The essays in this repository are organized with each in its own directory. Many directories contain supplementary material. All material in this repository is ASSAIL licensed unless otherwise noted. See:
Each essay is classified into one of five categories:
- α
These essays are complete and correct to best of my knowledge.
- β
These essays are substantially complete and correct. They may contain minor errata and there may be noticable lacunae, but the material present is consistent and usable.
- γ
These essays are first drafts that may contain serious errors. They are certainly incomplete.
- δ
These essays are formative - they are ε class essays that have been fleshed out enough to contain some useful material. Like ε essays, in the absence of broader interest, they may never be completed.
- ε
These essays are speculative ideas that may be partially or wholly incorrect. The essays are merely sketches and in the absence of any broader interest, may never be completed. They typically arise when some whimsy inspires me to think about something for a day or two.
In the subsequent sections, the essays in this repository are grouped by classification, providing links to pdf and html distribution formats, together with a short descriptive paragraph.
The pdf format is generated by the LyX document processor using the dvipdfm option, which creates the smallest files without image artifacts. The pdf format is converted to html using Lu Wang's most excellent pdf2htmlEX program targeting a 1024 pixel page width, which is the resolution of still pervasive minimal monitors.
An elementary mathematical analysis of the constraints involved for creating polygonal holes with round tools. Supplementary material includes a public domain python script and eight .svg images as well as the LyX source document.
I briefly looked at replacing images in html conversions with their svg source files. This reduces the html file size by about one third, but the exercise is a lot of work, so until I get around to writing a script to do it, redundant and inefficient storage of the images will be the order of the day.
I also looked for a standard compressed html format. Unbelievably, there is no such animal. Compression is performed on the fly when a page is served, but only when the client permits it. Repository data is of course compressed by default by github internally, perhaps using zlib which is the most common communication channel format. It is of course possible github decompresses the requested file, only to compress it again when the client permits it. The internet is full of such inanities.
I also looked at xml exi (Efficient Xml Interchange) which also appears to focus on client-server communication rather than data storage applications. Nonetheless, it appears to be a suitable standard, presuming it is reasonable to convert html5, the current defacto standard format and output format of pdf2htmlEX, to xhtml, a formal standard that never gained traction, but which most browsers render faithfully. As of 2018, however there does not seem to be any direct browser support for xml exi rendering. Usage would require writing a javascript decompressor, rendering output in a <div>.
All these are useful activities, but too time consuming for one individual such as myself.