Mathematicians and their insane symbology

First of all, mathematicians never use descriptive names in their formulae.  They use letters, often starting with greek letters, then when they have exhausted all the greek letters they pull out other letters from other languages.

Most of us don't have keyboards with all those letters, or that can even reproduce them easily.  Let alone having learned them or not.  Sometimes the letters are barely distinguishable from other letters in the same formula, from another language perhaps.  And the names don't have meaning to the uninitiated, though that part may be the least bad, as over time one becomes so used to the greek letter, or whatever, that the technical name is barely used anymore or maybe even never well learned.  So it is with sigma, rho, and a few others, at least for me.

Then the letters can have an endless variety of qualifying marks, little hats, tick marks at varying angles, circles, crosses, bolded crosses, dots, underlines.  Then you can have subscripting, superscripting, repeated superscripting.

This of course provides a way to make the most complicated formulae compact.  It enables symbolic operations, and writing things down with variations to get at some end (though mathematicians and many math books forgo many if not all intermediate steps anyway).

So it may indeed be good, in most ways, for the professional, for it to be like this.

It's generally not good for explaining things to people who are not professional mathematicians.

The Missing Today

I think I see what's happening.  It's 2:30 am Monday and the low expected in the next 12 hours is 34F, around 6am, according to the projected temperature graph (and yesterday's forecast of "today", as of 11pm).

But you wouldn't know that looking at the "Today" projections at Weather Underground.  It predicts a low of 41F.  Which is what the graph says it will be at around 6am on Tuesday.

OK, so that fits the intuitive notion of "today" (though I don't see that spelled out) meaning that the low is in the night following the day. But what about the projected low in the next 3 hours, that was "Today" until 11 am.  Then at midnight, Today became Yesterday, but Yesterday seems to show a low of 36, which may have been the low on Saturday morning at 6am.

So in my view it's OK to have an intuitive notion of day, and in fact I'd start each day at 6am.  But if you start doing that sort of thing, you ought to be consistent or else "Today" disappears within a certain range of hours, as it has right now.

Tale of Two Spell Checkers

The spell checker in the Mac Mail tool that I use at work is constantly changing the technical terms I use (in my work) into other words, fundamentally destroying what I am attempting to communicate.  It does this automatically requiring an explicit click to defeat (requiring a reach for the mouse--a big nuisance when you have two hands on keyboard) and I sometimes overlook this.  No matter how many times I use a particular term unknown to it (which could be a private or common acronym, a computer language command, or an esoteric concept word) the spell checker never learns.  Even when the technical terms I use are in all letters, and may actually be valid if obscure english words, and I use them frequently, they aren't remembered.  Right now, typing into Blogger from another Mac, a similar if not identical checker seems to be working, so maybe it's Mac specific rather than tool specific (now I am using Safari, into Blogger).  I recall the spell checker in my iPhone working similarly, but it wasn't as much a nuisance with that, since I am rarely giving technical support via phone, and even if I did it would be very short.  Actually, on the phone, where misspelling was far too easy compared with keyboard at work, an aggressive spell checker with limited vocabulary may have been ideal.

The spell checker in my Android based Samsung Galaxy S4 message tool seems much different, and very inconveniently so in a different way.  It seems to have pre-memorized all the typical mistakes made on an Android keyboard, and added them to an official word list.  Especially, on the tiny keyboard, it's all too easy to type a number when you mean a letter.  So for example I am trying to enter "work" but enter "2ork" instead.  Then it doesn't show "work" as a correction choice (factoring in the proximity of numbers to the top row of letters).  It shows me 2ork (what I just entered wrongly!) 23rd, and 20th.  On the longer list of possibilities, not even one starts with a w, the letter right below 2 on the keyboard.  I've often entered digits invalidly in words and had the message tool checker give me all similar looking nonsense choices with digits in the middle of words.  And the same is true with many all-letter misspellings as well.  The choices I am offered are all horribly misspelled words--most often not sounding like any acronym I've ever heard.  And when one of my horribly misspelled words goes through (as happens all too often) I believe it will be around to haunt me even more in the future as a spell checker preferred choice.

And as it happens, the Galaxy S4 mail tool keyboard (portrait mode) has the spell corrected words just above the numbers…so I might just type another number when I intended to choose a spelling correction to a word with one number.  And then I will get only nonsense choices, with two or more numbers in them, or perhaps only just what I entered.  How useful is that?

As with so many computer "conveniences" one wonders how much the designers actually used these designs before foisting them on the public.  Or how many kinds of other people they got feedback from in refining the design.  It seems often that flaws in technical products should have been noticed and corrected in the very first prototype.  Or not made in the first place by a thoughtful designer.

But then if designs are created only from the top down, from directives like "make a spell checker which learns new words and presents choices", without much further thought or testing on the part of the designers and others working from that directive, we might get these kinds of deeply flawed products.