How to type an em dash
- Phone (Android): Long press the hyphen button
- Desktop (Linux): Compose key
sequence
--- - Work computer (Windows):
- If in Word or Office: Type two hyphens and let it autocorrect
- If Markdown: Use the HTML character entity
— - Otherwise: ⊞ Win + . character chooser, or just Google “em dash” and copy/paste
People and Blogs interview
Manuel Moreale, a tireless indie web advocate, recently had me as a guest on his People and Blogs series. Welcome to anyone visiting this site via Manu’s feed! Take a look around and let me know what you think.
I was super excited to be interviewed by Manu, as many of his writings have sharpened my thinking around why I prefer blogging, email, and group chats to brand-name social media:
Manu has compiled a lot of useful information for people trying to pivot from social media, such as his list of blogging platforms. If you are one of the friends I’ve been trying to talk into creating a personal site, definitely check out Manu’s list.
Conda updated?
Using a tip from Travis Hathaway, here is a shell one-liner to check if a Conda environment is up to date:
conda update --all --dry-run --json | jq -e '.success and (.actions | length) == 0'
It exits (-e) with 0 if the environment is already updated and 1 if
updates are available.
I use this in CI so that I get an email if my environment.yml file is holding
any packages back.
Because this command actually executes the dependency solver, it won’t report the environment as out of date unless a package both has an available update and can be updated while satisfying all the other dependencies’ version constraints.
Newly excavated posts about teaching
When I migrated from Blogger to Jekyll a few years ago, I left a bunch of posts behind, with the vague resolution of importing them at some point. Today, I excavated a few more from the archives, all about teaching:
- The benefits of a nonnative teacher (2020): A very long-winded way of saying that language learners often benefit from having a teacher who isn’t a native speaker of the target language, because then the teacher has empathy for the student. I think I stand by this take.
- Things that are a thing here (2018): Just a few days into my Fulbright job, I was enamored with how seriously Korean teachers took their profession—and still am. But knowing what I do now, I would not write “Art, music, literature, and ‘morality’ class matter [in Korean schools] just as much as the STEM subjects.” Of course, all these subjects factor into your GPA, but as in the US, many Korean teachers and parents believe that the best jobs go to STEM graduates. And thus, even if it’s not their intention, they tend to celebrate students’ success in those subjects with a bit of extra energy.
- Centering students as creators (2017): Notes from my undergrad internship. I think I see the germ here of an idea I’ve grown more certain of since: When you don’t know how to proceed, the first thing you should do is start. You know—open a document, put your name and the date, choose a font. These first steps shake off the fear of failure and assure the brain that it is safe to proceed.
Server-side KaTeX rendering with Jekyll
This post explains how I set up server-side KaTeX rendering to improve the load time on pages that include mathematical notation.