Yet another weird SF fan
 I'm a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan. Common sense? What's that?Go to first entry

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 Yet another weird SF fan

### MathJax vs. LaTeX

The following sounded familiar:

You discover that one day, some idiot decided that since another idiot decided that 1/0 should equal infinity, they could just use that as a shorthand for "Infinity" when simplifying their code. Then a non-idiot rightly decided that this was idiotic, which is what the original idiot should have decided, but since he didn't, the non-idiot decided to be a dick and make this a failing error in his new compiler.
Meanwhile in my day job, I recently found that MathJax does not add equation numbers to blank lines. For example, the following will have an equation number in $${\rm\LaTeX}$$ but not in MathJax:

\​begin{gather}A=A\nonumber\\\​end{gather}
\begin{gather}A=A\nonumber\\\end{gather}
It was easiest to change it to the following to get consistent results:

\​begin{gather}A=A\nonumber\\\text{}\​end{gather}
\begin{gather}A=A\nonumber\\\text{}\end{gather}
I don't think it's quite in the idiot category but it's still annoying.

I disagree with the article on one point. I pour myself caffeine-free Diet Coke instead of Scotch.