Apolitically Incorrect http://www.oak-tree.us/blog The Rants and Raves of an Unsettled Mind Thu, 27 May 2010 13:36:09 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Moving to blog.oak-tree.us When I first started this blog, I thought it would be an experiment.  I was exploring WordPress as a platform and wanted to know how customizable it was.  I wanted to know if it could grow and expand with my interests.  I wanted it to be a place where I could post pictures and maybe [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Moving to blog.oak-tree.us

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2010/04/15/moving-hosts Temples and Timelines Newsweek has a fascinating article about an archaeological site at Göbekli Tepe in Turkey that is well worth a look. The site is the oldest religious temple ever discovered.  Preliminary carbon dating has determined that some of the artifacts date from 9,400 BC, which makes the place about 11,500 years old. (Which, just to be [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Temples and Timelines

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2010/02/25/temples-timelines Hannibal, Napoleon, and Joseph Charles Minard No study of the history of scientific communication can be complete without mention of Joseph Charles Minard, a 19th Century French civil engineer and cartographer. At the end of his life, Minard created two very famous examples of statistical charts, called flow maps, that every scientist, engineer and student should be familair with.  The first [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Hannibal, Napoleon, and Joseph Charles Minard

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2010/02/22/minard-maps Working With Words, Numbers and Images: A Reading List There are three tools that a professional, scientific or technical writer needs to make use of: words, numbers and images.  In many cases, such as an effective illustration or chart, all three will be used. The following books introduce principles and examples of how to use these tools to their fullest extent.  Some of the [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Working With Words, Numbers and Images: A Reading List

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2010/02/14/analytic-design-reading Image Gallery: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci When I graduated from college and had to choose between a career in industry or academics, I found it to be an easy decision: I stayed in academics.  I like to have my head in the clouds and enjoy the intellectual lifestyle.  (I actually consider the label of “absentminded” to be a compliment.) It should come as [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Image Gallery: The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2010/02/05/davinci-notebooks About This Book Thing In the past few weeks, I’ve had several observant readers ask about one of my “secret” projects.  They’ve wondered what I’m up to and why it’s detracting from other endeavors.  After answering another query this morning, I decided that it’s probably time to speak openly about it.  So, here’s my public confession: I’m writing a [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

About This Book Thing

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2010/01/28/book-thing Typeset Your Curriculum Vitae – Part 3: Automatically Generate a List of Publications Publications are the currency of ideas.  Through them the experts, thinkers and dreamers of this world can share their thoughts and insights.  A good publication is not only influential, but it’s even capable of shifting the course of a whole society, as Martin Luther King demonstrated with his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”. Since publications [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Typeset Your Curriculum Vitae – Part 3: Automatically Generate a List of Publications

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/12/02/latex-cv-part3 Typeset Your Curriculum Vitae – Part 2: Extending and Customizing an Existing Document Class Many first-time users of LaTeX often mistakenly look at the language as a a type of glorified word processing software – albeit a particularly complicated one.  While such an analogy may be apt in helping new users become acclimatized to the language, it suffers from a rather nasty problem: LaTeX isn’t a word processor. If [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Typeset Your Curriculum Vitae – Part 2: Extending and Customizing an Existing Document Class

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/11/30/latex-cv-part2 Typeset Your Curriculum Vitae – Part 1: The xetexCV Document Class Very few documents are more personal than a curriculum vitae (CV).  A CV lists a person’s educational history, who they’ve worked for and what they’ve accomplished.  Moreover, a CV is frequently used to judge a person’s inherent worth and value (or at least exploitability).  A quality curiculum vitae matters, a lot. For that reason, a [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Typeset Your Curriculum Vitae – Part 1: The xetexCV Document Class

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/11/25/latex-cv-part1 Customizing LyX: Character Styles and the LyX Local Layout Imagine for a minute that you’re writing a book or technical manual.  Let’s say it’s a book on technology, maybe the open source tools used for scientific writing (to randomly pick an example).  As you write this book, you realize that you need some way to cue the reader into different parts of the text. [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Customizing LyX: Character Styles and the LyX Local Layout

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/11/14/customize-lyx-character-styles Patronage in the Digital Age As wonderful as the internet may be, it causes a lot of problems.  For starters, it is putting newspapers out of business.  It’s also radically changing how artists, writers and musicians make their living.  And in case you weren’t paying attention, it’s starting to look like a crisis. Different groups have responded to the impending [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Patronage in the Digital Age

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/11/10/digital-patronage Statistics With R – Part 1: An Old Dog Learns New Computing Tricks When doing math or numerical analysis, the knowledge of the technique is far too often tied to the tool performing the calculation.  Consider an engineer whose understanding of the Fast Fourier transformation is inseparably tied to the fft function in Matlab.  Of course this hypothetical engineer understands what the results mean (more or less) but [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Statistics With R – Part 1: An Old Dog Learns New Computing Tricks

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/11/08/r-stats-part1 Customizing LyX: Create an NIH Grant Proposal Template LyX is a wonderful writing program.  It’s easy to use and produces beautifully typeset output.  More importantly, though, it lets an author focus on the content and structure of his writing; rather than the formatting.  It isn’t so easy to customize, though, which limits its usefulness in a big way.  What if you need to [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Customizing LyX: Create an NIH Grant Proposal Template

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/11/02/custom-lyx-nih Create a Unified Inbox in Gnome Evolution I have a serious love-hate relationship with Linux.  I love the fact that it’s free and open source.  I love the fact that it can breathe new life into old hardware.  I love the fact that it’s easy to extend.  I love the fact that it has a vibrant and passionate user community. What I [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Create a Unified Inbox in Gnome Evolution

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/10/27/unified-inbox-evolution Time Drive 0.3: Better, Easier, More Refined Imagine how awesome it would be if this announcement read: “Time Drive has been completely rewritten from scratch (yet again) to take better advantage of the paradigms of modern computing!  Version 0.3 has hundreds of updates and new features which will make your life easier and more fulfilled!” There’s just one little problem … such a hyper [...]

Copywrite 2009: Rob Oakes. Apolitically Incorrect

Time Drive 0.3: Better, Easier, More Refined

]]> http://www.oak-tree.us/blog/index.php/2009/10/26/time-drive-03