Comments on: That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named (on Mathgroup)

By: dnquark

dnquark — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:06:39 +0000

1. I appreciate Steven Christensen's efforts, and I'm willing to believe his contribution elevated the quality of discussion on Mathgroup back in the day. But today, such moderation just strikes one as odd, particularly because the target audience here is extremely highly educated, (hopefully) mature, and are quite capable of conducting themselves nicely. Experiencing mid-1990s style moderation in the year 2011 is very strange. (Of course, the entire smc.vnet.net domain is a blast from the past, so maybe it's all part of an immersive experience to make me feel nostalgic about the olden days of 486s and 14.4kbps modems).

2. SO is awesome. I'm on it. Furthermore, it is another reason for why moderation on Mathgroup is completely unnecessary: newbies can get their questions answered on SO, while the more sophisticated crowd can engage with Mathgroup luminaries.

3. Yes, having plots be very general is, in principle, desirable. Unfortunately, without a good interface (something akin to what Matlab provides) this generality is useless. I recently spent a whole day (!) reformatting a single plot to prepare it for publication. Manually changing line styles and fonts by constructing complex pattern-based replacement expressions, but that was the easy part. MMA PDF export is spectacularly bad: it's anything but WYSIWYG and requires much trial and error to get right. Next time I'm doing this in Inkscape.

By: telefunkenvf14

telefunkenvf14 — Sat, 21 May 2011 08:47:22 +0000

I stumbled across your blog while searching for something else... Anyways, two comments about MathGroup: 1. MathGroup is moderated by a single guy, and he isn't paid to do it. Yikes. I've also had references to other CAS systems and Matlab censored --- and received an email explaining why, which was nice. Basically, past flame wars lead the volunteer moderator to adopt the do-not-mention policy. Annoying, but I understand the time and energy this must save him. 2. You should join StackOverflow.com, if you haven't already done so. It is a much better/faster place to get MMA help, and the site is set up to publicly reward the best answers, good questions, and useful comments with reputation points. One final thought, about plotting in MMA, which you mentioned in another post... I agree that it can be a PITA sometimes to get things to look right, but plotting functions seem to fit the MMA design pattern of 'make things as general as possible'. Hopefully things will continue to improve---as I'm sure they will---given that all the Wolfram|Alpha plots are produced by Mathematica in the background (and they look great, IMO). If you've upgraded to version 8, you might try using the link to Wolfram|Alpha; send it your data, have it generate the plot, and then just grab that 'pod' of W|A output. The Demonstrations Project is also good source of plot customization code and examples. GIMP (open source) alternative to Photoshop may also be able to handle the necessary post processing, if you're sick of trying to code perfection in MMA. :)

By: Yaroslav Bulatov

Yaroslav Bulatov — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 08:56:38 +0000

"No mentions of competing products" is part of Mathgroup moderation policy. It can be hard to tell what is a competing product, last time my message was censored for mentioning "GAP". A couple of times I posted a message and it didn't make it to the list at all, apparently couple of other users had same problem