Week Notes 8: Last Week of Term

This post is 8 of 8 in the series week notes.

General

Last weekend, March 29-30th, I brought my phone home with me so that I could do a bit of time-sensitive finance stuff that required two-factor authentication. Turns out, this was the wrong move. I would have been much better off to just do the finance thing on Monday.

One surprising definitely-not-possible-without-the-internet turn of events was the following: I learned that there was a police raid at Westminster Meeting in London, UK. This felt like terrible news¹. We know that Meeting, we visited it on our honeymoon. And then, on Sunday, from my weekly How Was Your Meeting post on Reddit, I heard directly from some Quakers in Westminster: they had a strong Meeting on Sunday and letters are being written. This felt like great news. So, access to the internet both depressed me and uplifted me.

It seems that Hugo is posting some stuff with links to my local machine. I’m still trying to figure out a method of catching this in the build process. I tried to modify my build script, but it seemed to always catch the errors whether they’re present or not. Weird! Experimentation continues.

Reading

I’m still reading War and Peace. I just got to hunting scene in Chapter III of Book III. It’s so solid. The whole feeling and excitement of the scene is intense. The way it builds up from a description of nature, to the scene with the head huntsman in Nikolai’s study, to the actual hunt itself. Totally rad. I love the way the children and also the buffoon, Natasya Ivanovnva,
I’ve asked for the library to hook me up with Life Together by Bonhoeffer. It seems that a lot of my thinking and reading right now is around community.

Writing

I started up a draft of the piece about sundials for the $U(t)$-Mathazine. During a boring meeting, I started sketching out the main ideas in my notebook. I haven’t got all the details worked out, but I’m writing a draft of it. There is a bit of tension there, as I hit parts that need detailed calculations.

A list of ideas from last week.

Sundials?
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 chatted with an occupational therapy student about things that might get our family moving more. She recommended that we check out online yoga videos for kids. When I asked Mira about this, it turned out that she already watched Cosmic Kids Yoga at school!

We tried one out together before heading to school, and it was a lot of fun. The yoga moves are not hard, but I’m nowhere near as flexible as a four year old. Oh well, we had a lot of fun. For future reference,

Playing

You can make little webrings from RSS feeds / OPML files: openring.

Links

Terry Tao’s Differential Forms and Integration: an absolutely dynamite presentation of a difficult concept. I learned a few things reading this. Tao is a wizard!
Terry Tao’s Multiple Choice Questions
Wikipedia: Reality-Based Community
Current apparent sizes of sun and moon
Winnie Lim’s Ringfencing My Self.
Unoffice Hours: hosting online “unoffice hours” to connect with people. A neat micro-movement.
Wikipedia: Axial Tilt for the piece on sundials, I needed to look up the convention for axial tilt. Turns out that Uranus is hugely tilted!
Sriram Krishnan’s advice about cold e-mails is spot on.
Jeff Kaufman’s kids post retrospectives are awesome.
- A little bit of techy-y stuff about photo curation.
Taylor’s Seizing the Means of Re-Production: about plants and plant intellectual property.

You may use/lend/sell/destroy a patented wrench. But you may not clone that wrench (or sell its clones), even if that wrench clones itself. The same legal framework applies to plants.

American Scholar: The New Old Way of Learning Languages

I should note that terms-and-conditions apply here. The raid wasn’t directly targeted at the Meeting but rather at a group, Youth Demand, renting the space from the Meeting. It seems that the government took issue with the group’s plan to use road blocks to “shut down London”. Quakers across the world getting upset about this police raid is a bit of pearl-clutching. There are, right now, Quakers being murdered for pacificist beliefs. We’ve experienced way worse than this historically. None of that invalidates this pearl-clutching response, but it is important to keep it in perspective. ↩︎

Published: Apr 4, 2025 @ 00:00.
Last Modified: Apr 4, 2025 @ 09:17.

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#week notes #reading #writing #moving #playing