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I’ve written before about Sci-Hub and their fight with the publishing industry (1, 2). It’s easy to see both sides of the argument but one side, the publishers, have acted in ways that deplete whatever goodwill they might have had.

Boing Boing is reporting on the latest skirmish. Elsevier sued Bahnhof, an ISP in Sweden, demanding that it block access to Sci-Hub. They got the courts to agree and since a larger better heeled ISP had lost an appeal on a similar suit, they reluctantly agreed to comply. But they went a step further and blocked access to the Elsevier site as well, saying that if Elsevier wants to block sites, they should get a taste of their own medicine. For good measure, they also blocked access to the Bahnhof site from any connections coming from the Patent and Market Court that had issued the original ruling

Whatever you’re feelings about the dispute between Sci-Hub and the publishers, it’s hard not to see Bahnhof’s response as the perfect middle finger to those who use arguably out-of-date laws to punish anyone who interferes with their business model and draft third parties to involuntarily do their dirty work.

It’s one more reason, if you needed it, to take the side of Sci-Hub.

Last time I got high, I watched Snatch. I’d seen it twice before but I was still so confused. I should have watched the YouTube videos from Pedestrian.tv’s “A Highly Curated Selection Of Shit To Watch On YouTube When You’re Super Baked.” Selections include credulous 70s documentary The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, old-timey Cab Calloway cartoon Minnie the Moocher, and vaporwave music videos made of Simpsons episodes.

Other selections are full-length movies—and Pedestrian.tv suggests music to go with them, like a custom Dark Side of the Rainbow experience. (Might I add, several moments in Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 match up perfectly with Dark Side of the Moon.)

I’d also add the surreal cartoons of Felix Colgrave, the “It Is Wednesday My Dudes” series, comedy sketches by Kate Berlant and John Early, and silly songs about internet culture by Hovey Benjamin. And if you get too high, Lifehacker has the perfect video to mellow you out. But I’m open to suggestions.

A Highly Curated Selection Of Shit To Watch On YouTube When You’re Super Baked | Pedestrian.tv

Amuse Our Bouche is The Takeout’s column that answers your burning, boiling, and flambéed food questions.

The Korean staple kimchi is one of those amazing fermented dishes that we’re seeing in many non-Korean applications lately, such as in tacos or on top of french fries. But as with yogurt, buttermilk, or pickles, for something that seems to depend on aging, we couldn’t help but wonder: How long does kimchi last after it’s jarred? Forever? Can it go bad? If so, how can you tell? In desperation, we asked a number of chefs, all of whom have some relationship with kimchi.

“There are like 100 different types of kimchi, so it depends… Instead of using kimchi as a noun, I like to use it as a verb: Can we kimchi that?” says Bill Kim, chef and owner at Chicago’s UrbanBelly and Belly Q. “It depends on how aged you like your kimchi. Check out the color: If it’s orangey, it’s more aged. If it’s fizzy, and there are bubbles inside the jar, that means it’s fermenting. If the kimchi is bright red, it’s fresh, with no bubbles, which is how I like my kimchi. I say that like my kimchi like I like my salsa. And you would never say, ‘How old do you like your salsa?’”

For our purposes, let’s focus on the most common type of kimchi: pogi and paechu, the Napa cabbage-variety jarred with a fiery red marinade. It’s the type of kimchi you’d most likely find in the international aisle of your supermarket.

Gabriel Freeman, executive chef at Scofflaw, puts it bluntly: “Kimchi is literally controlled rot. Under the right conditions it will keep for years, changing in texture and flavor as it ages. Some people prefer a very young kimchi, crunchy and bright. Others seek a kimchi that is deeply aged, soft, funky, writhing with lactobacillus.”

Something deeply aged, soft, funky, and writhing with bacteria sounds like it’s best reserved for the most adventurous of eaters. But other chefs say it’s unlikely your old, funky kimchi is actually bad.

Nanam Yoon Myszka and her husband Ken run a number of restaurants in the Central Illinois town of Bloomington under the Epiphany Farms umbrella—and all those restaurants, thanks to Myszka’s heritage, feature Korean influence in some of the dishes. Myszka said that in South Korea, she would often frequent restaurants that specialize in long-fermented kimchi, places that proudly advertised their kimchi has been aged for three years or more.

It’s never that pronounced a problem amongst Korean families, just by the fact they consume such large quantities so quickly that kimchi sitting in a fridge for months is not a frequent problem.

Myszka doesn’t have a definitive answer for just how long you can keep kimchi in the fridge, but she did offer a few strategies to keep it as fresh as possible.

First, if you do buy a large jar of kimchi, you should avoid constantly opening and closing the jar and exposing it to air—she suggests scooping a few large spoonfuls into a separate container, take what you need over the course of a week, and only replenishing from the master jar when you need to.

Myszka also said you should always push the cabbage as far down the jar as possible, until the red liquid line comes above the cabbage. Having that pickling liquid soak in the vegetable will extend its shelf line.

A sign that kimchi has aged well is when it loses its crispness and gets mushy. If you express hesitation eating this straight, Myszka said you should throw it in a stew, like a kimchi jjigae. Or you can turn it into fried rice, or better yet, sautée it in a cast-iron skillet with pork belly.

Worse comes to worse: It’s pretty cheap, so when in doubt, throw it out. Or you can listen to the advice of a Korean mother: “If I find some white [growth] on the cabbage leaves,” Myszka said, “my mother would just say, ‘wash it and eat it!’”

This post was originally published on the All things Linguistic blog about a year ago by Gretchen McCulloch. Gretchen started blogging as a linguistics grad student at McGill University, but is now a full-time pop linguist, bridging the gap between linguistics and the general public. She writes pop linguistics articles for various places and is currently writing a book about internet language for Penguin. She also cohosts Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, with Lauren Gawne of the blog Superlinguo. I loved this post so much I asked if I could repost it for Thesis Whisperer readers who might have missed it.

The post tackles the tricky subject of making small talk with a speaker at a conference – a topic I’ve thought about writing, but never got to, so I was glad to find out that Gretchen had written a better one. As a regular guest speaker I know that many people eye you off at the conference morning tea, but don’t approach – making it a surprisingly lonely experience. Be kind to keynotes! Read this, muster up your courage and then start the conversation. Trust me, they will be grateful.

Making small talk with someone who’s just given a talk, whether at a conference or at a colloquium or invited talk, can feel intimidating, especially if you’re a student or early in your academic career. But as someone who’s currently spending a lot of time on the opposite side of that divide, I’ve realized that when I’m a speaker, I really really want people to come up and talk to me. So here’s your pep talk, and some tips on what to say.

The key thing to realize is that most of the time, you know more about the speaker than they know about you, so you need to start the conversation and you get to pick what it’s about.

Even before the talk, the speaker’s name and abstract has been emailed around the department or is in the conference booklet, and after the talk you’ve had somewhere between 20 minutes and an hour to hear them talk about what they’re interested in. If it’s a course, maybe you’ve even had weeks. Maybe you’ve googled them, maybe you’ve read their articles, maybe they’re your academic hero, maybe you just stumbled into the talk but now you find you’re enjoying it, whatever. You know something about them that makes them interesting to you.

The speaker, on the other hand, might not even know the names of anyone in the audience at all (at a conference) or might know only their one or two host(s) (at an invited talk). Or even if they know half the audience, if you’re one of the people they don’t know, then have no particular reason to want to talk with you. And even if they do have a general desire to meet people in their audience (and they probably do), all they have for small talk options with these unknown people are very general questions that can be asked of any linguist, like the classic academic icebreaker “So, what do you work on?” and its relatives “So, are you a student?” and “So, where are you from?” (Note that in an academic context, this means “What university(s) are you affiliated with?” and not “Where did you grow up?”)

Protip: if you’re new to academic conferences and want to seem like a srs linguist, make sure you have an answer to “So, what do you work on?” It’s acceptable to say “[phenomenon] in [language]” as a short answer, but it’s better to have a 30 second summary that gives the other person something more to hook onto, like “I’m looking at constructions like [Example McExampleface] in [language]. You might expect people to say [this thing], but in fact they say [other thing].” This gives them a couple of places to ask follow-up questions from if they’re interested. If someone gives you a “[phenomenon] in [language]” type answer though, a good way to continue the conversation is to ask “So what would that look like?/Do you have an example?/What have you been finding?” 

“What do you work on?” is a perfectly acceptable academic icebreaker for standing around the reception desk / coffee table / buffet line, but if you’ve just seen someone’s talk you can’t ask them what they work on – they just told you! If you hover around silently long enough, they might ask you instead, but you run the risk of someone who does know how to talk with speakers starting a conversation first. Of course, if you’re not actually interested in the speaker, you can leave without chatting, but if you are, there are better options than hovering around silently! Here are some of them:

Unlike the question period, you don’t have to have a formal “question” about the particular talk in order to go up to the speaker and talk with them afterwards. So instead think about how to start a conversation that will be interesting and relevant for both you and the speaker. A good way to think about this of options is to think about why you came to the talk and what you got out of it:

• You like a particular article they’ve written or other thing they’ve done. If you know this in advance, you have time to work out some specific comment(s) or question(s) about it.
• You’re working on or thinking about working on something that’s related to something they’re doing.
• You’d like to ask some specific advice. (Not “how do I become you” but “I’ve done X and Y towards Goal. What would you suggest I do next?” Try not to ask things that are readily googlable.)
• You work in Other Framework or with Other Language and you’d like to talk about how their thing might work with the thing you work on.
• You know of a related study or data that they might find relevant. (Don’t frame this as accusatory “why didn’t you cite this??”, rather as helpful “there’s a paper that might be useful for you”.)
• They mentioned something in the talk that you thought was interesting or got confused about, and you’re wondering if they could tell you a bit more about it. Not “please re-explain your entire talk to me” but “I’m wondering about what you said on slide 17.″ (Especially if they said “I’m not going into this in detail, but feel free to ask me about it later.” Take them up on this!)
• You have some acquaintanceship in common, such as you’re working with their former supervisor or someone they went to grad school with. (”I just wanted to say hi – I work with Profy McProferson.”) You’ll probably still need to follow that up with one of the above topics though in order to turn into a real conversation.

It may feel self-promotional to go up to a speaker and say that you work on a similar area, but it’s actually a great idea, as long as you start with a quick version and let them ask questions as interested, don’t just jump right into an extended description. People do talks partly as a shortcut to networking – you could have a bunch of individual conversations with a roomful of people to see who has common research interests, or you could just give a talk and let them self-identify to you after. (Giving talks is, counter-intuitively, a great idea for introverts and socially awkward people! You get a defined role and a bunch of people wanting to start conversations with you about stuff you’re interested in.)

For example, I always want to hear from people who are working on internet language or public outreach projects, but same goes if you’re talking with a speaker about your mutual interest in split ergativity or Bantu languages or whatever. You’ll want to tailor this to what kind of conference you’re at though. If you’re at a big sociophonetics conference, it’s less interesting to come up to a speaker and say “I, like everyone else here, am a sociophonetician” than if you’re at a small general invited talk.

Here’s some more general tips, some of which are courtesy of twitter:

• Several people mentioned that it can be a good idea to prepare a couple of potential questions or comments, especially if you’re worried about sounding more like a fan than a srs professional.
• That said, as someone who has now been on the receiving end of occasional fangirling, I find it endearing but also I don’t always know what to do with it. It’s super helpful if you can set us on the course of having an actual conversation, rather than putting me into the weird position of “why yes, I agree, I am awesome.” It’s always nice and safe to start with “I enjoyed your talk” but follow that up with something concrete.
• You know your own interests and also mine! I only know mine – tell me which of your interests matches mine and we can have a conversation about that. (”I really liked your thing about X, because I work on Y, and I think a Z approach can be useful for both of us/what we have in common is W/I was wondering how you deal with This Part.”)
• Social awkwardness doesn’t evaporate when someone becomes a famous professor. They don’t hate you. In fact, for most professors, mentoring emerging scholars who are interested in similar topics is one of the highlights of the job.
• Remember that the speaker was once a student just like you, and can remember what it was like to feel intimidated. And the further removed someone is from being a student, the more students they have interacted with along the way. They’re not expecting you to know all the things already. But they can’t read your mind to know that you’re wishing you could talk with them. You have to take that initial step and then they can meet you partway.
• You know the speaker’s name, but they likely don’t know yours, if you’re worrying about whether to talk with them (especially at colloquia/invited talks where people aren’t wearing nametags). Feel free to introduce yourself by name and/or introduce anyone else you know who joins the conversation.

And some advice about what happens once you’ve started that conversation:

• Pay attention to your surroundings and the speaker’s level of interest. It’s great to engage a speaker in conversation but you’re probably not the only one who wants to do so.
• If there are lots of people who want to talk to the person, keep your comments brief or try to convert things into a group conversation, not an extended monologue from you.
• If it’s immediately after the speaker’s talk and they haven’t had time to get water/food/coffee/etc when such things are available, suggest walking to the appropriate location rather than trapping them in a corner without sustenance.
• If you’re talking about your own research, don’t be self-deprecating about it (”Oh I’m working on X but it’s not nearly as cool as your thing”). Even if it’s not going so great right now, there must be some initial reason why you thought it was interesting enough to work on. Find that again.
• If you’re seated next to each other at a dinner table, it’s appropriate to have a longer conversation than if you’re at a standing reception (or keeping the speaker from the reception!).
• As with any conversation, keep an eye out for signs the other person is becoming bored or distracted – it’s better to leave the other person wishing you could have talked longer than to have them hunting for excuses to leave.
• If the person gives you advice, take it! If you meet the person again in 6 months, you want to be able to say “I read that article you suggested and I have X question/it was super helpful/it wasn’t completely related but it did lead me to this other great article” not “oops I spent all this time getting advice from you and didn’t act on any of it.”

Anyone who’s been on either side of the speaker/audience divide want to chime in?

Related posts

Small world – the academic conference trek

Gretchen also suggests this post on how to talk to famous professors

As I write this, there has been an escalation of white supremacist activity in the US, and the generally difficult political climate in both the US and the UK has not really become less difficult than when I wrote Part 1. Part 1 is still relevant and deals with how to make decisions and make time for political activism in a sustainable way using the principles priorities, boundaries, and slack. I also encourage you to give higher priority to basic self-care: sleep, exercise, good food. The situation may be urgent but it is not an emergency. It will require sustained action.

I concluded with this, which I want to return to now:

Your teaching and your research and writing are just as important today as they were yesterday. The fact that there are concerted attempts to silence or diminish the value of the arts and humanities (in particular) or academia (in general) does not mean they have no value. In fact, it may indicate that they are so valuable they are feared in some quarters. Even if you struggle to articulate why what you do is important in ways that your neighbours understand, trust that it is important. Keep doing it. (me, Juggling in dystopian times, Part 1)

And then this week, I read this in Kelly Diels newsletter.

This is not the time for those of us who are committed to justice and doing The Work to pull back or be less visible.

This is not the time for us to voluntarily make less money or invite deprivation and struggle into our businesses and payrolls.

This is the time for us to do MORE of what we were already doing.

As a collective, we need to amass even more influence and power and money.

We need to train and influence more people.

“You will not replace us.”

WATCH US DO EXACTLY THAT.

(Kelly Diels, What to do about this world, 13 August 2017)

Kelly’s audience is entrepreneurs, hence the reference to business and payrolls, but this also applies to you. The reason white supremacists are marching on university campuses, and governments and political organizations are attacking the humanities in general, particular university policies, or “expertise”, is because the work you do threatens their power. You may not see or intend your work as threatening. But even the much discussed and rarely specified “critical thinking” is a political threat to the status quo. Asking questions is dangerous. You ask questions for a living.

Your work is important

The detailed scholarship you do provides more nuanced understandings of (aspects of) the world we live in. It asks new questions about things we think we already know. It extends what we already know in important ways. That is, in and of itself, important work. There is a lot of work to be done. Your work is likely a tiny part of that work but it is no less important for that.

When you teach, you give your students a more nuanced understanding of the world (or at least some part of it). You provide them with additional knowledge and you provide them with new ways of looking at the world. You suggest different questions. You bring ideas together in ways they may never have thought of.

And you show them how to do that with their own questions. You teach them how to research. You teach them how to make arguments and support them with evidence. You teach them how to evaluate evidence, ask questions, find better evidence or better explanatory frameworks and arguments.

As Diels says, “This is the time for us to do MORE of what we were already doing.”

You don’t have to do something different.

Trust your judgement

Specific political events make you feel like the haters are right, that you really are doing “useless” research and teaching. You may feel like your time would be better spent out there on the front lines. Or studying something more directly relevant.

This is not true. You do not know what it is about your work that will be relevant.

As bizarre as our political discussion has become in recent times, it’s still unusual to see the history of Roman Britain on the frontline of debate.” (Jack Hunger, 11 August 2017, Prospect Magazine)

The ancient historians and classicists did not know that their particular knowledge of ethnicity in Roman Britain would be what was needed to engage in active political debate at the beginning of August 2017. And yet, this is exactly what happened in the UK. It was all about how Roman Britain was represented in a children’s animated series, with accusations of political correctness and bias. ( See also Mary Beard in the TLS and John-Mark Philo in The Conversation There are links to other pieces in some of those, too.)

Most ancient historians and classicists (not to mention the geneticists who study ancient DNA) are not motivated by the desire to intervene in political debates and argue with guys who troll people on social media for fun or bring torches to rallies. They are mostly the kind of people that think learning Latin and Ancient Greek is an interesting challenge, and who like hanging out in archives and thinking deeply about historical puzzles. They are the kind of humanities academics that are often held up as irrelevant. They teach degree programs that are derided as useless.

Yes, you research and teach the particular subjects you do because of a personal interest. You are a big geek, interested in stuff that you can’t discuss at the dinner table unless you’ve invited your fellow geeks (i.e. your colleagues) over for dinner. You are kind of lucky that someone is paying you a salary to teach and research this stuff, especially when people are starving. (I hope it is clear that I do not see the term “geek” as an insult. It merely describes someone with a very deep interest in a very specific topic.)

And yet, your research and your teaching are important, in ways it may be difficult to specify. You are contributing to the advancement of knowledge. You are training a new generation. Trust this. You are not “weird” or “out of touch”. Your work is not “irrelevant” or “useless”.

There will be occasions when you need to defend your research, your discipline, or your programme in clear ways to specific audiences. But try not to make defensiveness your standard posture. Defensiveness gives power to those who dismiss your work. (Calling something “irrelevant” or “useless” is not criticism.) Doing your research and teaching confidently and being the particular kind of scholar you are confidently is a political act.

Modelling what it means to value knowledge

Your students hear those statements about how “useless” their degree is and have chosen to do it anyway. They have chosen this degree because they think it is interesting. Whether you like it or not, you are a person in authority who confirms that their geeky interests are worthwhile. They need you to push them beyond whatever it was that got them interested in this topic to begin with and discover the wonder and fascination of the scholarly work that has captured your interest enough to make it your career.

They can’t all become professors, nor would they all want to, so it is also helpful to highlight the skills they are learning as they delve into this particular field of knowledge and how those skills might be transferred to more mundane contemporary concerns. It is also worth helping them determine what exactly they enjoy about this work in terms that help them see those qualities in other work they might do after they finish their degree. It is worth pointing out the qualities you see in them and their work that will be valued by those who do not understand or value the content of their degree.

And when an opportunity presents itself, or if a good example exists, it is helpful to point out how this detailed specific knowledge can help them engage in debates about current events, popular culture, or whatever. You don’t have to avoid that stuff, but that’s not what makes your work important. It is not the “relevance” or “transferrable” skills that make what you teach valuable.

In a political climate that devalues your work, it is a political act to treat your knowledge and skills as valuable. Be an example to your students of the value of knowledge.

What would it mean to do MORE of what you are already doing?

I’m going to throw out a couple of ideas here but I do not in any way assume this is all this could mean. This is what occurs to me today, partly influenced by some of the things people are writing about as they prepare courses for a new academic year in the wake of a particularly tough weekend. Please add other ideas or share what you have decided to do in the comments as inspiration for others.

If you are reading the news and (metaphorically) shaking your fists at the lack of knowledge of something that you actually teach, are you sure you are teaching it? Are you teaching it effectively? Is the current situation making you realize that you had implicit learning objectives that you might want to make explicit? Once you’ve made them explicit (at least to yourself), review your reading lists and learning activities and evaluate whether you are actually helping students achieve those objectives.

This is particularly true for those critical thinking skills. Academia tends to value knowledge over skills. It’s as if we expect students to either come with all the skills they need, or to pick them up by osmosis. What is your reaction to current events (or what people say about current events) telling you about the kinds of skills you want your students to acquire through engagement with the material you present? And how can you support them in acquiring those skills? What would evidence of those skills look like, even if they still disagree with you?

Are there topics you avoid when teaching because they will be contentious? Can you evaluate the risks of including this material and figure out ways of mitigating the risks so that your course better meets your own scholarly values for what coverage of this topic looks like? You need to keep yourself and your students safe, but you also need to stretch a bit out of your comfort zone to extend the bounds of safety.

Ask similar questions about your research. It may be hard to disentangle your feelings of self-doubt about your research and writing (if you have any), but it is worth noticing and making an effort. Don’t change track out of defensiveness, but do reflect on your research priorities. Have you been playing it safe? Is there a topic you’ve been avoiding? Are there questions you’d really like to investigate but you’ve been holding back from because it seems too risky? What might that look like?

Keep an eye out for your opportunity to educate a broader public

Another obvious way to do more of what you are already doing is to expand your audience. This should not be taken lightly. Mary Beard (who took the lead in the Roman Britain debate) has clearly made a personal decision to be more public about her work and is actively seeking out opportunities to speak to a wider audience. She has taken a lot of abuse, so we’d all understand if you aren’t ready for that. This may also be something you don’t want to do right now, even if you decide to do it later.

Even if you don’t actively seek more public outlets for your research, you can respond when public debates would be enhanced by your knowledge. Make sure your bio on the university website is up to date, and makes it clear what you are qualified to speak on. Talk to the media and communications office (not the academic department, the PR people for the university) so they know what you are willing to do and which topics you can speak to. Ask if they offer media training or other support. Getting media training will help you understand how media works and how to prepare your material for this kind of audience.

There will be opportunities to support your more publicly oriented peers when they face negative coverage, at least with comments on news articles, shares and further comments on various social media platforms. There will be opportunities for you to pitch an article that adds your specific knowledge to a debate that has taken off in a public forum (as Jennifer Raff did when people questioned the evidence and brought up genetics in the Roman Britain debate).

You may also find opportunities to speak to a wider audience without going quite as wide as national media and Twitter. Local libraries, bookstores, and museums often organize talks and other events that enable interested members of the public to learn more about their own particular geeky pursuits. There are members of the public who want to learn more and discuss this topic without bringing out all the haters. Opening up spaces for them to speak confidently about their interest in “useless” topics is a political act.

This is a long game.

Politics is not more important than your work. Politics is not less important than you work. Look at what is possible for you now. Identify your priorities. Set boundaries. Go do what you do.

Related posts:

Juggling in dystopian times, Part 1

Not so much a shenanigan as an inaccuracy, and also not so much a shenanigan as a hellish montage of bedpans, shit, and gagging…

On the premiere episode of the seventh season of Game of Thrones, Samwell Tarly is a lowly book-reshelver and bedpan-emptier in the Maesters’  medieval-style library with chains on the shelves. Nice work, GoT, except your chains are completely non-functional, as this article explains.

Of course, if GoT had shown the chains doing their jobs — keeping the books secured to their shelves — then Sam wouldn’t have had any reshelving to do (and we would’ve had to witness even more bedpan-emptying, which, honestly, would’ve killed me). And more important (spoiler alert), he wouldn’t have had any chance of stealing a book out of the Citadel library and thereby, perhaps, saving everybody in the Seven Kingdoms from certain death at the hands of the White Walkers.

This PBS video shows functioning book chains.

Thanks, Lynne M. Thomas!

It is really that simple!

Quit using goto-line and isearch to navigate in your Org-Mode document. I didn’t want to use Helm or Imenu to do it and Org-Mode has a built in solution with org-goto. Be sure to bind the “pop” key very close-by to make it symmetrical and fast.

(define-key org-mode-map (kbd "s-u") #'org-goto)
(define-key org-mode-map (kbd "s-U") #'org-mark-ring-goto)


‘If your knees aren’t green by the end of the day, you ought to seriously re-examine your life.’
~Bill Watterson

By Leo Babauta

I’ve been making my small decisions throughout the day, recently, with a simple question: How will I feel about this when today is over?

If I have a choice right now between reading social media and news articles, or writing, I know what the answer will be: at the end of the day, I’d be much happier if I’d chosen writing.

If I am faced with chips and pizza, I might be mightily tempted to eat them right now, but I know that later in the day I’ll be sorry I did. I inevitably feel bad after I eat greasy foods, though I always forget that before I eat the food.

At the end of the day, I won’t regret having spent a little time with my wife or kids, but I will regret watching videos online or wasting my time by playing games.

I won’t regret having done my workout, but I will regret sitting all day.

I’ve learned these answers through repeated observation, but you can learn your own answers by asking the question before you do anything, making a hypothesis (“I won’t regret this later”) and then seeing if you’re right by reviewing the results at the end of each day.

Have a daily review before you go to bed, even if it’s just a mental review. Were you right? Do you regret any of your choices? If so, don’t feel bad about being wrong — be happy that you’ve learned this.

Then make a better choice the next time.

What are you going to do next, after reading this? Will you be happy with that, at the end of this day?

Konferans ya da benzer bir etkinlik düzenliyorsunuz ve onlarca katılımcı var. İsimlik hazırlamak kabusa dönüşüyor çünkü herkes için isimleri yeniden yazıyorsunuz. Gelin bu işi LaTeX ile otomatize edelim!

Her isimlik katılımcının adını, üniversitesini ve üniversite logosunu içersin. Ben tek taraflı isimlikleri sevemiyorum. Yok arkası döndü de, geri çevireyim derdinden katılımcıyı kurtaralım. Bunun için her isimden önlü arkalı olacak şekilde iki tane olsun. Dış çizgiden ikisini ortak kesip ortadan ikiye katlayalım, kırtasiyeden alacağımız saydam isimliğe sığdıralım.

Üniversite logolarını ille de resim formatında tutmayalım. PDF de olabilsin, çözünürlük çok olsun, gözümüz bayram etsin.

İsim listesini genelde Excel'de tutarız. Excel'in bir sütununda tüm katılımcılardan

\confpin{Ad Soyad}{Üniversite}{Resim Dosyasının Adı}

formatında içeriği toplayalım. Üniversitelerin logolarını çalışma klasörüne ekleyelim. Ve Excel'den aldığımız isimleri dosyanın içine yapıştıralım. Ve işin gerisini LaTeX'e bırakalım.

Kaynak dosyaları buradan indirebilirsiniz.

Kod şöyle:

\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{letter}
% Yazan: İsmail Arı

\usepackage[freepin,boxed,rowmode]{ticket}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[export]{adjustbox}

\unitlength=1mm
\ticketNumbers{2}{4}
\ticketSize{86}{60} % birim uzunlukta
\ticketDistance{0}{0} % birim uzunlukta

% Varsayılan isimliği yapalım. \ticketdefault arkaplanı beyaz bir isimlik olsun
\renewcommand{\ticketdefault}{
  \put( 4, 7){\line(1,0){80}}
  \put( 8, 3){\scriptsize ACM-ICPC Programlama Kampı} % Etkinlik adı
  \put( 46, 3){\scriptsize Boğaziçi Ü. 23--30 Ocak 2013} % Etkinlik tarihi
}

% İsimliğin bileşenlerini ekleyelim
\newcommand{\confpin}[3]{
	\ticket{%
    \put(44,28){\makebox[0mm]{\bfseries\Large #1}}
    \put(44,19){\makebox[0mm]{#2}}
    \put(44,40){\makebox[0mm]{\includegraphics[width=24mm,height=14mm,keepaspectratio]{#3}}}
  }
	\ticket{%
    \put(44,30){\makebox[0mm]{\bfseries\Large #1}}
    \put(44,22){\makebox[0mm]{#2}}
    \put(44, 40){\makebox[0mm]{\includegraphics[width=24mm,height=14mm,keepaspectratio]{#3}}}
 }
}

\begin{document}
\sffamily

%# İsim, Okul, Resim adı
\confpin{İsmail Arı}{Boğaziçi Üniversitesi}{boun}
\confpin{Nehir Şengül}{ODTÜ}{odtu}
\confpin{Fatma Şirin}{Özyeğin Üniversitesi}{ozu}
\confpin{Ahmet Ali}{Koç Üniversitesi}{kou}
\confpin{Mehmet Gül}{İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi}{itu}
\confpin{Deniz Derya}{Hacettepe Üniversitesi}{hac}
\confpin{Irmak Algün}{Sabancı Üniversitesi}{sau}
\confpin{Onur Şanlı}{Sakarya Üniversitesi}{sakarya}

%# Elle yazmak için yedek boş isimlik(ler)
\confpin{}{Boğaziçi Üniversitesi}{boun} 
\end{document}

Örnekteki isimlerin çıktısı ise şöyle:

LaTeX'in gücü adına! İsimlik hazırlamak artık kabus değil.