I took Easter Monday off work to hang out with my wife and elder daughter, Mira. Our younger daughter, Mabel, was in day care, so we got the day to be a “trio”. It was really neat to see Mira be herself around her parents, without having to compete for attention. We had a lovely day together.
Canada is having a federal election. We took the kids out for early voting over the Easter weekend. Mira is at the age where she really wants to get in to the reasons behind things. We’ve been talking about the parties as “teams”. For example, there is the blue team.
She wants to know why each team wants to win. As I try to explain each party in terms that a kindergartner can understand, I feel that there is no sense in saying “This team sucks”. In adult discourse, we tend to dismiss things with labels. They’re obviously neo-liberal nuts. We neglect the fact that these parties are staffed by reasonable people making reasonable choices. They can’t just be entirely wrong.
Generally, I don’t read much poetry. However, I printed a copy of Malmalice by Claude Piron from Esperanto Britain. It is neat to read a whole book of poetry by one author. You can see his style and life evolve throughout the book. There are some good poems, but there haven’t been any great poems like Memore which I quoted at the end of Week Notes 10.
The thing about Piron that I really like is that he writes a clean and crisp Esperanto; his writing is “Zamenhofian” somehow. That is to say, it sounds classical and demonstrates a definite mastery of the language. He has a book length treatment of his views about style in La Bona Lingvo.
There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages. — Mark Twain
A few weeks ago ago, I read The Tea Dragon Society. This week, I got around to reading The Tea Dragon Tapestry. It’s the same kind of slow-moving, loving, lightly queer, graphic novel as the others in the series.
The Tea Dragon series makes me want to drink tea.
The pitch that I sent FYMSiC last week about the fundamental theorem of calculus was well received. They said that I shouldn’t use many formulae because $\LaTeX{}$ doesn’t play nicely with their software. So, it’ll have to be a higher level piece without many calculations.
My favourite part of the family day described above was collecting sticks while out walking with Mira. My favourite forms of moving are going for a walk or a hike. A friend recommended that I take out A Philosophy of Walking from the library.
I started up a draft of a blog post for my seminar talk on Integration in Finite Terms. This is my first time writing up a talk as a blog post. It seems to have paid off: I was able to send the talk to a colleague who couldn’t attend.
Recently, I started to be curious about ukulele again. I have had a ukulele for over a decade but never managed to make much music with it. This summer, I want to set a goal of learning a handful of definite and identifiable songs. Jeff has a nice post Teach Yourself Any Instrument. The main bit is the intro:
You can learn any instrument on your own. Once you can make it produce a sound, all you have to do is mess around until you can make it do what you want. I’m not just saying this: I’ve done this with piano, double bass, and mandolin. Most people do this with whistling.
However, I think it’s missing a final step: “learn some songs.” When I play ukulele, it sounds like charming non-sense. It is light background music that drifts around a bunch of major chords. I can’t produce anything that sounds like a definite song.
If we read Jeff’s “make [the instrument] do what you want” charitably, then Jeff’s last step is indeed “learn some songs”. If you want to make the instrument play songs, then you’ll play songs.
Published: Apr 24, 2025 @ 00:15.
Last Modified: Apr 24, 2025 @ 15:46.
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