More potential StackExchange sites
It's taking a while for these to gather steam, at least compared with the LaTeX StackExchange site, but I've come across a few other interesting proposals in SE's Area 51. Specifically, I've committed to or started following these proposed Q&A sites:
- Physics, for active researchers, academics and students
- Mathematica, for people who use Wolfram Mathematica regularly
- Theoretical Computer Science, for theoretical computer scientists and researchers in related fields
I'm actually most excited about the Mathematica one, although at this point it's far and away the furthest from becoming a reality. It's not that the other two won't be useful to me, just that I'm finding these sorts of sites to be most relevant to getting really fast answers to very specific questions. That can of course be applicable to any research topic, including physics and comp-sci, but it's a model that works exceptionally well for discussing software usage and implementations.
Update 14 August 2010: Added Apple, for power users of Apple hardware and software, to my commitments.
Punk Mathematics
Via Dave Bacon, I found out about the Punk Mathematics Kickstarter project. It looks as if it will result in an excellent addition to any shelf of math books, for sheer readability if nothing else. Besides that, it sounds as if Tom Henderson has some really interesting topics lined up.
We just added our pledge to this amazing project, which should be 2.38 times (as of this writing) as good as the video suggests it will be!
I've also got to add Tom's Math For Primates podcast to my subscriptions, if it's going to be half as entertaining as his Kickstarter promotional video!
TeXoverflow beta is live!
The name is not official -- in fact, I'm not even sure if it's in use by others, but it's how I think of the site right now. Whatever it will be called though, the StackExchange TeX beta site is now live, and has been since sometime yesterday.
Stack Overflow-like site for (La)TeX
Yesterday I received an invitation to the private beta of a new LaTeX question-and-answer site hosted by Stack Exchange. I've been going through questions, reading comments, and contributing where I feel it will be useful for more of the past 24 hours than is healthy for my other tasks. It's neat to be involved with this at the ground level! I'm effectively brand new to the Stack Overflow-type sites -- despite having been finding answers on SO through the Google for quite a while now, I've never really contributed before. Still trying to get the hang of the etiquette involved with voting things up and down, gaining reputation, and so on. It's a lot more fun than a standard forum environment though, that's for sure.
The beta becomes public on Monday, I believe, so check it out sometime on or after August 2nd.