I got an e-mail from a colleague saying that I will likely have a plot in the UTSC Garden Club. I’ve never done much outdoor gardening, so I’m excited to get my hands dirty this summer. Lots to learn!
It’s that time of year when lots of students want to schedule “quick little meetings” with me. I made a sign for my office door that has invitation to schedule a meeting, a YouCanBook.Me link on it, and a QR code. Hopefully this helps with the scheduling but I do feel a bit futuristic and nerdy for doing so. This is another whiff of Future Shock in education.
This bit of dialogue will make no sense out of context, but I love it:
Parker: “Who wrote this?”
Student: “I have no idea.”
Parker: “A TA, perhaps.”
Student: “Of course. That’s obvious!”
The part that I like about this exchange is the instant switch from “I have no idea” to “Of course. That’s obvious!” This is top notch mathematician-speak to me.
Suddenly, as spring arrives, I seem to have a bunch of ideas for this website. Do people do spring cleaning for their websites?
_index.md
page to week-notes.The biggest play thing to come to mind is using ISHINO Keiichiro’s index of string figure to track down the stuff in Tom Storer’s Red Book.
The Red Book is a little pocketbook with ~80 pages of string figures writen in Storer’s string figure calculus. There are probably 100~150 string figures in there, but there are no diagrams or references. It was meant for personal usage. I had previously thought about translating it out of Storer’s string figure calculus but thought that it would be impossible without tracking down all the references. There are some calculus-ifications that are so dense that I don’t have a chance of deciphering them. And then, I thought that tracking down all the references would be a task of years? Decades?
Well, it turns out that Keiichiro’s website uses English names for figures on the backend. He has ~1100 string figures described in Japanese with full bibliographic information. A random sampling of both looks like there is a good amount of overlap.
Published: Mar 28, 2025 @ 00:00.
Last Modified: Mar 28, 2025 @ 16:06.
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