Do you use org-mode?[1] It's perfect for outlining and managing lots of information. Once you've written your paper, you can easily export it to HTML, PDF (through LaTeX) or plain text to be copied into a Word document, if that's the way you swing.
> (I'm looking to extract audio clips from video files by using the subtitles and timing information, to create listening flashcards. Since Anki doesn't really do this, not reusing their code isn't really a big deal.)
Just fyi, I recently hacked something up that did exactly this, using a bit of csv parsing in python and ffmpeg to extract the clips. It wasn't too hard to write, though I can see it becoming more difficult if you want more sophistication.
As I noted in the edit to my comment in another sub-thread, their divorce happened before "no-fault" divorce was created. At that time, couples wishing to divorce would often concoct stories of abuse or adultery to give the courts grounds on which to grant their request.
It's doubtful anyone alive today could say definitively, but this could be an instance of that practice. I certainly hope it was.
I can't say I knew him well but I knew him out of school, and this is completely unlike the guy I knew. Your theory makes sense -- especially the humorous elaboration about thinking about calculus at all times as grounds for divorce -- THAT sounds like the classic sense of humor.
I quite like the 'apology' he received from the conference organizers:
> In July 2013 I told the NSA-affiliated conference organizers that I was having some problems in getting my visa, and gently asked whether they could do something about it. Always eager to help, the NSA people leaped into action, and immediately sent me a short email written with a lot of tact:
> “The trouble you are having is regrettable… Sorry you won’t be able to come to our conference. We have submitted our program and did not include you on it.”
Some context: I don't actually know how useful this will be. Most foreign companies already use VPNs to Hong Kong or the US. Almost all the expatriates I know have personal VPNs set up as well. Astrill (https://www.astrill.com/) is the name I've been hearing nowadays.
I also discovered recently that more tech-savvy locals can also buy ways to jump the "Great Firewall" ridiculously easily - even right off of Taobao, which is the Chinese version ebay. (If you're interested, just search for "IP代理." I think it's about 8-15 RMB a month?)
This free-trade zone is tiny, and in the middle of nowhere. [Edit: things may be different if it's by Shanghai's port; I wasn't aware of that.] The most potentially exciting part about this news is that the government is thinking about extending this relaxation to all of Pudong, which is home to Shanghai's new financial and business district. Pudong effectively the CBD of Shanghai, but otherwise essentially is like the south side of London's Thames: most people live on the other side of the river, where the culture, excitement and history is. In other words, the vast majority of Shanghai's 20 million residents still won't be able to access Facebook... which is why this isn't half as big of a deal as it appears. Then again, I suppose it is exciting that there will now be a portion of mainland China where the government is actively letting people access Facebook.
The GFW isn't as big a problem as the shitty broadband in China. $50,000 USD/month buys the equivalent of a $99/month Time Warner business connection. The GFW is a problem because every router in the country is doing filtering and dropping connections, causing high latency and making broadband very expensive.
I agree that this means little for Facebook or Twitter, but it likely means that in a few years multi-nationals will actually have usable video-conferencing and internet connectivity that works and doesn't cost a significant fraction of each employee's salary.
> The conversion from LaTeX to HTML was expensive: we raised considerable funds, but ran out before finishing Volumes II and III, so we are only posting Volume I initially.
I don't know too much about digitalisation, but why does it cost so much?
The LaTeX source of the Lectures is long and heavily formatted, so the conversion to HTML involved writing a large amount of custom software, including lots of tests to catch regressions. In other words, this was a speculative software project; as anyone who has experience with such projects can tell you, it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the problems you'll run into. (The costs would have been even higher had I not worked for a reduced rate, often pro bono, because I wanted to help make the Feynman Lectures accessible to a wider audience.)
I am very grateful for your work, and I hate to pick on details, but surely you reused much of what's already available for LaTeX? I hope you didn't spend much of your time reinventing the wheel. I freely admit that I am probably vastly underestimating the amount of work that went into this, reuse or no.
We did make use of as many existing resources as possible. If you take a look at the [Ruby on Rails Tutorial book](http://railstutorial.org/) and [The Tau Manifesto](http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto), both of which are converted to HTML from LaTeX, you'll see that I have deep experience in such conversions. Combined with my previous role as Caltech's editor for the Definitive and Extended Edition of the Feynman Lectures (and my Caltech physics Ph.D.), this made me uniquely qualified to work on this project, which is the main reason I did it. (It certainly wasn't for the money; the opportunity cost of the time I spent on this project was high.)
Unfortunately, there's a vast gulf between "kinda-sorta mostly converted"—which is the best you can get with off-the-shelf converters—and "a faithful representation of the Feynman Lectures". Closing this gap required a large amount of gruesome work.
I would absolutely pitch in if someone organised a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for mhartl, even just to pay him back for the current efforts. I'm ecstatic that the lectures now exist online!
Hello, all. Many people seem to have gotten the impression from my letter that because we ran out of funds paying for the conversion of FLP Volume I from LaTeX to HTML we need additional funds to complete the conversion. However, that is not the case because some chapters of Vols. II & III were also converted for us (though imperfectly), and after comparing the Vol. I HTML to the original LaTeX, I found I could do the conversion myself quite easily using parametrized regular expression search and replace operations and a minimum of hand-editing. I am able to convert one chapter of FLP from the LaTeX to HTML in about 2 hours. I have been working on completing the remaining Vols. II & III chapters in my spare time, and they are very nearly done. Only a few chapters remain to be converted, and a few others only need some HTML tables. We are planning to make a second release when our two PDF editions (formatted for the desktop and for tablets) are available for sale online. In fact, the PDF editions have been ready for a long time, but the publisher is having some difficulties getting them into their retailers' sales queues. Today we have the first evidence of the publisher's success in resolving the difficulties:
So, hopefully it will not be long before we add the completed Vols. II and III chapters to the published HTML edition, with the few remaining chapters to follow shortly.
Michael A. Gottlieb
Editor, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
www.feynmanlectures.info
Unfortunately, there's no general mapping from LaTeX to HTML, so for any realistic pre-written source you have to write many custom modifications to complete the conversion. This is a time-consuming and error-prone process, involving a large amount of custom software.
There are various ways to do this, none of them perfect. Online searches suggest that "htlatex" (for HTML output)and "xhlatex" (for XHTML output) are pretty good:
