Virtual Office Door

...the stuff that would be taped to my actual office door if it were arbitrarily large...

Here's my first LaTeX package, which you can use to put a fancy cover page on your exams. If you're a TeXnician, I'd love for you to improve this. Just do me a favor and share the result with me, so I don't have to use an inferior version!

jscover.sty by James A. Swenson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. [Get jscover.sty, and ExamTemplate.tex for an example of how to use it.]
Jorge Cham at Ph.D. Comics explains how one writes a doctoral thesis, and what one should not expect to learn in the process. (update 3/21/07)
Associated Press technology writer Jordan Robertson has written one of the world's perfect sentences in the article, "Scientists dubious of quantum claims" (removed). Here, Robertson describes how Herb Martin, CEO of D-Wave Systems Inc., characterizes D-Wave's new product: "[Martin] said all the evidence the company has indicates that the device is performing quantum computations, but he acknowledged there is some uncertainty." I guess it must work! (2/14/07)
Check out Carlos A. Furuti's site on map projections. My favorite is the Tiled Peirce Quincuncial Map shown below, from Furuti's Conformal Maps node. He even has printable versions of many polyhedral projections! (12/13/06)
Dan Velleman of Amherst imagines the consequences "[i]f the IRS had discovered the quadratic formula...."[PDF] (12/13/06)
On a practical application of set theory (10/14/01)

The college application process is stressful for students, so it's unfortunate that UNC-Chapel Hill accidentally sent congratulatory e-mails (removed) to 2,700 prospective students who had not, in fact, been admitted. (1/25/07)
CNN.com reports (removed) that many women entering college "don't see engineering as a way to help others," so they choose other careers. Cecilia's Blog says,

Whaaaat? Of course engineering helps people!!!
We do things like create transportation systems, develop clean and renewable sources of energy, build better commnunication systems and infrastructures, design livable neighborhoods, help paralized people gain mobility and independence, make de-mining robots, and countless other things that make people's lives better.
Engineers make the world a better place to live. We need better PR!

Nicely put. (1/25/07)
Did I Miss Anything? -- a cautionary poem for students -- part of Poetry 180 at the Library of Congress. (12/13/06)

If you're interested in my opinion on the war in Iraq, you can click here. (1/25/07)
The U.S. government sent Canadian citizen Mahrer Arar to Syria to be tortured. (11/4/03)
Update: NPR's Morning Edition reports, "A Canadian high commission ruled Monday [9/18/06] there was no evidence linking [Arar] to any terrorist organization." (9/22/06)
Update: NPR's All Things Considered reports, "The Bush administration formally refused the Canadian government's request to remove Maher Arar from a terrorist watch list." (1/25/07)
A war poem by Robert Service.

If you can print something from a Windows application, you can (almost certainly) save it in PDF format with PDFCreator. Despite the name, PDFCreator also allows you to save in PostScript and EPS formats, as well as many standard graphics formats (BMP, JPEG, PNG, PCX, and TIFF). It's fantastic software: easy to install, easy to use, and free under GPL. Strongly recommended for anyone who publishes anything from Windows. (1/26/07)
You can get custom graph paper in PDF format from Free Online Graph Paper! Once there, you probably want to click on Plain Graph Paper PDF Generator, but they have various other things too. (1/26/07)

The Virtual Office Door