Posts tagged “university”:
Productive Note-taking
After initially starting to use Emacs back in high school merely for programming, I naturally began to use it for other tasks such as document preparation and note-taking. This introduced me to the surprisingly large overlap between Emacs users and people generally interested in “productivity” workflows.
Continue ReadingA Cohesive Note-taking and Academic Workflow in Emacs
I have been using GNU Emacs for about three years now. I initially
began using it after completing a semester of introductory programming
classes exclusively in GNU Nano, with a series of shell scripts to
compile and run C# code, and to set up a trio of terminals; one for
code editing, one for compilation, and one to actually run the CLI
program I was writing. I had practically created my own little system
for terminal multiplexing. This might sound like hell, and in
hindsight it was. I was not even aware of some of the abilities of
nano to perform syntax highlighting, display line numbers, indent
lines et cetera. I merely needed something quickly to write text in,
and was horrified at my classmates who had to sit idly and wait for
visual studio to start or restart after crashing, it did not help that
visual studio was not even available in platform of my choice. In the
beginning I only needed to write short programs, simple loops, input
and output and the like, and so the simplicity of nano was not in any
way a burden — in some ways it was even a boon due to its quick
startup time and lack of clunky UI. But eventually I found it annoying
having to create and resize my layout of terminals and writing long
commands to get Microsoft’s Windows-centric tooling to compile on
Linux became a chore. So I created little scripts to optimize my
workflow. Nothing incredibly complex mind you, just little fixes here
and there. When what is called “fall break” in Sweden came around I
decided to ditch Nano entirely. I had friends who used Vim, but being
a staunch hipster I decided I couldn’t copy them, at least not without
trying the alternatives.
The Role of Geography in Dynastic China
Throughout Chinese history, there have been two great divides. First, that of the east-west, and later the north-south. These two dynamics have been instrumental in how Chinese society looks today and of how the history of imperial and premodern China played out. While China has had contacts with the outside world since time immemorial, it has been isolated from the outside world due to its geographic boundaries. To the north, large steppes and desert that makes settled agriculture largely impossible, as well as major mountain ranges. The west has large deserts and the major obstacle of the Tibetan plateau in the south-west, and further to the south tropical forests and a dense network of mountains. Finally, to the east lies the world’s largest ocean, the pacific, with only the islands of Japan and Formosa, as well as the Korean peninsula before a reaching expanse. These borders have shaped the Chinese frontier, but a multitude of geographic features have also impacted the Chinese interior.
Continue ReadingThe Philosophical Impacts of Nuclear Weapons
To answer the question of whether or not the invention nuclear bomb has been the most important event of human history is not an easy task. There are certainly numerous arguments in favour of such a statement; nuclear weapons have given us the thermodynamically most efficient form of releasing energy yet devised; they have given us the ability to quickly and easily destroy the major feats of our ancestors and possibly even those of our descendents; they have given us power beyond humanity’s comprehension. And yet the nature of a question of this broad a nature requires us to think more deeply about technological evolution and of our place within it. What constitutes an invention, and what makes certain inventions more important than others? Have the impacts of nuclear weapons, on both our materialist world and the cultural spiritus mundi, been large enough to warrant such a description? The Manhattan Project, despite its tremendous success from seemingly out of nowhere, was not a gift of Prometheus. The project itself was an industrial effort of incredible proportions, and built upon the recent cumulative advances in nuclear physics, quantum mechanics, and special relativity. It is therefore difficult to see the invention of nuclear weapons as a being a particularly important event from the left-handed qua limit perspective, while for those looking in from a right-handed perspective may see the Trinity test as a defining point in human history, especially given the role in the popular consciousness nuclear weapons were given during the cold war.
Continue ReadingA Historical Perspective on Strategic Resources
Throughout the history of human civilization, the characteristics of strategic resources and the methods of dealing with them have changed considerably. But as our economy becomes more and more complex, and the number of materials increases together with this complexity, the application of any single material represents a smaller and smaller portion of economic activity. For this reason, the impact of any single resource on the world’s supply chains is unlikely to have as significant of an impact as they might have had in the past. It is interesting however to observe how nations have dealt with the issue of strategic resources in the past and to learn how those techniques may be used in the future to protect critical industries. Historically energy has been the principal strategic resource, but in recent time the prodution of computing machines and information processing has become increasingly important.
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