## Some politics observations, 2017-02-28

Some observations:

The other day, I was writing some lecture notes for my linear algebra class, and wanted to create the following diagram (to illustrate the concept of a Markov chain):

I had a very limited time in which to finish these notes. Fortunately, I found the tkz-graph package, which made this a snap:

\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\usepackage{fouriernc}
\usepackage{tkz-graph}

\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\SetGraphUnit{5}

\Vertex[x=0, y=10]{0 points};
\Vertex[x=0, y=5]{1 point};
\Vertex[x=0, y=0]{Win};
\Vertex[x=5, y=5]{Lose};

\Edge[style ={->}, label={$1/3$}]({0 points})({1 point});
\Edge[style ={->}, label={$1/3$}]({1 point})({Win});
\Edge[style ={->}, label={$1/6$}]({0 points})({Lose});
\Edge[style ={->}, label={$1/6$}]({1 point})({Lose});

\Loop[style ={->}, label={$1/2$}, labelstyle={fill=white}]({0 points});
\Loop[style ={->}, label={$1/2$}, labelstyle={fill=white}]({1 point});
\Loop[style ={->}, label={$1$}, dir=EA, labelstyle={fill=white}]({Lose});
\Loop[style ={->}, label={$1$}, labelstyle={fill=white}]({Win});

\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

You don’t even have to specify the locations of the vertices; you can throw caution to the wind and have LaTeX decide where to place them! (I am a bit too much of a perfectionist for that.)

One slight issue I had was that the documentation for this package (at least on my computer, as retrieved by texdoc) was in French. Fortunately, I seem to have retained enough knowledge since I took the French language exam as a grad student that I could read most of the documentation.

## It’s been a long time

It’s been a long time (over a year) since I’ve posted on this blog, because I have (to put it mildly) been very busy with other responsibilities and passions that have taken me away from blogging. Also, I serve as a (low-level, volunteer-basis) officer in a political party, and as a result, I am sometimes reluctant to post my opinions in public, for fear that they might be taken (or portrayed) as official statements, despite my disclaimer (which, to be clear, says that everything written here is my personal opinion and does not reflect the position of my employer or any organization of which I am a member).

However, we are now facing a national emergency, and it is important for people to speak out. And I’ve decided that I distrust Twitter and Facebook as platforms for doing so (a topic on which I will elaborate later), leading to my desire to start writing again here. I certainly don’t have time for this, but I am going to try to make the time, hopefully posting here more frequently than once every two years.

I have also added https/SSL to this blog, using Let’s Encrypt. I took this step a few months ago, right as the national emergency began, and promptly could not log into the interface for this blog. Because I was (and continue to be) so busy, I put off fixing the problem, only to discover that the problem seems to have fixed itself. Go figure.

While I do plan on talking about politics on this blog, I also have other interests (mathematics, for example), and so I will be posting on these as well.

By the way, I don’t have time for comment moderation, so I don’t plan to enable comments on my posts.