Fifth and final round of edits

004/codex-004.tex

@@ -199,7 +199,7 @@ A well-educated populace is a public good and there is no humane reason why any
 
 His second argument was that as a prospective biology teacher, I was required to get a group science ``minor'', which is in quotation marks because it was actually 36 credit hours (the equivalent of a major) rather than the 20 credit hours typical of an actual minor. As a result, I would have little time or energy (or money!) for another minor.
 
-There are very solid reasons I got of out teaching, but unemployment makes us do strange things. So in 2008 I decided to go back to teaching. To renew my license, I needed to get eight credit hours in ``a teachable subject'' and I decided to take a couple of English classes, as that would both meet the legal requirements and also give me a chance to read and write for credit. 
+There are very solid reasons I got of out teaching, but unemployment makes us do strange things—hence the decision to go back to teaching which is really the only thing I'm good at. To renew my license, I needed to get eight credit hours in ``a teachable subject'' and I decided to take a couple of English classes, as that would both meet the legal requirements and also give me a chance to read and write for credit. 
 
 As they say, things happened.
 
@@ -223,7 +223,7 @@ Still, this left some twenty-odd young people on the other side of that door who
 
 I mention all of this because it was generally assumed that young people were \textit{so} good with computers, that they were \textit{so} comfortable with computers, and why wouldn't they be? After all, they grew up with them. In fact, the term that got bounced around a lot in the education world at the time was ``digital native''. It was just assumed that young people could do anything with computers because they had grown up with them.
 
-Well, I had grown up with computers, too, only I did it twenty-five years before these kids did and the computers I grew up with did not have a GUI or a mouse. They made you think a little bit more than modern computers.
+I had grown up with computers, too, only I did it twenty-five years before these kids did and the computers I grew up with did not have a GUI or a mouse. They made you think a little bit more than modern computers.
 
 But it is not the presence or absence of a mouse or a GUI that makes you good with a computer. A lot of kids my age also had Commodore 64s and all they did with them was shove a cartridge in the back and play games. This in no way prepared them to know how to set up a spreadsheet in VisiCalc to balance your checkbook.\footnote{Which was one of the very first things I ever tried to do with a spreadsheet. It is not nearly as easy as one might think.}
 
@@ -276,7 +276,7 @@ But this engineer showed me that if you have a cell selected all you need to do
 
 This was sheer genius to me and yet I had never heard of it! If I had known this ten years before, it would have saved me so many mouse clicks and so much frustration. 
 
-In this instance, this engineer, who viewed himself as anything but ``good with computers'' was indeed very good with computers, simply because he knew something I didn't. 
+In this instance, this engineer who viewed himself as anything but ``good with computers'' was indeed very good with computers, simply because he knew something I didn't. 
 
 Here's another example. At my current job we have an Excel form that we use every single day. It basically does three things: 1) it collects any findings we discover in an experiment, 2) it adds those findings to a database so that we have metrics to measure analyst performance by, and 3) it generates an email to send to the analyst in question so they make corrections. 
 
@@ -294,7 +294,7 @@ The number one characteristic I've discovered that is shared by all people who a
 
 And that's what I ultimately like about Linux—it encourages you to keep going. You don't get to a point where things are hidden away behind a proprietary brick wall. Everything is open source, right down to the core, and you can dig as deeply as you like. The only thing that's really holding you back (besides your attitude) is your time and money. But for me to even talk about these things would mean that I would have to do a deep dive into the many faults of capitalism, and that's not what this zine is about, although I do touch on that tangentially (or not so tangentially) from time to time.
 
-That is really my biggest disappointment when it comes to computers. They were supposed to be the great equalizer, because everybody would have access to the same information and the same tools. But it hasn't worked out like that at all. We commodified everything. I look around me now and I thoroughly understand the reaction that the Taylor character had at the end of the original \textit{Planet of the Apes} movie: ``You maniacs!'' he yells when he sees the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on the other side of the Forbidden Zone. ``You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!''\footnote{This is an authentically great film by the way. With a script cowritten by Rod Serling and based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote \textit{Bridge on the River Kwai}) and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (who also directed \textit{Patton}) how could it not be? I highly recommend it.}\textsuperscript{,}\footnote{Or as Paul McCartney might say, ``I look around me and I see it isn't so.'' No, it is not so. It is \textit{so} not so.} Pretty much every pop-up asking me to join a mailing list or asking me to like their Facebook page, every advertisement, every clickbait article, and every social media algorithm makes me feel this way.
+That is really my biggest disappointment when it comes to computers. They were supposed to be the great equalizer, because everybody would have access to the same information and the same tools. But it hasn't worked out like that at all. We commodified everything. I look around me now and I thoroughly understand the reaction that the Taylor character had at the end of the original \textit{Planet of the Apes} movie: ``You maniacs!'' he yells when he sees the ruins of the Statue of Liberty on the other side of the Forbidden Zone. ``You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!''\footnote{This is an authentically great film by the way. With a script cowritten by Rod Serling and based on a novel by Pierre Boulle (who also wrote \textit{Bridge on the River Kwai}) and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner (who also directed \textit{Patton}) how could it not be? I highly recommend it.}\textsuperscript{,}\footnote{Or as Paul McCartney might say, ``I look around me and I see it isn't so.'' No, it is not so. It is \textit{so} not so.} Pretty much every pop-up asking me to join a mailing list or asking me to like a Facebook page,\footnote{Which is especially bizarre given that I haven't even had a chance to read their webpage yet. Why do I want to like something or sign up for something if I haven't even seen it yet?} every advertisement, every clickbait article, and every social media algorithm makes me feel this way.
 
 Yep, we blew it all up so we could create value for the shareholders. We're not quite at a ruined-Statue-of-Liberty-on-the-beach point yet, but we are, I fear, very close to the end. We could have done better as a species, but we didn't. As Stephen King says of his generation, ``we had a chance to change the world but opted for the Home Shopping Network Instead''.\footnote{In \textit{On Writing}—which is a great book to read, whether you want to become a writer or not.}
 
@@ -323,7 +323,7 @@ alias gita="git add *"
 alias gitx="git add *.tex"
 \end{Verbatim}
 
-The first one just prints out the status of any git project that I'm working on. The second one will automatically add all files (except for invisible files) to the commit. Because I use \LaTeX{} a lot, I also have the third one, which will commit any new or changed files that end in a \texttt{.tex} extension.
+The first one just prints out the status of the git project that I'm working on. The second one will automatically add all files (except for invisible files) to the commit. Because I use \LaTeX{} a lot, I also have the third one, which will commit any new or changed files that end in a \texttt{.tex} extension.
 
 I rarely have invisible files in my git repositories except for the .gitignore file, which I seldom change, so I don't need a bash alias for it. I find it easy enough to type \verb+git add .gitignore+ on the rare occasion that I need it. But if I did want to add that file on a regular basis, I could just change that line to:
 
@@ -463,7 +463,7 @@ And, as we shall see, sometimes it's beneficial to do something the wrong way. Y
 	\begin{itemize}[noitemsep]
 	\item It doesn't work and it breaks things in weird places.
 	\item It doesn't work and it breaks almost everything. 
-	\item It doesn't work but it only breaks a few local things.
+	\item It doesn't work and it still manages to break a few local things.
 	\end{itemize}
 \end{itemize}
 
@@ -473,7 +473,7 @@ Let's start at the bottom, and work our way up from there.
 
 Very wrong ways are very wrong because not only do they \textit{not} work, they take other things down with them. 
 
-\paragraph{It doesn't work and it breaks things in weird places.} You may wonder why this is worse than ``It doesn't work and it breaks almost everything else'' but for me the answer is simple: it can be terribly difficult to find those weird places. When I say ``weird'' I mean that they may be obscure places that nobody looks, they may be distant from the current situation and apparently unconnected,\footnote{But nothing is \textit{truly} disconnected from anything else.}, or they may be things that you don't have to rely on very often, so you may not discover that they are broken until days, weeks, or even months later.
+\paragraph{It doesn't work and it breaks things in weird places.} You may wonder why this is worse than ``It doesn't work and it breaks almost everything else'' but for me the answer is simple: it can be terribly difficult to find those weird places. When I say ``weird'' I mean that they may be obscure places that nobody looks, they may be distant from the current situation and apparently unconnected,\footnote{But nothing is \textit{truly} disconnected from anything else.} or they may be things that you don't have to rely on very often, so you may not discover that they are broken until days, weeks, or even months later.
 
 \paragraph{It doesn't work and it breaks almost everything else.} This is bad, but it is not bad as the previous example, because it has two advantages. First, because almost everything is breaking, those breaks are pretty obvious. Second, because almost everything is breaking, this provides you an opportunity to look at the overall structure of your project and examine how all the different parts are connected. There may be connections that you weren't aware of. You may realize that some things are connected that shouldn't be or that some things aren't connected that should be. Sometimes it takes a real disaster to point out the strengths and weaknesses of your system.
 
@@ -499,13 +499,13 @@ Wrong ways may work, but they break other things along the way. As we shall see,
 
 \paragraph{It works, but you have no idea why.} I was very tempted to put this in the wrong\textit{ish} section, and in some cases it may certainly belong there. Quite frankly, you \textit{should} know why a technique works. Not knowing why can be dangerous, because you can assume too much about this particular technique. That may cause you to be a bit overconfident with it, and use it in a situation that doesn't really warrant its use.
 
-\paragraph{It works, but it requires you to rework some other parts of the project.} I admit, I was at a loss as to where to put this one. And I guess it depends on whether you are using a kludge or a best practice, so I'm going to assume you are using a best practice. In which case, this shows you places that you were possibly \textit{not} using something which is a best practice, and now you need to make those things better.
+\paragraph{It works, but it requires you to rework some other parts of the project.} I admit, I was at a loss as to where to put this one. I guess it depends on whether you are using a kludge or a best practice, so I'm going to assume you are using a best practice. In which case, this shows you places that you were possibly \textit{not} using something which is a best practice, and now you need to make those things better.
 
 \paragraph{It works, but it's a bit of a kludge.} A kludge is not always a bad thing (sometimes you have to work with what you have) but they are at best, inelegant, and at worst weighty and ugly. But they work for now, they don't break things, and they will last until you learn or can afford a better way. (I created a bit of a kludge when I couldn't figure out how to indent a bibliography entry.\footnote{You can see it in action in this commit for a different project: \kref{https://git.kjodle.net/kjodle/Notes-on-Python/commit/d4f93ec00f1e1078b1cfcb3aacd3481eb82bb0cd}{https://git.kjodle.net/kjodle/Notes-on-Python/commit/d4f93ec00f1e1078b1cfcb3a\\acd3481eb82bb0cd}.} Does it work? Yes. Am I happy with it? Not entirely. I'm 75\% sure there is a better way to do this, but I haven't found it yet. But it works for now, and I've marked it as a kludge, so I know this is something that I can come back to later. At least I made this less weighty and hid its heft and inelegance by turning it into a macro.)
 
 \section{Right Ways}
 
-\paragraph{It works, and is considered a best practice.} A best practice is one that has generally been accepted as the best way to do things not because it is perfect, but because it produces results that are better than the results achieved by other methods, with either minimal or zero negative side-effects. This is a good thing. A best practice is a best practice because it's proven itself. It's not perfect (hence it's a ``best practice'' not a ``perfect practice''), but you can count on it to get the job done. And because it is a best practice, when things go pear-shaped, it's most likely because of something you've done, but if it isn't, there will probably be a lot of people who are \textit{very} interested in helping you.
+\paragraph{It works, and is considered a best practice.} A best practice is one that has generally been accepted as the best way to do things because it produces results that are better than the results achieved by other methods, with either minimal or zero negative side-effects. This is a good thing. A best practice is a best practice because it's proven itself. It's not perfect (hence it's a ``best practice'' not a ``perfect practice''), but you can count on it to get the job done. And because it is a best practice, when things go pear-shaped, it's most likely because of something you've done, but if it isn't, there will probably be a lot of people who are \textit{very} interested in helping you.
 
 Unfortunately, sometimes a best practice is arrived at that for no other reason than ``that's how we've always done it and nothing has exploded yet.'' That's not great, but still…have a fire extinguisher handy.
 
@@ -529,7 +529,7 @@ At least when FOSS software projects get abandoned or the original developers ge
 
 I first found out about NAPS2 (\kref{https://www.naps2.com/}{https://www.naps2.com/}) because I had downloaded a book from the Internet Archive\footnote{\textit{Inherit the Stars} by James P. Hogan, which you can read at \kref{https://archive.org/details/inheritstars00jame}{https://archive.org/deta\\ils/inheritstars00jame}} and the pages were very, very yellowed. (It had been scanned from a pulp paperback printed on cheap paper with a high acid content. How seldom we plan for the future!) 
 
-I was looking for a way to lighten the background of the pages so that it would be easier to read. My usual solution for this would be to open the pdf in GIMP, opening each page as a separate layer. I could then figure out the settings for one page, convert that into a script (GIMP is scriptable!), apply that script to every single layer, and export the entire thing as a pdf, remembering to tick the box that says to export layers as pages, and also to do it in reverse order.
+I was looking for a way to lighten the background of the pages so that it would be easier to read. My usual solution for this would be to edit the pdf in GIMP, opening each page as a separate layer. I could then figure out the settings for one page, convert that into a script (GIMP is scriptable!), apply that script to every single layer, and export the entire thing as a pdf, remembering to tick the box that says to export layers as pages, and also to do it in reverse order.
 
 That's not a huge amount of work, but still—it's work. Surely, there has to be a more automated way to do this, no?
 
@@ -558,7 +558,7 @@ I'm a scientist, so I experimented. I took five sheets of scrap paper, wrote the
 \kpage{1}\kpage{2}\hspace{1mm}\kpage{3}\kpage{4}\hspace{1mm}\kpage{5}\kpage{6}\hspace{1mm}\kpage{7}\kpage{8}\hspace{1mm}\kpage{9}\kpage{10}
 \end{figure}
 
-Using this scanner means every page has to be scanned twice—one time for the front side, and a second time for the reverse side. As a result ``upside-down'' has a couple of meanings here. My scanner's ADF accepts pages with the side you want to scan face down. It then flips them over when it scans them, which rotates them around both the $z$-axis and the $y$-axis. Because it flips them over along the $y$-axis, I only have to spin them around the $z$-axis. This should seem self-explanatory, but it often isn't—I had to use the scanner at work the other day and it took me three attempts to get it right.
+Using this scanner means every page has to be scanned twice—one time for the front side, and a second time for the reverse side. As a result ``upside-down'' has a couple of meanings here. My scanner's ADF accepts pages with the side you want to scan face down. It then flips them over when it scans them, which rotates them around the $y$-axis. Because it flips them over along the $y$-axis, I only have to spin them around the $z$-axis to get them in the proper orientation to scan the other side. This should seem self-explanatory, but it often isn't—I had to use the scanner at work the other day and it took me three attempts to get it right.
 
 Because I wrote on both sides of each side of paper in order to emulate a double-sided original, I scanned the pages, and then spun them around the $z$-axis and scanned the other sides. And because I am scanning these face down, the even numbers end up in reverse order. So I ended up with a pdf that looked like figure \ref{naps2-scan}.
 
@@ -737,7 +737,7 @@ It's pretty easy to see what's happening inside the \texttt{chemfig} enivronment
 \item We then angle those branches relative to the \textit{x}-axis by placing the angle inside square brackets after a colon. In this case, we are specifying 30\textdegree{} angles.
 \end{enumerate}
 
-We can also predefined angles of angles of 45\textdegree{} by omitting the colon, so that this code: 
+We can also use predefined multiples of angles of 45\textdegree{} by omitting the colon, so that this code: 
 
 \begin{Verbatim}[]
 \chemfig{H_3C-C(=[1]O)(-[7]OH)}
@@ -914,7 +914,7 @@ Another issue that I ran into when creating the cover in \LaTeX{} is that I need
 
 \begin{multicols}{2}
 \begin{small}
-\noindent{}Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?
+\noindent{}It's been a while, hasn't it?
 
 I'm gratified that this zine has a small but dedicated fan base who have a lot of great things to say about it. The feedback that I have gotten has been nothing short of amazing. I appreciate every single bit of it.
 
@@ -924,7 +924,7 @@ And a large part of it is no doubt because I have short bursts when I get quite
 
 Another reason is that I find I write best when I can work longhand. There is just something about the feel of pen or pencil on paper that really gets my creative gears going. Once they get going, I can usually switch to working digitally without too many problems. 
 
-I do have a website for all my zines, which you can visit at \kref{https://just13.click/}{https://just13.\\click/}. I used to have a mailing list, but then Mailchimp decided to get rid of their TinyLetter service because why provide a public good for people when you can make money instead? If you want an email notification of when I produce a new zine, just send me an email at \texttt{wolfgangswishlist@gmail.com} and let me know which zines you want to hear about.
+I have a website for all my zines, which you can visit at \kref{https://just13.click/}{https://just13.\\click/}. I used to have a mailing list, but then Mailchimp decided to get rid of their TinyLetter service because why provide a public good for people when you can make money instead? If you want an email notification of when I produce a new zine, just send me an email at \texttt{wolfgangswishlist@gmail.com} and let me know which zines you want to hear about.
 
 I also have a list of topics I intend to cover in future issues. I've provided a link to it on page 2. If you have ideas for things you'd like me to talk about, you can send me an email at the above address.