The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we known we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.
— American Pastoral, Philip Roth

The longer quote is below the fold.

You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you’re anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you’re with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible airs? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and set secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we known we’re alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that – well, lucky you.
— American Pastoral, Philip Roth

See the bus?

No? Let me zoom in:

(The picture was taken while standing in one place and only zooming in and out.)

Real photographers will tell you that such zoom lens are pathetic because they have high distortion etc. All true, but I find this zoom range to be exciting as far as enjoying photography.

Also, it is well documented that any discussion on the web concerning any lens converges on the conclusion, by real photographers, that one should buy three lenses instead of the pathethic single lens you were considering, and each one of these lenses costs at least 2000$. This does not imply that one should not spend money on good lens…

In the last few decades Otfried Cheong had repeatedly spoken about the upcoming new version of ipe (totally rewritten from scratch using Cobol) and how wonderful it would be (for example, world peace would be finally achievable by using one of the ipelets, etc).

Well, the beta version of Ipe 7 is now available – I was/am using it for the last few weeks and it works reasonably well…

BTW, installing it on Ubuntu or Debian is pretty easy.

Imagine there’s no universities
It’s easy if you try
No high school below us
Above us only ignorance
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no journals
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to write or submit for
And no conferences too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

Imagine no rejections
I wonder if you can
No need for grants or students
A sisterhood of love
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say i’m a blogger
But i’m not the only one
I hope some day you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Inspired by this:

I believe that one day all science will be done on blogs because we bloggers are natural skeptics, disbelieving the mainstream and accepting the possibility of any alternative idea.

But you should really read this. You might learn something.

Especially as the regular itemize/enumerate environments in latex take too much space. Anyway, an easy way to achieve this is to use the paralist package in latex. You just replace enumerate by inparaenum. For example:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{paralist}

\begin{document}

Is is sometime useful to have enumerate inside a paragraph, because:
\begin{inparaenum}[(i)]
\item it looks better,
\item it is shorter, and
\item its cool.
\end{inparaenum}

\end{document}

Generates the following: