When someone complained about the surface noise that came with listening to music on vinyl, the late BBC disc jockey John Peel, was said to have replied, “Mate, life has surface noise.” — Surface Noise – Mine In Mono
Ooops! Somehow, this week notes got posted a week late. No worries, life has surface noise! I was away at CMESG having a blast with mathematics education colleagues.
Everything I’ve ever done was done with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it.
Since [childhood], I have never listened to anyone who critized my taste in space travel, sideshows, or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave.
Speiser’s An Annotated Classification of Textiles Techniques (2024) is a delight to see. My wife said that it would just as well be an art book. It is clearly the work of many years of research. The sketches sometimes haunting and otherworldly.
From Calculus to Cohomology by Madsen and Tornehave. I put in a hold for this one from the library. It hasn’t arrived yet.
I went down a bit of a rabbit hole and wrote a longer post about my current mantra “Trust the Process. It’s All Connected.” I found myself asking: What Is The Process? After writing the post and thinking about it throughout the week, I think that the search for The (Ideal and Perfect) Process is a bit quixotic. I decided to quit complicating things and lean in to what works for me: writing, exercise, and Hodgkin.
I spent a good chunk of time working on the MAT B41 course prep. I am working on it from start of term to end of term. With MAT A29, I did the reverse. We’ll see which one is more useful.
I’m putting a lot of thought in to the solutions. I want them to be interesting to read and provide insight about the problems. This is a bit different than my usual homework solutions, which tend to be pretty bare bones. The change is due to the fact that these will be graded for completion only, so the students won’t be getting much feedback about their work per se. This means that they’ll have to consult the solutions to see where they went right or wrong.
I continue to enjoy the “14 Minutes of Anything” approach to physical activity. Lately, I’ve been going over to the community center and exercising via juggling and hacky sack in the big public space. No one seems to mind. Everyone who mentioned my juggling was positive about it. (Juggling is not hard exercise, but I can break a sweat by doing hacky sack.)
The allotment garden is coming along. The beets and radishes are looking good. Unfortunately, we had our first encounter with pests. Small black and yellow beetles ate most of Megan’s pumpkin plants. We’ve got a few more pumpkins on our porch, so we’re going to spray them with insecticide before moving them to the garden.
The appeal of the garden as a broader concept is that your role in it is not to control, but to cultivate. It’s a space you can plan and labor over, but the main action of growth is something beyond your power. In literal gardening, you make yourself one part of a larger natural system that supports the flourishing of your plants. Similarly, anything you participate in to bring about a flourishing beyond your control can be thought of as a kind of garden. — A Gome’s Garden
On a website admin level,
I can’t figure out the distinction between blog posts and notes.
For example, this week note is filed under /blog/!
So, I’m thinking about merging them in to a single type and distinguishing them by something more flexible like tags.
Merging them will require a lot of tedious manual editing.
A rainy day project?
Alfred Valley designs a bunch of cool storytelling games. I went looking for how to spell “ossuary” and now I’ve got a dozen tabs open. I love going down internet rabbit holes like this.
Online game resources that I used at one time or another:
Hilma ad Klint Swedish mystic and artist. Pioneer of abstract art.
My Website is Ugly Because I Made It by Taylor Troesh: talks about websites as reflections of personal aesthetics. Also, a bit of CSS / number theory voodoo.
Olly Costello makes amazing botanical themed art about liberation. Found their work via pixel dirt.
The Mathematics of Juggling recent talk by Allen Knutson, who really went deep with this stuff.
Podcast: A Quaker Take on Parenting
Book: Esperanto Revolutionaries and Geeks by Guilherme Fians looks awesome.
Published: Jun 13, 2025 @ 15:00.
Last Modified: Jun 20, 2025 @ 10:02.
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