Archive for August, 2012

Temperature conversions for Americans living in mild climates

August 12th, 2012

Converting temperatures in your head is a good trick for Americans living abroad.

So here’s the trick. You memorise the following correspondences:

0 °C = 32 °F
10 °C = 50 °F
20 °C = 68 °F
30 °C = 86 °F
Then, to convert any temperature that is near these, approximate 1 °C = 2 °F. This will allow you to convert almost any naturally occurring outdoor temperature in the UK in either direction to within 1° accuracy.

Let’s try it. As I write the current temperature in Edinburgh is 14 °C. This is 10 °C plus 4° extra. From memory convert the 10 °C to 50 °F. Then convert 4 °C extra to 8 °F extra and add it back on. This gives you 14°C = 58°F. This is not exact, but close enough that you know to wear a jumper. The exact formula is

14 * 9 / 5 + 32 = 57 F
Good luck doing that in your head.

from Charles Sutton’s Converting Fahrenheit into Celsius.

A jumper, for Americans, is “A pullover sweater.”

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Real-time LaTeX Collaboration

August 11th, 2012

I’m still looking for real-time collaboration tools for LaTeX. I need to try shareLaTeX again. Sadly, LaTeX-lab (which layers ontop of Google Docs) is only designed for a single editor at a time (kind of defeating the purpose). Apparently, ScribTeX (discovered via pinboard search) is popular (and there’s also verbosus) — and sounds useful.

One of the sticking points of using Google Docs (which is useful at some points of the editing) was its use of smartquotes. That, at least is avoidable: Tools -> Preferences gives the option to disable smart quotes and automatic substitution.

Google Docs preferences - disable smart quotes

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