One day recently I was trying to decide what to make for dinner. I was feeling a little sick, and was looking for comfort food. I thought I would make my Macaroni and cheese with spinach recipe, but we were out of flour. So instead I whipped up something new. I already had the frozen spinach thawing, so it would have to have spinach. We also still had a bunch of tomatoes from the garden (which had been ripening indoors). […] (Read more)

I tried this recipe from The Voluptuous Vegan. I thought that the combination of squash, fennel, and apple sounded particularly good, and that turned out to be true. The recipe called for a kabocha squash, which I just happened to have on hand. I had never had it before, but someone at the grocery store recommended it. It is similar to butternut in taste, but looks like a small green pumpkin. I will definitely be making this one again. (Read more)

When writing a beamer presentation with LaTeX, I organize my presentation into sections and subsections. Frequently, the title of the first frame (slide) in a subsection has the same name as the subsection. Let’s say I start off with the following structure: \section[corpora]{Accessing text corpora} \subsection[gutenberg]{The Gutenberg Corpus} \subsection[chat]{The web and chat Corpus} \subsection[brown]{The Brown Corpus} \subsection[reuters]{The Reuters Corpus} \subsection[inaugural]{The Inaugural address Corpus} \subsection[annotated]{Annotated corpora} \subsection[foreign]{Corpora in other languages} \subsection[DIY]{Loading your own corpora} For each subsection, I want to put […] (Read more)

Recently I heard some sort of public service announcement about energy usage. I don’t recall where I heard it, but I was struck by one part of it. Two kids were talking about energy usage, and one mentioned that your cell phone charger still draws power, even if your cell phone is not plugged in. That is, if you leave the charger plugged into the outlet when not charging, which many people do. I was very suspicious of this claim, […] (Read more)

The first question on reader’s mind must be — why use LaTeX to blog? Well, I have a pretty specific instance in mind, but I can imagine that others might be interested as well. This fall I am teaching a course on computational corpus linguistics at CU Boulder. I like to have some materials online for the students, such as the syllabus, course notes, etc. I thought about setting up a simple webpage, but then I decided instead to use […] (Read more)