All my books are yellow

In Better Off Ted’s third episode a joke was that Veridian Dynamics’ company motto was “Money Before People”, and that it looked more heroic in latin. From what I can work out from dictionaries and some introductary grammar sites, this should be Pecunia Populo Precedo.

Copyright violation

Well known is the fact that the owners and maintainers of filesharing website The Pirate Bay are being charged for accessory to copyright violation. This is of course not very interesting and all in all humbug. Ofcourse I understand that the primary reason for going on with this huge media spectacle of a trial is so people will get the exposure of the news that using The PPirate Bay is illegal, framing their mindsets about the site. I was thinking something more efficient would be to find the groups who uploads most of the torrents, “loder” for example, if you really are after punishing people for copyright crimes that is.

But it hit me; am I supposed to make sure nobody can use the copyright protected media I own? Am I supposed not to put songs in a hidden directory on a webserver so I can get them to all my computers, or as backup if my computer dies?

If I buy a DVD and forget it on a bench or similar in a central town square, am I to be blamed if someone take it home and watch it? Am I obliged to get good computer security so hackers don’t gain access to my computer and copies all my music?

Can I not put my music in a shared folder on my computer (Note that all the latest versions of Windows by default make a folder for that purpose, which I have never seen anyone use.) so I can easily access it on my media center or other computers because someone might copy it when I’m in another larger network for some reason?

If I put up a torrent with my favourite album on, does that have to imply I mean for people to listen to it? I could just have done it as to say “Can you guys hold on to this on your computers while I reformat mine?”

Would it help if I made my intentions clear? If I had a server directory with mp3’s, would it help if I in the filenames of all of them wrote “This is property of Valentine Svensson, listening to this while I’m not present at the device where it’s being played is prohibited”?

Math ed.

I just read a swedish article about a new study that shows how the swedish education system is falling behind other countries who are participating in TIMSS. In this particular case students of the 8th grade. They quote a few people, among others an 8th-grader and a teacher of 8th grade math. The 8th-grader claims most of the math is stuff you’d only use if your are a physicist. And the teacher explains how she motivates her students: She tries to explain to the students that it might be important when they are going to buy a house or a car, but she prefers to just say that if you pass the tests with good marks you get to chose an upper secondary school you like.

I have heard horror stories from middle school math classes like this. Why does it seem to hard to explain it like it is: Studying math lets you practice thinking logically. Whenever someone had trouble seeing what use some math had when I went to middle school our teacher told us this, and when I got the upper secondry school I realized this is true for alot of middle school, I don’t get why they don’t tell these things to kids.

An example is handwriting lessons. These where lessons in the native language class where we were supposed to write texts in cursive handwriting. Everyone hated this, and I probably hated it the most. I hated how cursive was harder to read and took longer to write than my normal handwriting. Most of my class always joked about how stupid a schooling system that forced its students to waste time on this was, and we where always mad when we where about to have these lessons. In upper secondary school I realized it was just the same as math. The actual goal wasn’t to be able to write the letters in cursive style, but for us to practice the fine motorics in our hands. This way of thinking explains alot of middle school that you find vastly stupid while you’re there.

The goal of middle school math i not to be able to calculate the area of a circle as fast as possible, or memorizing weird things, like the pythagorean theorem. It is to think about how one can use these sort of things to do other things, or generally, how one can use a set number of known facts and logically solve problems using these.

LaTeX things I've had to look up twice.

To write a normal multiplication dot, the command is \cdot. To write a “divides-symbol”, or “|”, the command is \mid.

After you’ve put a blahblah.sty file in a blahblah directory of the tex/latex directory you need to run the mktexlsr command!