-editor. There is an option “Render” which transforms Markdown to HTML and then updating the post will save the HTML-version. This looks like a relative quick way to get my old post-links back. So far, I’ve rescued the posts of the last year, more later. Hopefully, this causes no overload in your RSS-aggregator…

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