Knol has — finally — added an equation editor that groks a moderate subset of the LaTeX markup language.

This should do a lot to enhance Knol's support of technical writing in math and science.

Jon Awbrey

It may be too late, Jonny. The 2009 traffic stats for Google Knol are not indicative of a successful product.

p ≠ q,

where p = popularity and q = quality.

I wouldn't read to much into that trend. I just re-ran your numbers from en.wiki and it was down 5.6% over the same period, compared to knol's 4.2%. Granted en.wiki is up 18% year over year. I think something like Alexa's traffic rank would be a better metric for product success (unless we are measuring ad revenues, and then I would agree page views is an appropriate metric).

The real measure is whether the patrons are learning anything.

Over on Facebook, they have popular games like Mafia Wars. It generates a lot of traffic, but what are the players learning?

Further to the thread subtitle Jon of all people must know that the X in LaTeX is a capital chi so is pronounced ch as in German noch.

And Scots/English loch. Which might be the only non-proper name word in English that has that sound....


They are congugate properties, like truth and clarity, mercy and justice. The more of one, the less of the other.

Pibroch.

Had never heard of that, but now I have.

God, I hate bagpipes. My cell in Hell will feature rap, done to bagpipes.

Wikipedia gives this an ending with BOTH a chi and k, one after the other. Pi-brachhk

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%ACobaireachd

Just a wee single malt on th' loch
Then laddy, we heard some pìobaireachd
And hoped nae to meet Nessie
As we ken 'ould be messy
Cuz then we'd be pissed and then f&$#ed


-Milton

Well, no, if you mean conjugate properties, then those are pairs like momentum p and position q, or energy e and time t, whereinregardto the more you know about one the less you know about the other.

At any rate, the lack of TeX support was the main thing that kept me from developing more knols this year. But the formula editor is very nice — one of the few WYSIWYG editors I've seen that is actually easier than Marking It Up Yourself (MIUY). And the TeX images line up and size up seamlessly with the rest of the text — unless you've grown fond of that ransom note math effect that MediaWiki gives you on most ¬Apple browsers.

Some of my math and logic knols —

• Hypostatic Abstraction
• Logical Graphs : 1
• Logical Graphs : 2
• Peirce's Law
• Praeclarum Theorema

Jon Awbrey

In which case, I've got the highest quality blog in the world!



They display the same qualities of expositional opacity combined with statements designed to infer the greatest possible insult to people's intelligence, as the rest of your works that were on Wikipedia.

Well done! You've simultaneously reduced the pool of people who can appreciate Peirce and increased the desire of people to remain ignorant of him by one and it only took 10 minutes.

Chutzpah, leprechaun…

Thanks for your review. Were there specific bits that struck you as especially opaque or intelligence insulting?

Jon Awbrey

Most people actually say leprechaun with a hard k. Chutzpah is barely English-- a Yiddishism which sometimes is not understood outside NYC or the Jewish community. Of course this sound is common in German, Hebrew, and (of course) Yiddish.

All of them. You have a special gift for explaining concepts that impart neither ideas, rationales or intellectual bridges which enable any inquiring person to comprehend what the fuck you're talking about.

In all cases you insult the reader with bafflegab that its all so obvious:


The only people who can understand your articles are the few people who don't need to read about them because they've already been formally trained in Peirceian logic.



It leads me inevitably to the conclusion that your sole purpose in writing the articles is to baffle the reader, blind the seeker, confound the inquirer and stroke your own ego by making sure that whatever insight you're supposedly trying to give remains with you and no-one else.

ETA: Oh yes, and the only references made are to Peirce's own writings (out of print long ago) or to your own writings where the opacity tends rapidly towards black hole. Not only are you safe from criticism in that Ivory Tower but also from any purpose of education which actually involves learning.

Thanks for your comments. I will work on the points you indicated.

Incidental to your last point, an amazing amount of Peirce's work is still in print — the 8 volume Collected Papers is even available on CD — and tons of his stuff can be found online. Ben Udell and others did a fantastic job of tracking down editions of Peirce's work available online for Wikipedia's Charles Sanders Peirce Bibliography.

Jon Awbrey