According to LtGen Joseph Weber, Vice President for Student Affairs, bacterial meningitis (bact. men.) claims about 3,000 lives annually in the United States. Using a Poisson probability distribution (something I recently learned in my Statistics course), I was able to estimate the following statistics:

1. bact. men. will claim one life at Texas A&M this year: 30.0%
2. bact. men. will claim two lives at Texas A&M this year: 7.3%
3. expected rate: one death every two years

These estimates are based on US pop. ≈ 307 million and TAMU pop. ≈ 50,000. Statistic 1 is a little unnerving, but as shown in Statistic 2, the probability for multiple deaths in one year decreases dramatically.

Since both of these courses require special formatting and special characters, I’ve been delving more into the LaTeX ^[1] markup language for taking notes. Writing raw LaTeX in a plain text editor has proven to be more straightforward and more powerful than using a WYSIWYG word processor (like Microsoft Word or LibreOffice ^[2] Writer). Granted, LaTeX has a steep learning curve, but the compiled output looks extremely uniform and professional: LaTeX is to printed documents as HTML and CSS are to web pages.

Because LaTeX markup is plain text, it can be shared and tracked using a versioning system like Subversion or Git. The only other word processing system (that I’m aware of) that offers this kind of collaborative editing is Google Docs. Microsoft Word, Rich Text, and Open Document file formats are all stored in either a binary package or cryptic markup—both of which are hard to track with versioning/collaborative software. LaTeX, on the other hand, has human-readable source code.

By default, the latex executable outputs to DVI files, but LaTeX packages like TeX Live include pdflatex, which outputs to more universally-accepted PDF files. For more information about obtaining a distribution/build for your system, visit the LaTeX home page.

I understand that LaTeX is not for everyone. Some people do not need the fine-tuned control that LaTeX offers—in which case Microsoft Office, LibreOffice, or another word processor would better suit that person’s needs. Some might not have the time required to learn LaTeX. Nonetheless, I recommend it to anyone looking for a powerful markup-based word processing tool for writing books, articles, reports, or even letters.

Until next time, Gig ‘em and God bless!

Footnotes

1. ↑ I had mentioned LaTeX before when setting up math rendering in MediaWiki, but the packages that power this feature in MediaWiki aren’t even a snowflake on the tip of the iceberg! For a good example of what LaTeX can do, look at any textbook: symbols, math-type, columns, listings, images, figures, graphs, charts, plots, diagrams, tables, indices, appendices, bibliographies, cross-references, chapters, sections, typesettings, formatting, whatever—LaTeX can do all of it (and still even more).
2. ↑ When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems and all of their products (including OpenOffice.org), the founders of the OpenOffice.org project decided to form an independent organization—The Document Foundation. However, Oracle has not allowed them to continue using the name “OpenOffice.org”. After improvements and rebranding, The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 3.3.

As a faithful Catholic, I do my best and let God handle the rest: We should embrace the challenges we face and use them as opportunities to grow in patience, humility, and faith.  I take pleasure in making myself a better person (which, in turn, makes the world a better place) because I know that I am becoming who I was meant to be–the best person I can become.  Therefore, I can proudly say that I enjoy English class because I enjoy making myself a better person, challenges give us the ability to better ourselves, and English is challenging to me.

I also like English because I never know what profound sermon Mr. Beeler is going to give.

I recently watched the following two movies and found them quite intriguing:

• The Last Sin Eater
• Knowing
• Hidalgo

Both movies are extremely good stories that describe humanity and its tendencies to stray from what God originally intended for Creation and his plans to make good come from the evil that we have twisted. I do not wish to give an in-depth analysis on the four layers of meaning (literal, figurative, tropological, and anagogical), but they are easy to interpret for one’s self.

I must warn you that Knowing offers a very skewed, but thought-provoking, view of the eschaton/apocalypse as foreseen by a young girl in 1959. Recall that Jesus tells us to, “stay awake, for [we] know neither the day nor the hour” (Mt 25:13, NAB). In the movie, a few chosen children are removed from the earth before it is destroyed and are taken to a different planet. This act of “rescue” from the tribulation is commonly referred to as the Rapture. However, the Rapture is never mentioned anywhere in the Bible, nor is it alluded to by any of the prophets, by Jesus, or in the Pauline epistles. The answer to why there will not be a Rapture can be found in reason: Human suffering is redemptive by nature if united with the sufferings of Christ as an offering. This is why euthanasia is wrong: it provides an “easy death” (from the Greek eu + thanatos) without any suffering and no chance at redemption. To suffer through the tribulation would be the ultimate sacrifice and the ultimate redemption. Would God really deprive us of that opportunity by taking us from it? The only human person who did not need redemption is Jesus: He came to be our redemption through is life, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension and established His Kingdom on earth to guard the seed of faith and pass it down to all generations. Jesus’ dually human and divine nature (hypostatic union) explains that He was, in fact, God. His name literally means “God saves” and thus he is our savior; he does not need to be saved.

I believe I have written enough to provide plenty of fuel for thought: it seems that I have written an essay while trying to avoid writing an essay. Watch for how grace is at work in the movies, and I hope you will get as much out of them as I did.

Please pray that our robot performs to the best of it’s ability (pun not intended).