Gordon Houtman's blog

TeX

I am installing Tex on my PowerBook. I bought The TeXbook many years ago, and several years ago, I bought a CD containing several TeX distributions, but I never got them to install properly. Now I think I’m almost done with a TeX installation. I’m excited!

TeX is a typesetting program invented by Donald E. Knuth, who wrote some books called The Art of Computer Programming (volumes 1, 2, and 3). Knuth is a pioneer of theoretical computer science. TeX can be used to typeset mathematics and physics.

Let’s see, how did I get to where I am tonight? For a start, I am following the instructions I found on http://www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/. I found that link in the help pages for Ulysses, a text editor for creative writers. I heard about Ulysses because I surfed to http://daringfireball.net/, a nice website I’ve visited several times before. (Daring Fireball is the website of John Gruber, whose Smarty Pants is one of my favorite plugins for Movable Type. I visited Daring Fireball tonight because I had been playing around with Alexa (http://www.alexa.com/), and when I looked up the traffic rankings of http://meyerweb.com/, no http://www.dooce.com/, Daring Fireball was last in the list “People who visit this page also visit:” for dooce.com. And it (TeX) works.

The fifty-cent description: TeXShop provides a GUI for teTeX, a version of the actual TeX program (which is unabashedly a command-line driven program).

the Good Book

When I first read the Bible, I was an atheist. As a scientifically minded young person, I thought that cosmology and evolution provided a clear description of how the world came to be, and that religion was just superstition.

I argued with classmates, most of whom were Christian, about religion. One classmate finally convinced me that if I were to approach the question “scientifically,” then I would want to examine all the evidence, including the evidence for competing hypotheses. She stated that the evidence for faith is the Bible. Different people could say all sorts of things: some wise, some foolish, but the Christian claim is that the Holy Bible is the revealed Word of God. You don’t have to believe it to read it. You can doubt it. Just approach it as you would approach any other book, with an open mind (and with a recognition that it was written long ago, so it doesn’t follow the “rules” of most books).