Category: Ramble

Did you hear? It’s going to make data centers obsolete. It’s not going to need a nuclear power plant to run. Just a hyperbolic, cryogenic, billion dollar chamber. We are renting out Quantum Time to solve non-Classical Problems. It’s going to revolutionize military security and enable non-linear problem solving with stochastic methods.

Oh yeah, I’d like my fusion tech now. Let me know when Google’s stock price starts going sideways, or we start waxing poetic about mining solar tritium deposits on the Moon.

^Title, but also it is really hard to create tables and automatically format in a way that pen and paper can. I can’t really get into a ‘train of thought’ on the computer simply because what I want to say can’t be articulated into a single concept. Most of these posts that feel a bit like a cloud that I have to flatten down and square off. There is always just a little bit more that I want to add, but for the sake of brevity – paper feels nice to write on.

Sometimes I read this as “proo-freading” or “Professor Eading”, sometimes I look at a word for so long that it ceases to be real anymore. I’ll read the same text over and over again trying to find errors and eventually I simply begin to ignore the obvious mistakes. Faced with a wall of text, no matter how riveting the story, no matter the importance, I begin to find my eyes skipping sentences, darting around the page looking for the end. It occurs to me that this problem is entirely unique to myself, but judging by the vast amount of literature detailing this exact problem and how to fix it… it probably isn’t.

SEMANTIC SATIATION

Once in junior high, I was waiting to go on stage for some rehearsal – I forget for what. The only thing I remember was that I was in a distinctly itchy version of formal wear, with not much to do. This was before I had a smart phone, which were common, but not yet ubiquitous – so there was nothing to satiate my boredom, but the pencil I had in my pocket and some bits of tissue paper. being a teenager, the funniest thing that I could think of was the word “taco”. for the next thirty minutes, I wrote the word taco, over and over, until the piece of paper was covered – with bits of the word stuffed in between lines, and eventually spilled onto the desk. I don’t know why or how it began, but eventually, I covered a section of the desk too. (Don’t worry – the desk was hardened acrylic, I could wipe it off.)

Somewhere along the line, the word taco ceased to mean “taco” and started to become a jumble of letters, -c-o-t-a-c-, repeating endlessly on paper. Eventually, the letters themselves stopped being letters and more like a repetition of sounds and symbols; that ‘c’ simply became another curve, flowing into another.

DUCKING THE ISSUE

Interestingly enough, there is another solution that comes from the software engineering mythos – explain your problems to a rubber duck and you will find a solution. Doesn’t it seem strange? I suppose when you try to explain it to someone smarter than you – you assume that they already have answers and that you are missing something. Explaining to a duck means that you have to organize your own thoughts before having it all spill out of your head.

Maybe it seems crazy to an outsider – but I suppose Wilson the Volleyball would have been an excellent help in modern problem solving.

E-READERS AND SCREENS

When it is all a bit too much to read on a screen, I just print it out. Sometimes the shift from the digital to the physical helps me take a step back and review the things I have written with a more critical eye. The same thing happens with books; the physical pages gives stories something and I take a just a little bit longer to read them.

I’ve begun to realize that there isn’t much point in trying to write in Microsoft Word. It is a nice tool, but I wonder if it is really necessary for what I want to do with it. I can’t really make templates or work with multiple versions of the same document.

There are two things that Microsoft Word does extremely well – create a simple document that might require small changes and provide some basic spelling and grammar checks. In practical terms, it is the epitome of “what you see is what you get”. Likewise, this means that there isn’t really any way to deal with templates, version control, structured data – why would there be?

Word at it’s core is a simplified document writing tool. It has neither the capability or the proper tooling to deal with raw text and has no consistent formatting tools or automatic syntax highlighting. Dedicated code editors shine in this realm, and often are better for note-taking and (obviously) writing code. As a tool, it sits in between the dedicated publishing tools and raw text editors.

LaTeX (I am not being sarcastic, this is the proper spelling) is something else that sits a little closer to the publishing tool than Word. You define the document settings in text at the top of a .tex file, and the settings generally apply globally for a consistent theming. Consequently, it is immediately better for template forms that need to be consistently updated or fit style guidelines. The addition of variables allows you to generate letterheads and documents with significantly less work than copy pasting parts of names into different parts of a template document. Additionally, the plain text nature of the .tex document itself and the rendering engine allows you to integrate Git into your workflow for managing and editing multiple versions of the same document. (There is a “versions” package if Git isn’t your cup of tea.)

It generally won’t be something that you use in everyday writing, but I’ve warmed up to the idea. Microsoft Word is an recently all rounder, but each tool serves a purpose – LaTeX is really good at making template forms.