Week Notes 5: Pi Day!

This post is 5 of 7 in the series week notes.

General

Ooops! This set of Week Notes went out a day late. Week Notes 4 went out early. Who cares? Enjoy a bunch of stuff from this week.

Phone Thoughts

A while back, I posted Minimizing Use of Phones and Technology on /r/Quakers. This post started my experiment with leaving my phone and laptop at the office during the week. It has been a positive experience.

In that post, I mentioned that my only “need” for a phone is to call the school to let my daughter in early. So far, I’ve managed to get by just fine by talking to the secretary and asking her to let us in. They haven’t given us a hard time yet, so I suppose that my phone wasn’t really “needed” for that task.

One striking thing that happened regarding the phone: the neighbour across the way had their fire alarm go off while they were out of the house. Their little dog, B, was stuck inside and would bark whenever I approached the house. I have my neighbours’ contact information on my phone, but couldn’t contact them because I didn’t have my phone. After thinking it over, I went and knocked on the door of one of the people on the condo board. She contacted the owners of the unit, who contacted their local property person, who contacted the tenants (my neighbours). The whole thing took a lot longer and was a lot more complicated than just calling the neighbours directly.

And yet, it all worked out.

Someone responding to that post pointed out the following Amish insight:

“Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?”

The Amish have a radical commitment to community.

“Their selective use of technology, thus, hinges on an implicit assessment of [technology’s] long-term impact on community life” (Kraybill and Nolt, 1995).

Technology is evaluated by the community for the community.

And I think that in the case of this fire alarm, handling the situation without a phone definitely brought the community closer than handling it with a phone.

March 1st 2044

The way that I put these week notes in to my Hugo setup is as files like week-notes-005.md. This only allows 999 different week notes, and when you look at 994 weeks in the future (starting from today), you get to March 1st 2044. That’s not crazily far in the future. I’ll be 55 or so.

Reading

Right now, I’m in a period of intense parallel reading.

Playing Pool with $\pi$ by Galprin (2003). This paper gives a novel method of calculating $\pi$ using collisions between balls of different weights.
Knot Theory’s Odd Origins by Daniel S. Silver. There is an extended version of this paper here. The paper explores the lives of three mathematician-physicists who thought that the fundamental building blocks of the universe were ``knotted vortices of aether’’. The big names were Tait, Kelvin, and Maxwell. After reading this, I was surprised by how little was known about actual real-world knotted vortices. Some folks at UChicago people managed to make topologically non-trivial vortex rings in water around 2013: YouTube, UChicago News, Nature.
The Computer as Communication Device by Licklider and Taylor (1968). This paper had some insights that came to fruition in The Virtual Community (1994). Even though the paper is ~60 years old, we still haven’t realized all its insights. For example, the third and fourth point here:

First, life will be happier for the on-line individual because the people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity. Second, communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable. Third, much communication and interaction will be with programs and programmed models, which will be (a) highly responsive, (b) supplementary to one’s own capabilities, rather than competitive, and (c) capable of representing progressively more complex ideas without necessarily displaying all the levels of their structure at the same time and which will therefore be both challenging and rewarding. And, fourth, there will be plenty of opportunity for everyone (who can afford a console) to find his calling, for the whole world of information, with all its fields and disciplines, will be open to him—with programs ready to guide him or to help him explore.

The first point is striking “people with whom one interacts most strongly will be selected more by commonality of interests and goals than by accidents of proximity”. I think that this is the secret-sauce of the internet and isn’t an obvious strategy at all.

Kredu Min, Sinjorino! (Believe me, miss!) by Cezaro Rossetti, this is one of my favourite novels in any language. It’s about the adventures of a peddler who sells stuff at markets and fairs throughout the British Isles. Feel good reading, full of excellent anecdotes. At some point, I want to write a little review for my reading page and translate some of it. I understand that an English translation was prepared by the author’s brother but it is lost to the mists of time.
Valley of Vision by Arthur Bennett. A collection of Puritan prayers formatted in a clever sentence-diagram-like format. You can read it online here although the formatting doesn’t come out so well online. (As I said, I’m reading a lot of things in parallel right now.)

Moving

I rode my bike in to work for the first time since September. It was absolutely lovely. We saw five deer on the way in through the valley. Another time, I saw two adult red foxes across from the dog park. Initially, I thought they were loose dogs but realized: “Oh snap, those are foxes!”
A pen pal and I were writing back-and-forth about exercise, he pointed out that I ought to make an exercise log, however minimal, with little notes like “Goal: X” and “Goal X met” or “Goal X un-met”. This feeling of accomplishing goals will help keep me in the groove of exercise.

Playing

I played with a string figure suggested by the ISFA mailing list:
- Andromeda Galaxy
French: I checked out some podcasts from this list.
- Affaires Sensible: I haven’t listened to any of these yet.
- Transfert: These are amazing! They’re slice-of-life stories about people with incredibly interesting lives. For example, there is a pair of episodes about a Parisian woman who takes in a refuge from Côte D’Ivoire: one from her perspective and one from his perspective.

Meta

Published: Mar 14, 2025 @ 10:00.
Last Modified: Mar 15, 2025 @ 15:28.