Mon: Eccentric mathematician
Tues: What’s the most important thing in statistics that’s not in the textbooks?
Wed: Carl Morris: Man Out of Time [reflections on empirical Bayes]
Thurs: “The general problem I have with noninformatively-derived Bayesian probabilities is that they tend to be too strong.”
Fri: Good, mediocre, and bad p-values
Sat: Which of these classes should he take?
Sun: Forget about pdf: this looks much better, it makes all my own papers look like kids’ crayon drawings by comparison.
Looking forward to Sunday—I hate PDFs! Especially ones with multiple columns. The worst thing about preprints is that they tend to be PDF only. I guess it is good that arXiv archives the latex source files though.
Multiple columns (usually only two) have a purpose. I think the human eye can scan short horizontal spans more efficiently than a line that stretches the whole screen length. Newspaper columns arise from similar reasons I think.
Yes, multiple columns serve a purpose in printed material. What I dislike is having to scroll upwards after finishing a left column when zoomed in. Paper size is tall and thin relative to most monitors, and over time people shift towards reading on screen more and printing fewer papers out.
In biology, eLife started using single column PDFs (wide margins), and the PLOS journals followed suit. eLife also started an alternate HTML reading tool they call ‘Lens’, but I think it does not use screen space too efficiently either.
When generating your own documents, it is nice not to have to worry about page breaks—major reason why knitr/rmarkdown became more popular than Sweave.
I agree about that. The source of the problem is a wide screen format whereas for reading a tall narrow screen would be more optimal.