Advogato: Personal info for vicious

6 Feb 2012 »

Diffy Qs notes at 20000 downloads

So the differential equations textbook just reached 20000 downloads from unique adresses. The real analysis textbook is close behind (despite being a year younger) at around 19200. The rate is growing, it started out at around 200 per week for both in the fall and is now pushing 400 a week. As an overwhelming percentage of the hits come from google I think google might have ranked the pages higher. So if you want to help out with the project of free textbooks: link to the books on your blog, page, whatever. And press those social buttons on the page, I guess that also does it.

It’s also interesting to see how ipv6 is doing. So far, 82 ipv6 adresses looked at the real analysis book and 43 for the diffyqs. As ipv6 was active for about half a year on the server, it’s still a very tiny percentage. There were about 6-7 thousand ipv4 addresses looking at the diffyqs book during that time frame and about 8-9 thousand for the real analysis book. But at least someone is using ipv6 (if I could get an internet provider that offered ipv6, I’d use them, but I didn’t find such in Madison).

Syndicated 2012-02-06 00:31:34 from The Spectre of Math

21 Jan 2012 »

When will the beheading start

It is always good to know when will other people want to cut off your head. Let us look at when were most heads cut off: that was probably the French revolution. OK, what made people want to cut off other people’s heads? Extreme inequality. OK, what was the Gini coefficient? Well, one estimate is 59 [1]. OK, so if we look at the US Gini coefficient it seems to be rising approximately linearly since 1980. In particular, US Census Bureau (via Wikipedia [2]) has the following data:

1980	40.3
1990	42.8
2000	46.2
2009	46.8

Let us do linear regression to obtain:

2020	50.0
2030	52.4
2040	54.8
2050	57.1
2058	59.0
2060	59.5
2070	61.9
2080	64.3

So, I guess people will start trying to cut other people’s heads off around 2058. We’re all safe till then.

[1] Christian Morrison, Wayne Snyder The income inequality of France in historical perspective, European Review of Economic History, 4, 59-83.

[2] Wikipedia.org, Gini Coefficient.

Syndicated 2012-01-21 22:40:35 from The Spectre of Math

20 Jan 2012 »

Biking

So, it was -15 celsius (barely positive farenheit) and snowing this morning, actually it’s still -15 and still snowing. Surely only a complete moron would bike to work today. Actually the ride was pretty good. Yesterday it was -18 and I think I can tell the difference (though it was not snowing). The downside of biking in this weather is that the gears are refusing to shift. The levers just sort of stick and nothing happens. Fortunately, I’m in a reasonable gear right now.

Another downside is that I have these cool hybrid tires on the mountain bike. Sort of like road tires with spikes only on the sides, which is reasonable in terrain and much smoother than regular mountain bike tire on the road. They were really good at the UCSD campus (San Diego) where I’d go off road often and it never snowed. Because they kind of suck on snow.

Syndicated 2012-01-20 22:02:19 from The Spectre of Math

17 Jan 2012 »

Newspapers will be half the size on wednesday

With the Wikipedia blackout, what will journalists do? There will be a lot less in the wenesdays edition, though on the plus side it will have a better chance to be correct or at least original. Also, all school essays that were due wenesday will be turned in a day late.

Syndicated 2012-01-17 22:53:23 from The Spectre of Math

19 Nov 2011 »

New chapter in real analysis notes

I finally posted a new version of the real analysis book with the new metric space chapter, it weighs in at 192 pages now (with 12pt font though). It also fixes a now record number of errata; though my standard for what is an erratum rather than just a simple obvious typo has dropped slightly. One thing that makes me feel better about errata is that it seems Rudin’s 3rd edition of principles still has some errata that is essentially the same as what I did (independently, not that I really worry about taking credit for errata:).

The differential equations book nowadays seems to be hitting fewer and fewer problems: 6 errata in the past year, 2 of which have been in new stuff added before the summer. This is despite several people using the books and one ongoing partial translation. So I guess they are rather “correct” by now.

My goal right now is to get them to be correct rather than perfect. So I haven’t really been reordering things or rewriting things that could be improved. I’ve been at most doing small improvements in exposition. The main thing is that I want to spend time doing other things too of course:)

Syndicated 2011-11-18 23:17:13 from The Spectre of Math

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