Week Notes 6: Spring is Sprung!

This post is 6 of 6 in the series week notes.

General

We’re arriving at the end of the semester. I can feel myself getting excited for the summer, and the free time to read and think about stuff again. There is a wave of students worrying about their final grades, and there is also a wave of people asking about summer projects with me. This makes for a period of time which is simultaneously desperate and optimistic.

A nice internet occurence: a stranger reached out and told me that my RSS links were all directed to localhost:1313. Many thanks for this! It was a pleasant surprise to learn that someone might read my RSS feeds. It looks like something went wrong with the build process for my website, and the private version got posted by accident.

Reading

Right now, I have a tonne of books and articles on the go.

My default behaviour is to put a hold at the library on anything interesting that I come across. This means that there is always a trickle of cool books landing at the library for me. But, I think that I have hit some kind of exploration-exploitation bottleneck. There just isn’t enough time in the day to read all the cool stuff! What are you supposed to do when these all show up at once?

Teaching As A Subversive Activity by Postman
Sona Geometry from Angola by Gerdes
Linear Algebra and Geometry by Manin and Kostrikin
Research as Ceremony by Wilson

Over the weekend, our family picked up all the Tea Dragon Society graphic novels from the library. They’re so cute! I’ve only read the first one, but I understand that one of them has some ASL speaking characters. Very cool.

Writing

I finally started writing the piece about belonging for The Canadian Friend. It is only supposed to be 500 words long, so it is going pretty quick.
On the equinox, a student came to me and asked if I was going to write anything for the U(t)-Mathazine. After a bit of chatting, I realized that I ought to write something about conic sections and sundials.

Moving

I’m consistently biking to and from work. Last week, folks were laughing at me for biking in the cold weather. I told them, “If I start biking, spring will come earlier!” It seems to have worked. The weather is a lot nicer. (Also, the vernal equinox is Thursday, Mar 20, 2025, 5:01 a.m.)
During the Pandemic, I got in to the habit of running up and down the staircase of our apartment buildnig for exercise. It was right there, rarely used, and got my heart pounding. This week, I realized that I could do the same in my office building.

Playing

Heard about MDWiki and put up a copy in the experimental part of my website. It looks nice! I’m not sure what my use case would be, but I like it. Perhaps it’s a recommend resource for building a student website?
I got playing with some string figures:
- Two Loop Apache Door: inspired by Tetsuo Sato’s 1988 BSFA article.
- Flint and Steel: a Caroline Island / Uap string figure with a miraculous extension. The figure pre-extension doesn’t look like much, a boring tangle, but jumps to life when extended.

Meta

Published: Mar 21, 2025 @ 10:00.
Last Modified: Mar 21, 2025 @ 10:56.