LaTeX is more or less built to typeset books, particularly (but not exclusively) scientific literature. It is less obvious that LaTeX is also extremely good at producing   Songbooks Play scripts Chess diagrams Linguistic literature and IPA Bibles Dictionaries Presentations Tolkien alphabets   Can people mention other surprising and inspring uses of LaTeX that go beyond scientific literature?  This question is meant as a place to showcase surprising uses of TeX, made by you or others, a bit similar to the posting , which focuses on beautiful TeX and LaTeX documents.
I think the questions says it all! :)  By TeX, I mean any derivative of TeX as long as the code is clearly a derivative of TeX, i.e. that it could belong on TeX.SX (and not pure Lua for example).  I'll give two answers myself so you see what I mean.
What can I do if I'm the victim of serial downvoting? While browsing Stack Overflow, I noticed that I lost a lot of reputation:        Is this serial downvoting? Will it be corrected by a rep-recalculation? How often are those done?    Here's a second instance: I've been reading through a lot of the rookie Java questions on finalize() and find it kind of bewildering that no one has really made it plain that finalize() is an unreliable way to clean up resources.  I saw someone comment that they use it to clean up Connections, which is really scary since the only way to come as close to a guarantee that a Connection is closed is to implement try (catch) finally.    I was not schooled in CS, but I have been programming in Java professionally for close to a decade now and I have never seen anyone implement finalize() in a production system ever.  This still doesn't mean that it doesn't have its uses, or that people I've worked with have been doing it right.  So my question is, what use cases are there for implementing finalize() that cannot be handled more reliably via another process or syntax within the language?    Please provide specific scenarios or your experience, simply repeating a Java text book, or finalize's intended use is not enough, as is not the intent of this question. Finding critical points (extrema) directly without using eigenvalues If we have a function $f: \mathbb R^3\rightarrow \mathbb R$ of the form:  $$f(x)=(a_1x_1^2+a_2x_2^2+a_3x_3^2)e^{-x_1^2-x_2^2-x_3^2}$$  where $a_1&gt;a_2&gt;a_3&gt;0$.   We can find the critical points by:  $$\frac{\partial f}{\partial x_1} =2x_1e^{-x_1^2-x_2^2-x_3^2}(a_1-a_1x_1^2-a_2x_2^2-a_3x_3^2)=0$$  And solving symmetrically for $x_2$ and $x_3$. We get critical points: $(0,0,0) , (\pm 1,0,0) , (0,\pm 1, 0) , (0,0,\pm 1)$   We could determine the nature of them by looking at the eigenvalues of the Hessian, but is there a way to just analyse it directly? Obviously $(0,0,0)$ is a strict global minimum, but I can't quite see that the other points are. Any pointers/hints would be appreciated. Why square the difference instead of taking the absolute value in standard deviation? In the definition of standard deviation, why do we have to square the difference from the mean to get the mean (E) and take the square root back at the end? Can't we just simply take the absolute value of the difference instead and get the expected value (mean) of those, and wouldn't that also show the variation of the data? The number is going to be different from square method (the absolute-value method will be smaller), but it should still show the spread of data. Anybody know why we take this square approach as a standard?  The definition of standard deviation:  $\sigma = \sqrt{E\left[\left(X - \mu\right)^2\right]}.$   Can't we just take the absolute value instead and still be a good measurement?  $\sigma = E\left[|X - \mu|\right]$ I have multiple polygons, all located offshore around the UK. I am trying to calculate the areas of these polygons in square kilometres, without splitting them by UTM zone.  Is it possible to do this accurately? I have been using World Mercator, but there are big distortions at this scale. If the polygons were limited to the east coast, say, I would use UTM31N. However, as they are all over the UK waters, I am unsure what to use.  Is there a coordinate system that covers this area? British National Grid does not extend far enough out to sea to be of use. is it possible to display a Google Earth map INSIDE Excel? Is there any way, using the scripting available to Excel 2007 to display a Google Earth map inside a sheet?  I've used Excel to house the data that I've then gone and generated a KML file to load into Google Earth, but now they want to see a pretty little cell with a client address mapped out in Excel directly to pretty up the presentation. Given that , I wonder if every intelligent biological species is capable of producing beings that are Force-Sensitive?   Or are there some species characteristics that can make it 100% impossible for them ever to produce a Force-sensitive individual.  NOTE: Let's exclude - if they exist in EU - things like random new-species-creating mutations - e.g. the individual should be 100% the same species, able to interbreed. Why not to extend the set of natural numbers to make it closed under division by zero? Why and how is the  of a matrix in $M_3(\mathbb C)$ fully determined by its characteristic and minimal polynomials? And why does it fail for $n &gt;3$?   Thanks. is there a better way to do this XML scraping task in R? Why is the Fisher Information matrix positive semidefinite? How to create a rounded cone Resistor in series needed with LED string? Show that the function $g(x) = x^2 \sin(\frac{1}{x}) ,(g(0) = 0)$ is everywhere differentiable and that $g′(0) = 0$ Show that the function $g(x) = x^2 \sin\left(\frac{1}{x}\right) ,(g(0) = 0)$ is everywhere differentiable and that $g′(0) = 0$. Selecting features with NULL attributes in QGIS How do I identify which features have NULL attributes in the attribute table of a shapefile?  When i try [field]= 'NULL' it selects the features with value = 0 (see picture) network manager says "device not managed" I used to be able to share my network connection by editing the Auto Eth0 to share with other computers in the Ipv4 section and now I upgraded my laptop to 11.10 .  Now are there no wired connections in the network manager. When I click my connections applet at the top of the tray it also says wired device not managed!  when I type ifconfig -a  daniella@daniella-1001HA:~$ ifconfig -a eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 90:e6:ba:83:d6:fc             UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000            RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)           Interrupt:45   eth0:avahi Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 90:e6:ba:83:d6:fc             inet addr:169.254.13.40  Bcast:169.254.255.255  Mask:255.255.0.0           UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1           Interrupt:45   lo        Link encap:Local Loopback             inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0           inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host           UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:16436  Metric:1           RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0           collisions:0 txqueuelen:0            RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 00:25:d3:90:43:41             inet addr:192.168.0.6  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0           inet6 addr: fe80::225:d3ff:fe90:4341/64 Scope:Link           UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1           RX packets:12881 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0           TX packets:12867 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0           collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000            RX bytes:8851081 (8.8 MB)  TX bytes:2343199 (2.3 MB) Whenever I start a game, from both the disc and hard drive, my Xbox will say "Username signed out". What's wrong and how do I fix it? Just to be clear, it signs me out when I start a game. How can I stop this? Finding the limit of $x_1=0 , x_{n+1}=\frac{1}{1+x_n}$ How can I integrate $\ln \left( x+\sqrt{1+x^2} \right) $? They agreed to stay connected for hours in their provisional support group, looking for answers in their counterparts.   I want to change the bold part to say that they all shared the same problem.  Might end up using one of the above, but I feel like I need some more options to weigh in.    Edit for context: they all share the same rare cognitive impairment