on January 21, 2008 by lieven in iMath, rants, Comments (14)
please, use this bookmarklet!
Great! You’ve finally managed to arXiv your paper after months of laborious research, and now, you’re eagerly awaiting response…
The odds are you’ll be disappointed, if not frustrated. Chances are high that if you get any response at all it is only to clarify that someone else (usually the person emailing you) proved this result a long time ago, or that your result could be generalized enormously, or that you could have shortened your proof tremendously if only you were more educated, or … Mathematics seems to be more of a pissing contest than anything else, at such moments.
Imagine someone would be kind enough, at that particular moment, to send you an email saying not much more than : “Gee thanks! Ive just browsed through your paper arXived today and you really made my day! Keep up the good work, all the best :: lieven” (change the name to your liking)
Sadly, math-circles are not known for their ‘good-vibes’ generally. Mind you, Ive send similar emails to people posting on the arXiv, but, admittedly, I did it far fewer than I might have. Often I like (even admire) a result but repress the urgent need to communicate that feeling to the author, perhaps my Asperger kicking up…
Now that you may feel some empathy with the situation, let’s get to a similar situation in math-blogging. Sometimes, you spend a lot of time writing a post 1 , release it to the world, see tons of RSS-bots and genuine hits passing by and then what?… nothing! no reply, no email, no comment, nothing at all!
Personally, I’m not that influenced by this. When I blog I do it because (1) Ive the time, at that particular moment and (2) I like to write about the things I do, at that moment. But sometimes, it comes to us all, that feeling of ‘why am I doing this after all? can’t I spend my time more sensibly doing something else?’ and when you begin to have these doubts it usually marks the beginning of a long silence at your blog2
So, here’s an appeal to all you lurkers at math-blogs : give these people, once in a while, something back…. Ive thought for a long time that this lurk-but-no-comment attitude was something typical of mathematicians, but, as often, when researched in more depth, I have to admit that I’m wrong! Read the post Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute by Jakob Nielsen to find out that most blogs act along a 90-9-1 scheme :
User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule: 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.
So, the good news is, it’s not that particular to us autistic mathematicians. But, wouldn’t it be even better if you could do something positive about it? Speaking for myself : often I read a post I like, and (being a semi-pro myself) appreciate the work had to be put into producing such a post, but even then I don’t feel the urge to communicate this positive feeling to the blogger in question. Perhaps, we could accelerate things by having a bookmarklet in your bookmarks-bar that does the following : when you like a post, go to the post-page where you are asked to leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and it will automatically fill in your name, URL, email adress and a supporting message along the lines of “Nice post! I’m not so much of a commenter, but rather than not replying at all, I found it important to let you know that people actually read and like your post. All the best (and perhaps later I’ll comment more to the point) :: lieven (again, change the name to your liking).
Well, I’ve just done that! So please take a few minutes off your time to read and follow-up the instructions below and have a math-blog-bookmarklet up in your bookmark-bar to tell the blogger in question you really liked her/his post. This may just be enough motivation for them to carry on…
Okay! Here the nitty-gritty (it takes under 2 minutes, so please, do it now!).
part 1 : copy the following text and save it as blogmarklet.html
Download mathblogmarklet.txt and save it into your favorite text-program as bookmarklet.html and change your URL, name, email and custom message (please extend on your compliments…)
Once you saved the file as bookmarklet.html open the file under your favourite browser (Safari or Flock) and drag the link to your bookmark-bar.
part 2 : use it!
Whenever you visit a blog-post you like, go to the page of that post where you can leave a comment. Hit the bookmarklet and your comment-fields are filled (but PLEASE ADD TO THE DEFAULT COMMENT IF YOU FEEL LIKE IT) and press the submit-button!
That’s it!
For example, Ive just changed the layout of this blog. Please leave a specific comment what you think about it.
- but probably you have to be blogging yourself to appreciate the amount of energy it takes to write a genuine post compared to a link-post or a couple-of-lines-not-going-into-the-specifics post [↩]
- browse my archive and I can tell you specifically what happened at that particular moment to stop blogging [↩]
Hi, I'm a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. My research areas are non-commutative algebra and non-commutative geometry. Sometimes, you can also find me here :
Louis de Thanhoffer de Völcsey
January 21, 2008 @ 10:51 pm
Some students at UA read your posts very often. We try to understand what you’re saying (which isn’t always easy since you’re talking about a lot of high-shelf stuff), but we’re a little too inexperienced to have refined opinions on all those objects you speak of, which is the main reason why we generally don’t leave any comments, but we do think this is an excellent place to read about mathematics and to catch up on mathematical news !
Blog » Blog Archive » please, use this bookmarklet!
January 21, 2008 @ 11:06 pm
[...] neverendingbooks wrote an interesting post today on please, use this bookmarklet!Here’s a quick excerpt Great! You’ve finally managed to arXiv your paper after months of laborious research, and now, you’re eagerly awaiting response… The odds are you’ll be disappointed, if not frustrated. Chances are high that if you get any response at all it is only to clarify that someone else (usually the person emailing you) proved this result a long time ago, or that your result could be generalized enormously, or that you could have shortened your proof tremendously if only you were more educated, or … Mat [...]
lieven
January 21, 2008 @ 11:11 pm
@louis : at the new-years drink of the department I was saying that due to the fact that Ive been teaching bachelor-courses for some years, I hoped to be blogging at a level a good undergraduate student could appreciate that there is more to mathematics than category-theory pervading math-blogging. His dry reply was something along the lines “well, I think this will only work for extremely, extemely, extremely good undergraduates…”
it is a bit odd communicating this way, but ive not answered your scheme-question yet because you probably have my copy of ‘introduction to scheme theory’ and Olivier has my ‘red book’. so please give more details (preferably by email, not here, schemes are probably off-limits anyway..)
Florin
January 22, 2008 @ 11:36 am
I have to admit that I am indeed one of those 90% guys who don’t contribute, but I promise I will try to change this in the future… For the moment, here is a comment: it appears that the blog came back to its old name (neverendingbooks), what hapenned to moonshinemath? I liked more that name…
lieven
January 22, 2008 @ 12:57 pm
@Florin : i found the title MoonshineMath too restrictive. people might expect of a blog with that name more than i could ever provide. besides, having URL and blogname the same seems a sensible strategy to me. feel free to set up your own blog and call it MoonshineMath…
Florin
January 22, 2008 @ 1:37 pm
That would be nice
)) But since I’m not much of a blogger, and-hellas!-not (yet) much of a moonshiner, maybe somebody else will take the idea and do it.
As a matter of fact, maybe Borcherds himself should do that, it’s a nicer name than the one he uses for his blog…
javier
January 22, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
Guess I am right in-between the 90 and the 9? Concerning the participation on the math-related posts, it is true that what you write has become more readable along the years, but yet, being able to read one of your math posts and catch the idea of what is going on (which I think is a great thing to do) is one thing. Actually understanding the details is a completely different one. And possibly most people thinks that commenting around when you only got the general idea (if any) of some math topic would be rather bold.
Personally, with your 2 last posts concerning Connes-Bost systems I am interested on understanding the story in full detail, so I printed your first post, took it home, read it carefully, made all the computations on my own (not that I dont trust yours, but you never know…) and before I had finished getting a sound impression of what was going on, the second part was already online, so had to go through the same process (in top of usual duties) just to keep your rythm. If things go as usual, by the time I am ready to make any sensible comments, you’ll be already bored of the topic and have switched to something else, so it won’t make much sense commenting at all! If its comments what you’re lasting for, write short, one-idea posts, rather than long, technically detailed ones.
By the way, with the change of the layout it seems that you tweaked the plugin that put posts in nice form for printing. Now I get an ugly frame around the text and like 1/4 of the first page containing no sensible information. As for the rest, don’t like the new heading image, but most of the time read you from my RSS-reader anyway, so don’t take this too seriously.
lieven
January 22, 2008 @ 7:23 pm
@javier :
WP-print doesnt work it seems, but ive installed a printer.css in the header so you can now have a printer-friendly version when you do a normal print. Let me know if this works for you.
Header picture : well, that was not crucial for me. but i wanted to have the latest k2 theme. i can easily change header-pictures so all suggestions are wellcome (the one here is a portion of the picture i once used in my Manin-Marcolli cave-post and is a picture of the hyperbolic plane, so i thought it might fit.
please check all my calculations (reminds me i should update errors in my superpotential posts…). in fact i spend over 2 hours trying to understand something in the Bost-Connes paper until i realised it must be a typo, so i try to check everything myself but may make mistakes…
“if things go as usual….” well, i plan to stay focussed on the Connes-Riemann approach for some time because i have to lecture on it to undergraduates… (well, not quite but ill do the music of the primes with them and may try something out). ok, ill slow down a bit also because it takes me much more energy than i imagined…
btw. are you already at max-planck? if so try to get the vivatsgasse7 people to start blogging again (or join the team…)
atb.
farid
January 23, 2008 @ 2:06 am
I don’t consider myself an extremely, extremely, extremely good undergraduate, but still I wanted to drop a line on how I appreciate this blog. I try to read most things posted here but as Louis said, the larger part of the posts need prerequisites I do not have. One day maybe.
javier
January 23, 2008 @ 10:49 am
CSS does a better job now, but still a few annoyances. Biggest ones are black frame surrounding all the text (some “border” attribute, I guess) and the comment form included at the end. You can easily get rid of the lattest simply by adding a display: none; line at the div.comments part on the printing css. For the rest now the text is readable and looks fine.
Indeed, I’ve been at the MPIM since the end of the winter break, but don’t know how easy will be to get the Vivatsgasse 7 thing working again. The two most active guys (Anton Mellit and Abhijnan Rej) don’t seem to be around here anymore. But I’ll ask Mehran or Anders as soon as I see them. I don’t thing it would change anything if I joined the team, I havent been a very active blogger myself lately, and actually should take a bit of care on my old site and revamp it…
lieven
January 23, 2008 @ 1:19 pm
@javier, ok check out the new print css. i think ive removed comments and the sidebars. remains a number of horizontal rulers. any suggestion to remove those?
javier
January 23, 2008 @ 2:13 pm
Getting better, but still with that black frame around everything… Some things you can get rid of:
Then you have this span style=”margin-bottom:40px; border-bottom:none;” thing, with a lot of Javascript inside, which I think is causing the black lines. Just put a class on this spam, and in the print.css set display to none, and you’ll also get rido of that.
Only remaining thing at the end are the tags, but they are not css styled, so they can be trickier. If it is possible to wrap them all inside some div labels, just give it a name and hide it in the printing.
Some lines might also come from hyperlinks underlines, so under the “#contents a” section just replace “text-decoration: underline;” by “text-decoration: none;” and you’re done.
Also, it might be a good idea to make the print.css stylesheet load after all the other (like half a dozen) ones, so that no part of it gets over-ridden.
But please, don’t get over-perfectionistic about this, it is not such a great deal… just focus on keeping writing interesting things!
i’ll take rerun requests | neverendingbooks
February 8, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
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i’ll take rerun requests | neverendingbooks
February 8, 2008 @ 9:05 pm
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