Talks from Neil Lawrence

To create talks from these files you need to access the python package makemd. This package includes a macro language implemented in the generic preprocessor, gpp for interpeting the markdown.

You can install with

apt-get install gpp
pip install lamd

If you’re working on this repo regularly, it’s often simplest to rerun LaMD’s minimal installer to refresh the local LaMD editor/agent guidance (Cursor rules, optional .cursor/rules, etc.).

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lawrennd/lamd/main/scripts/install-minimal.sh)"

Note: this does not (yet) install/update system dependencies like gpp or pandoc. It also only installs the Python tooling if you opt in (creates a local venv and installs lamd):

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lawrennd/lamd/main/scripts/install-minimal.sh)" -- --with-venv

The talks folder is organised as follows.

Each general subject or lecture series comes under a sub-directory

_subject/

Under that subject, there are a series of talks. Each as a markdown file. These files include various snippet files mainly from anothe repository. https://github.com/lawrennd/snippets/. They are also allocated to different subject files.

_subject/includes/

Different subjects have their own configuration files that are found in

_subject/_lamd.yml

Some talks include interactive physics demos (for example entropy billiards and Maxwell's demon) powered by scripts in scripts/ballworld/.

• Runtime and architecture documentation: scripts/ballworld/README.md
• Script includes are wired through snippet loaders in the snippets repo (_scripts/includes/*-js.md).
• The demo entropy readout is a velocity-histogram Shannon entropy proxy (coarse-grained), not full thermodynamic entropy.