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Week Notes 37

This post is 37 of 37 in the series week notes.

General #

These week notes are getting a bit more sporadic. It’s just that time of year. Lots of stuff going on with classes as the end of term approaches. I’ve seen a few people talk about “weak notes” as opposed to “week notes”. I don’t especially want to write weak notes. Hard to get excited about, don’t you think? I’d rather write willy-nilly notes.


The absolute best thing that happened last weekend was seeing a tractor till a field of pumpkins back in to the soil.

A bit of context, to explain why this was so awesome: Back in Weeknotes 35, I showed off some of the pumpkins we grew at our community garden. Part of growing the pumpkins was driving past a pumpkin farm up Reesor Rd. to see how their pumpkins were doing. Every Saturday, since mid-summer, we’ve driven up to the farm to see their pumpkins. We’ve watched them ever since they were tiny vines in a field.

And this last weekend, we happened to drive by during the very brief window when the farmer was tilling them back in to the soil. It was magical. The whole job could not have taken more than twenty minutes, and we got to see it. We rolled down the windows and just marvelled.

Reading #

Writing #

I sent off another draft of Jayne in Brief. This last round was a lot of fiddling with fonts and layouts. It is nice to have this piece “out there” in the world. Now that it’s off my plate, I might get back to the Seminar piece.

Playing #

a/b 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 1
2 1 1
3 1 2 1
4 1 1 2 1
5 1 2 3 2 1
6 1 1 1 2 2 1
7 1 2 2 3 3 2 1
8 1 1 3 1 4 2 2 1
9 1 2 1 2 3 2 3 2 1
10 1 1 2 2 1 3 3 2 2 1
Spoiler The highlighted values are the first "new" values in the table. For example, $\gcd(3,5)$ take three steps to compute, but every earlier pair takes at most two steps. Moreover, the new values occur at the following spots in the table:

\[ \gcd(1,1) \quad \gcd(2,3) \quad \gcd(3,5) \quad \gcd(5,8). \]

And these are precisely the pairs of consecutive Fibonacci numbers! This observation leads to Lamé’s Theorem.

Links #

we were looking at
the ceiling and then
we saw the sky

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you any different. — Kurt Vonnegut on Farting Around | Hacker News

If LaTeX was being designed now, it would probably have more code in the preloaded format, but in 1993 when LaTeX2e was designed there was room for around 100 commands (including \label) in a document after you had loaded amsmath so having the option of not loading such packages was a vital option.


Published: Nov 21, 2025 @ 12:00.
Last Modified: Nov 20, 2025 @ 10:07.

Tags:

#week notes #juggling #braiding #Anki

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