Week Notes 31

This post is 31 of 33 in the series week notes.

General #

I’m not keeping up with week notes at all it seems. And that’s totally alright. Last week, Megan had some weird inner ear stuff which led to vertigo. Fortunately, this week, things seem to be getting a lot better. She’s regaining her balance and the condition is steadily improving.

This is my favourite tree on the walk to work. It is noticeably changing colour! Fall is definitely here. The walk has been beautiful lately.

Reading #

This week, I read The Shattering Peace by John Scalzi. It’s the most recent book in the Old Man’s War series, which Scalzi has been writing since 2005. It was great. A wonderful addition to the series. Given the ending, I’m sure there will be more to the series in the years to come. I’ve read pretty much everything Scalzi has written, and I look forward to reading more from him.

A couple blips from reading this one:

The main character, Gretchen, makes a big deal of leaving their PDA¹ at the office, and everyone gives her a hard time because it is very hard to contact her. I felt a little self-conscious because I tend to leave my phone at the office, and I worry about how inconvenient it can be for others. Of course, my life involves much less conflict than Gretchen’s life. After checking with my wife, she thinks it’s a net positive for me to be phone free.
Lots of possibly violent fights were resolved by peaceful means and trickery. The most memorable “violence” of the novel was sparring and martial arts practice.
Scalzi writes reasonable female characters. It’s clear that he knows, respects, and is respected by, some real women in the real world. This isn’t true of all sci-fi authors. (Scalzi also notices when people notice this.)

Playing #

I haven’t done especially much “playing” recently.

ISHINO Keiichiro and I have started to work on the figures in Tom Storer’s Little Red Book. Keiichiro previously confirmed my translation of Flor de Palo Borracho.
The braiding course has been an absolute blast. We’re working up to 10-loop letter braids.

I keep meaning to write a piece about the braiding course. There is a lot of cool pedagogically innovative stuff going on it. For example, the three seated students in the photo above are some random students from another class who just wanted to get involved. At some point, we’re going to do a field trip to the Textile Museum.

Links #

results on cataloguing digital resources | zoe loukia: Zoe wrote a little summary of her system of cataloguing digital resources. I’m happy that I helped in a small way.
Bag of words, have mercy on us - by Adam Mastroianni: a nice think piece about an alternative way of thinking of AI. Full of nice (and very quirky human quotes):

Trying to understand LLMs by using the rules of human psychology is like trying to understand a game of Scrabble by using the rules of Pictionary.

Bag-of-words model - Wikipedia: It turns out that “bag of words” is already a real thing!

The series started in 2005, when PDA meant “personal digital assistant” – an ancient pre-cursor to smart phones. ↩︎

Published: Oct 3, 2025 @ 12:00.
Last Modified: Oct 17, 2025 @ 17:29.

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Week Notes 31