Week Notes 7: Almost at the end of term!

This post is 7 of 11 in the series week notes.

General #

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.

Reading #

I’m still reading War and Peace. It’s just so incredibly rich and complex. There are so many sub-plots and sub-stories going on ay any moment in time. It seems to contain everything. Alternative translations of the title is “War and the World” or “War and Humanity.” Those titles really land.

Writing #

Yay! The piece for The Canadian Friend was sent in. This is my first for-print submission since March 2024. Oh my!
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.
Related to the “website spring cleaning” hinted at below, I have a bunch of ideas for blog posts or notes that I’d like to write.
- Language learning micro-climates
- Why students probably don’t want to write deferred tests / exams. (Spoiler: The averages always come out terribly lower, despite my sincere attempts to make the tests of equal difficulty.)
- Why I care so much about RSS support, even though nobody will probably use it.
- How I do reading courses
- A complaints / feedback policy for my courses
- The frame illusion in string figures
- Jotters and “clearing your cards” regularly
- What good is a static site generator?
- Why do I ask so many Google-able questions to people in real life? (Spoilers: it’s about building community.)
- Why we (probably) shouldn’t use the word “wiki” for personal sites.
- An approach to teaching antiderivatives: prove the fundamental theorem of calculus via Riemann sums to motivate the introduction of antiderivatives, do a couple examples, and then name the process of taking anti-derivatives.

Moving #

I’ve been consistently walking or biking to work. It’s nice to have a bit of time to clear my head. This morning, I saw a coyote running ahead of me through our neighbourhood.

Playing #

Suddenly, as spring arrives, I seem to have a bunch of ideas for this website. Do people do spring cleaning for their websites?
- Add _index.md page to week-notes.
- Implement a change-log.
- Implement ReedyBear’s suggestions in What does good RSS support look like?
- Create my own personal URL shortner / re-director for handing huge URLs from CalcPlot3d.
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.

Links #

Bradley Taunt’s website design is shockingly similar to mine. Stumbling upon this page was so exciting. It is like see convergent evolution on the web or something. I reached out to Brad, and he responded. Yay, web friends!
Cosma Shalizi writes about 30 Years of Notebooks and ponders whether maintaining his website is a worthwhile use of time.
Erik Demaine’s Cube Folding Puzzles. These puzzles are surprisingly tricky! I played with the first one for five minutes or so. Meg solved it in a minute!
Youtube: Stone Rebel: Waiting for the World to Change: another solid Stone Rebel album.
Toby Thruston’s Drawing with Metapost is a huge crestomathy of amazing illustrations. It makes me want to learn Metapost.
Elizabeth Sandifer is amazing. Very punchy. Witty. Lots of molten lava takes. For a short read, check out: Four Tiny Essays on SF/F.

Published: Mar 28, 2025 @ 00:00.
Last Modified: Mar 28, 2025 @ 16:06.

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#week notes #reading #writing #moving #playing

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Week Notes 9: In the Calm Middle