Struggling with Postscript – not any more!

First, I’d like to thank those of you who posted in my discussion group – or on their own sites – and tried to help solving my Postscript problem. (I don’t know if anyone sent tips via email because the mailserver has been down for a couple of hours and still is.) Thank you so much, Jörg, Scott, Garret, Eric and Max, for your tips, and André, for your help and patience!

Now, about my Mathematica graphics: I gave them up. Well, not really, but I decided not to use the graphics I created with Mathematica. When I created them a little while ago, it seemed a good idea to use Mathematica because I already knew how it works, but of course I didn’t know that it doesn’t export Postscript files properly.

LaTeX comes with its own graphic tool called MetaPost. Initially, I had decided against using it because it seemed too much effort to learn a programming language for less than a dozen graphics, but now I tried it out anyway. And it works! It’s a bit more complicated than Mathematica, but it does what I want.

The good thing about my pictures is that they consist only of straight lines and circles or parts of circles. I just learned how to draw lines with MetaPost, and have thus re-created three of the nine pictures I had done so far. It’s now midnight, and I’m leaving the circles and the other graphics for tomorrow.

While I think this is not the perfect solution because I have to recreate pictures I already have on my hard drive, it still seems to be much easier than trying to get those Postscripts to work properly.

Again, thank you very much for your tips! It’s great to know you are out there and willing to help me! I’ll keep you posted about my problems…

Community

Craig thinks of himself (and other webloggers) as a link jockey. I like the idea. LJ CJ rules!

LaTeX

Gary L. Gray’s Macintosh TeX/LaTeX Web Site is a very useful resource for – you guessed it – TeX/LaTeX users on the Macintosh!

Please Help!

Update: It seems the problem is that Mathematica doesn’t generate a proper .ps file of the graphics. So what do I do now?

Okay, I have this problem: I’ve written my thesis with LaTeX and created my graphics with Mathematica. To be specific, I use OzTeX 3.1.1 and Mathematica 3.0.0.1 for Apple Macintosh, MacOS 9.0.4. Now, it should be easy to export the Mathematica graphs as either .ps or .eps, include them in the LaTeX document and be able to print them. However, it doesn’t work! I can print the graphs from Mathematica directly just fine, and I can print my LaTeX document as well. But when I try to include the graphics in the LaTeX document, it doesn’t work any more. I tried including the graphic like this:

\begin{figure}[h]

    \centering

    \epsfig{file=modulallgemein.eps,width=textwidth}

    \caption{Modulfigur}

    \label{fig:modulfigur}

\end{figure}

With this, the graphic appears in OzTex (see screenshot), but when I print the page, I just get white space instead of the graphic.

I also tried to include the graphic using \includegraphics{modulallg.ps}, but this doesn’t work either.

To export the graph from Mathematica, I tried both to print the graphic into a file (.ps), and to select the graph and choose ‘Save selection as .eps’.

The strange thing is that I can print the LaTeX file and the graphic seperately, but not together. I also tried converting the .dvi into .ps and viewing it with MacGhostView, but same problem: I can view text and graphic seperately, but I can’t see the graphic if I include it in LaTeX.

Has anyone encountered this problem, or has anyone an idea why it doesn’t work? Please let me know via the discussion group [NOT via Email, the mailserver is down at the moment, sorry.)] Thanks in advance for any tips or help.

Retroshock

Nick Selby: Retroshock: When the Familiar Is Unfamiliar.

“’One of the first things that people returning to the States see is the monumental waste — throwing food away, excess packaging and these things are very disturbing because you tend not to notice them before you go away.’ […]

For many, retro-shock begins on the flight home […] ‘And then the captain told us that the temperature in New York was 45 degrees. For the last three years, I’ve been living like the rest of the world, in Celsius. For a second I thought it was 115 degrees Fahrenheit in January in New York.'”

Highways to Hell – Driving in Germany

Nick Selby: Giving New Meaning To ‘Floor It’.

“No matter how fast you go, someone’s going to be faster; no matter how clear your rear-view mirror is, check again. . . . There’ll be someone there.”

I know why I like traveling by train.

Community

Happy first Weblog birthday, Tsja!

404

The 404 Research Lab has “Links to the best 404 Not Found errors on the web, researched and categorized for your surfing enjoyment.” They also have a section on the history of 404.

Link via Jan-Willem’s first weblog entry.

“I love to smirk for you”

Can you believe this?!

“Police in Kentucky are looking for a customer who succeeded in paying for a $2 order at a fast-food restaurant with a phony $200 bill featuring a picture of President George W. Bush and a depiction of the White House with a lawn sign saying, ‘We like broccoli.’ Authorities say the female cashier at a Dairy Queen in Danville even gave the culprit $198 in real money as change.”

Here’s a photo of the $200 bill.

Link via The Dad’s Radio Blog.

Building a house

Instead of building a boring house with a rectangular layout, why not build a round house? Garret had a link to Yurtworks.com. They build yurts, or round homes, of all kinds and sizes.

But I think I like geodesic dome houses even better. There are lots of geodesic dome sites out there. I especially liked these:

• Take a look at Terry Teague’s geodesic home – he has photos (choose either jpegs or faster-loading gifs) from the exterior and the interior of his home.
• Kathleen Schrock has a slide show of how her geodesic dome was built. I dig those wooden structures and triangular windows!
• Geodesic Dome Home Project Book. Commercial site with some cool pictures.
• Geodesic Domes & Homes, rustic-looking domes. Take a look at their photos.
• Econ-o-Dome, somewhat futuristic-looking.
• Michael Rader has collected lots of information, including a useful list of links.
• For those interested in the math and construction techniques: Monkey House.

Weiberfastnacht

Ugh, today is Weiberfastnacht (women’s carnival). I had an explanation of this event last year. If you are interested in seeing the carnival processions of Bonn or Dransdorf, there are several webcams. Today, most of the action is in Beuel. (Hit reload for a new picture.)

Passend zum heutigen Tag: Weiberfastnacht.de, wo es auch einen kurzen Abschnitt zur Geschichte der Weiberfastnacht gibt.

Astronomy

See a beautiful picture of the Star Forming Region S106. Beautiful!

Link via Blackholebrain.

Weblogger meet weblogger

Susan went to Las Vegas to visit her niece (and her parents) and met Audrey and Hal!

Hal: “I’ve never actually seen another one of you [ETP weblogger] face to face, for the longest time I’ve suspected you’re all a figment of my imagination… ”

Believe it or not, we’re real. Too bad André and I didn’t know Hal when we went to Las Vegas in 1999…

By the way, Susan has photos of the meeting and of beautiful cactus flowers and the like from the Water Conservation Garden, and photos of Valerie Grace Kitchens and her parents.

Cryptography

New York Times: The Key Vanishes: Scientist Outlines Unbreakable Code.

“A computer science professor at Harvard says he has found a way to send coded messages that cannot be deciphered, even by an all-powerful adversary with unlimited computing power. And, he says, he can prove it.

If he is right, and he does have some supporters, his code may be the first that is both practical and provably secure. While there are commercially available coding systems that seem very hard to break, no one can prove that they cannot be cracked, mathematicians say.”

Link via MetaFilter.

Community News

Hey Al, I like your new photo! I also enjoyed your picture gallery. I’ve never peeked ‘behind the curtain’ in a hospital, and I’ve never been in an intensive care room.

Abschaffung der Flatrate der Telekom

Auf SWR3 habe ich gerade gehört, daß jemand eine Protest-Site eingerichtet hat:
http://www.flatrate-protest.de/.

Dort wurden bisher 53352 Unterschriften gegen die Abschaffung der Flatrate gesammelt.

Hooty Hoo?

The Curmudgeon reports that today is Hooty Hoo Day. Going out at noon and shouting ‘Hooty Hoo’ is supposed to chase the winter away. Bummer, why didn’t tell me anyone earlier? It’s almost 9 pm over here already. Do you think it will still work?

Modulfigur

Phew. I’ve done my work for today. Believe it or not, it took me several hours to create this picture. It may be called modul figure in English, but I’m not sure. (Can anyone tell if that’s the correct term? The German term is Modulfigur.)

So you ask what’s special about this graphic? The white circle represents the hyperbolic plane. It can be tesselated with triangles, some of which I’ve drawn in there. Although they look different, they’re all the same size. If you start with the ‘big’ triangle in the middle and mirror it on each of its sides, you get the light blue triangles, and if you mirror them, you get the outermost triangles. All triangles have three zero degree angles.

In our Euclidian world, every circle inside forms a right angle when intersecting the outer circle. Cool, huh?

Now for some surfing before I crash and collaps into bed.

“Use the force, dude!”

I always thought Flash was useless. Until today. I present: Star Dudes! These are phanastic minimal and somewhat cute versiona of three Star Wars films. Totally cool! You can watch the Flash movies right away or download them for offline viewing.

Link and picture via ronsens.

Warning: Rant ahead! Click here to skip it and read some philosophy and positive thoughts instead.

Cars

Garret posted some thoughts on cars in cities yesterday:

america’s car culture is ruining the charm of santa fe, and other places. […] americans seem to think that if you can’t drive up to something, it isn’t worth seeing. to a certain degree, that’s good (wilderness areas) … on the other hand, tourist destinations like santa fe have to cater to this kind of individual. i’d love to see them prohibit cars, strip off the asphalt and return to dirt and boardwalks … and, watch that horsechip over on your left, ma’am …

If you can’t drive up to something, it isn’t worth seeing – that was what I thought when we visited those National Parks in California, Arizona, Utah. They had streets, panoramic roads, parking space and picnic tables all over the place. I understand that it is important to have streets and broad walks to some of those places, so people in wheelchairs can see them too, but somehow it felt wrong to have masses of cars in those places. Traffic had to be limited on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon and in Yosemite Valley (and now in Zion, too). There were buses in those places, and they worked well. Why let cars into the parks in the first place? They could use buses or trams or trains or whatever in every park, and the individualists can still go there on foot or by bike.

To be fair, I have to say that there are still places that you can’t reach by car, for example the Needles section of Canyonlands, or the Wave. To conserve the beauty of fragile places like the Wave, it’s essentiel to limit the number of visitors.

Cars in inner cities are a different thing. Many cities are planned and built for cars, but older ones were not. In Germany, many cities and towns have turned their inner cities and old towns into pedestrian precincts. (Nice word. Is it British, or do Americans use the word as well?) That simply means: The cars stay out, and pedestrians are allowed to walk everywhere, even in the middle of the street. But the streets have been changed as well. Pedestrian precincts often have lots of trees in them, a bench or some stones to sit on, cafés put their tables outside, and the whole atmosphere changes.

Bonn has a big pedestrian precinct in the oldest part of town. There are two markets, some broad and many narrow streets that are for pedestrians only. Bikes are only allowed in some of them.

Besides, there are pedestrian precincts in other parts of town: one in Beuel (across the Rhine), one in Bad Godesberg (where many of the foreign embassies used to be while Bonn was the capital of Germany), and one in Duisdorf, the part of Bonn in which we live. Ours is just one street, less than a kilometer in length, with a small market, and bikes are allowed there.

As to your ideas, Garret, they don’t strip off the asphalt here, but often use cobblestones. Combined with the builings in inner cities that are several hundreds of years old, this does a lot to improve the atmosphere!

(By the way, Craig, do you remember the pedestrian precinct in Koblenz?)

While looking for photos of our pedestrian precincts, I found a site with wonderful pictures of Bonn: Stadtplanungsamt – Überblick. It’s in German, but you can click on one of the little round photos to see panoramic photos of Bonn, taken from the roof of a tall building in the city center. For example, this one shows the inner city with the pedestrian precinct, the University (building with four orange towers) and the Münster (one large and two smaller towers on the right). You can also see the Langer Eugen, the building in which the members of the parliament used to have their offices, and the Siebengebirge (seven hills) in the background.

Damn, I didn’t find any decent pictures. Seems I have to do them myself… but not today.

Life can be surprising at times

I quote Max Smith:

“We should all be so resilient and self-determined. On Saturday, you composed what I now consider the most beautiful sentence ever created in the history of mankind:

“I have decided that today is going to be a good day.“

There is nothing more inspiring, powerful, and beautiful than human will. You may have written that sentence without any regard to it’s philosophical and moral implications, but it would be hard to find a more concise expression of what it means to be fully human, and not merely an animal controlled by instinct and circumstance.”

Max added a quote from the Hagakure:

“If (one) will just think about what he is to do for the day at hand, he will be able to do anything. If it is a single day’s work, one should be able to put up with it. Tomorrow, too, is but a single day.“

Thank you, Max. I feel deeply honoured, and I’m sure your quote by Hagakure will help me through the rest of my thesis.

Have a wonderful day, everyone!