If you’re in America and want to help your native butterflies (and moths), the National Wildlife Federation has a tool for finding local plants and their respective pollinators.
Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird. There’s not many stories or symbolism with green pheasants (as opposed to, say, cranes) and it’s mostly known in the country as food. I’ve seen it argued that it was selected because it’s delicious (though the official line seems to be their ability to recognize earthquakes)
The animals on Australia's coat of arms: Emu and Kangaroo, are both able to be eaten. The Emu is our national bird.
I don't know if they're technically game meats but I can buy them both commercially. Kangaroo meat is in most supermarkets, and Emu in speciality butchers.
When I was in Namibia and saw oryx on the menu at a restaurant, I ask them if they really ate their national animal. The waiter's response was, "oh, heck, no. These oryx are from South Africa!" Touché.
(Off-topic?) Not talking about the pheasant, but I once read that the Japanese used to eat cranes (presumably the same kind shown in JAL logo), and even offered them as delicacy to a group of Korean ambassadors, who were horrified, because cranes were considered a symbol of Confucian virtue in Korea and nobody ate them.
> Japan’s national bird (green pheasant) is, IIRC, the only national bird that’s also a game bird.
India’s national bird is the Peacock. It is a type of pheasant and was historically a game bird that was a common delicacy, especially for the rich. It is now illegal to hunt peacock in India, but people still get it in the black market.
Having lived in the UK, I found the balance between systems to be quite nice. I think that the Imperial System is actually underrated for daily use: most of the measurements are intuitive (based on sensory information and easily visualizable objects) and align better with common uses of measurements (rough approximations and division into equal parts). I think the metric system is beautiful and elegant, but for non-scientific tasks I don’t think it’s as valuable.
Thats what people say who have grown up with the system. If you grew up with the metric system in day to day life then you'd say the same.
eg A Metre is a distance between two held out hands. A litre is half a 2l bottle. A kg is the same weight as a litre of water or a small bag of something like sugar. I instinctively know how hot 10, 15 20 or 30 degrees is.
I grew up with 20 and 30cm rulers so I can picture how big they are. At school we had various weights around. Stuff is sold in metric weights.
By “two held out hands”, do you mean a person’s wingspan? Is there something similar for centimeters? I’m asking out of genuine curiosity and not antagonizing. I would love to have more tools at my disposal. An inch, for example, is the length of the first digit of the index finger. [0]
With length, I find that most of my use cases are division into equal parts as opposed to scaling. The imperial system was designed for this (frequently using base 12) [1]. I understand that this may be due to my framing.
I agree with the sibling comment about temperature granularity. Fahrenheit set 0 degrees to the coldest temperature in his hometown, then used freezing water and body temperature as reference points. 100 degrees is about body temperature, and around as hot as ambient temperature gets for many people.
[0] Useless trivia: an acre is one chain (66’) by one furlong (660’) and was supposed to be the amount a field a single ox could plow in a day. Neither of the latter two measures are commonly used anymore but a mile was redefined from 5000’ to 5280’ to make it an even 8 furlongs.
[1] Apparently this is the reason that the French failed twice to establish Metric Time
Come on, surely you don't believe your own argument. If thermostats can offer fractional-degree adjustment in fahrenheit, they can offer it in celsius.
Miles and kilometers can be estimated by the Fibonacci Sequence. The conversion (mi -> km) is very nearly the golden ratio (1.61 and approximately 1.62, respectively, IIRC). For any number in the sequence taken as miles, the subsequent number is the distance in kilometers. Your way is probably quicker, but it’s a fun bit of information.
There’s an app for this [0,1]. It follows the calendar and shows you the current season, it’s haiku, seasonal foods, etc. It’s free to view the current season, but you can pay (one-time) to access to the entire calendar. The company that makes it [2] publishes a book as well, though last I checked, it was only in Japanese. They also have an app [3,4] for Nara, showcasing local activities in the area during each microseason.
Plan 9 troff might work! It works with utf8 out of the box[0], and while I haven't used it for complex math typesetting, there is a command (eqn [1]) that was developed for it. I'd recommend Ali Rudi's port (neatroff [2][3]) for a minimalist implementation. There's also Heirloom Documentation Tools [4] which is an implementation of *roff-and-friends that uses Knuth's paragraph-at-once algorithm (instead of the original line-wise one) for typesetting, plus some other interesting features.
The authors of eqn wrote a paper about it: "Typesetting Mathematics" by Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry. Kernighan also wrote two manuals (one in 1976 with a revision in 1992, and one in 2007 with updates for the Plan 9 version). [5].
thanks. i do appreciate the effort, but i feel like this just underscores my point how *roff isn't a viable ecosystem like TeX is.
this is maybe slightly unfair, since i don't use TeX or even LaTeX, but XeTeX/XeLaTeX. however, those work out of the box with MacTeX/MiKTeX. i just want pretty PDFs.
My apologies. I think I misunderstand what you mean by "ecosystem". All of your requirements are fulfilled by the tools I suggested. The guides I provided show complex typesetting (mathematics and otherwise), eqn does complex math expressions (more powerful than TeX according to Lorinda Cherry, the neateqn implementation by Ali Rudi allows for using TeX bracket syntax as well), pic and grap provide complex (2D) graphics, refer and bib2ref/ref2bib provide bibliography management, and all of it installed from a single repository and makefile (maybe this is different than an installer framework?) to under 43MB (including demos and acm fonts). XeTeX/XeLaTeX seem to only add support for utf8 (as I mentioned, natively supported by the plan9 *roffs) and various font formats (at least supported by neatroff, I haven't checked the others). Of course, pretty PDFs was the original point you quoted in the parent.
You should at least check out the neateqn guide for examples of math typesetting (even output in Computer Modern). But the original guide, as well as the others will show many more and different examples. These aren't groff guides. You might be surprised.
It's funny, I looked at the "Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide (Second Edition)" postscript document, and - at least with macOS' Preview - some big brackets are segmented (Neatroff brackets don't seem to do this, although I've seen it in other troff generated documents), and they even say this:
> Warning — square roots of tall quantities look lousy, because a root-sign big enough to cover the quantity is too dark and heavy
The solution is naturally to rewrite big roots as powers.
pic does seem close to Tikz, although I had to look in the GNU pic doco to figure out how to do colors. Even then, transparency didn't seem to be supported?
Heirloom actually looks the most useful/mature. At least the output looks pretty/someone cared enough to make the example files pretty, there's actual documentation. Limitations are still there (having to convert bitmaps to EPS?). I will say I'm at least slightly impressed by `gpresent`, which is like beamer (so for making presentations), and built-in hyphenation support.
I still don't get Neatroff. It's compatible with/implements a lot that Heirloom does, but then the font support is worse again? It's an impressive project though, the source is very readable, and RTL/LTR support. Less impressive is the lack of a license - I think it's ISC, based on a single comment, but who knows?
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A repository and a makefile are distinctly different than an installer. Random macro packages that may or may not be on GitHub are different than `tlmgr`. Piping stuff around and having to convert images is different than just one command. GUI editors. Example documents (like https://texample.net/). That is what I mean by ecosystem.
XeTeX outputs PDFs by default (granted, via xdvipdfmx), and can also include bitmaps directly (again, granted it needs graphicx or something). All TeX stuff isn't without it's warts, and seems overly complex (pdfTeX/XeTeX/XeLaTex/LuaTeX/ConTeXt, etc). But in practice, it kinda somehow just works (until it doesn't).
I appreciate you having a look! I totally understand if it's not enough to make a switch, but I'm glad you were able to see that it's not so bad on this side of things. There's definitely not enough niceties for the average computer user (GUI editing and installing) and some missing for any user (package manager). I will stand by piping as a matter of taste (the biggest benefit for me is it allows for using the tools I'm already familiar with, awk and grep or plain c/zig).
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My interest in neatroff is mostly the code itself. A tiny and opinionated project with readable source that still achieves quite a lot (all that I need anyways). But it's definitely not for everyone! The author doesn't use a windowing system, for example, and instead uses the framebuffer for pdf viewing and editing (both custom implementations). It is ISC, by the way. It's included in the bottom of the readme.
In the early days of computing (that is, when computer companies and universities were finding the first people to learn programming) music experience was a strong signal for programming ability! Playing music prepared them for focusing on the low-level details while holding the big picture in their head. [0]
> Brian is super modest and claims to be a horrible programmer but he is comparing himself to Ken Thompson, who he thinks is just incredible. Ken once wrote a disassembler, assembler and B interpreter for a mini-computer that ran a printer they were struggling with, in a couple of days, so that they could get it printing again. This blew Brian's mind.
For the next level up here's Ken (in a very interesting conversation with Brian Kernighan about the history of Unix) describing McIlroy:
> McIlroy keeps coming up. He's the smartest of all of us and the least remembered (or written down)... McIlroy sat there and wrote ---on a piece of paper, now, not on a computer--- TMG [a proprietary yacc-like program] written in TMG... And then! He now has TMG written in TMG, he decided to give his piece of paper to his piece of paper and write down what came out (the code). Which he did. And then he came over to my editor and he typed in his code, assembled it, and (I won't say without error, but with so few errors you'd be astonished) he came up with a TMG compiler, on the PDP-7, written in TMG. And it's the most basic, bare, impressive self-compilation I've ever seen in my life.
This story, by the way, leads into how Ken created B (and how that was eventually improved by Dennis Ritchie into C).
I checked out that youtube link too - you might be interested to know that his t-shirt says "επιτέλους το κατάλαβα" which is Greek for "eventually I understood it" - I thought that was neat :)
Thats a terrific story! Another interesting thing is that they were often working on very practical problems, grounded to the real world. The second unix system, the PDP 11 machine was being used for patent applications, so they had to build text processing tools and also be very careful not to break anything that the patent clerks needed. I think this combination was the key, smart people and practical problems.
Yes. What I read somewhere is that the early Unix team (some of whom had just come off the Multics project) got the full use of a spare minicomputer that was in the Labs, to build an early protototype of Unix (may or not be the first one), only by promising their manager that they would build text processing software on top of it that would be useful for the Labs' patent and other text processing work. And they delivered. Some of that work became a software suite called Writer's Workbench, IIRC, and some of it became the powerful Unix command line filters and such that we still love and use today, such as cut, paste, join, diff, tr and more - "more" as in "etc.", not the pager tool, although maybe that one too, ha ha.
