This week we had the MAT A29 exam. It was a hard one, I needed to adjust the final exam grades a bit. The rest of the week was spent doing admin work around the exam such as grading. I made a fair bit of progress preparing the MAT A02: Magic of Numbers tutorial activities. We’ve got tutorial activities (worksheets and slides) for Week 2-5 and lecture notes for Week 1-2. I always want to have “everything” done by the time classes start, but that’s just not feasible for a new course.
Jayne in Brief is published! My writing progress tracker says that the first draft was sent in 2023-08-09 and that is was finally published 2025-12-08. It’s been a while1 in the making. The editor was enthusiastic about the piece, and even suggested a specific contribution for 2026 issue of the Bulletin.
Dies The Fire by S. M. Sterling: A math education colleague recommended this to me, saying that it is their favourite book. And it’s a great post-apocalyptic page turner. Is it timeless literature? No. Is it an engaging read? For sure! After finishing it, I immediately put the sequel, The Protector’s War, on the Kobo to keep reading.
There was a suprising amount of linguistic diversity, with passing references to: Spanish, Finnish, Gaelic, Vietnamese, and Elvish. One character is profoundly deaf and signs.
I was a little shocked by the lack of slings. The novel has a lot of detail about weapons, especially bows. Someone on the Slinging.org forum back in 2014 noted that a lack of slings was probably just an oversight.
The geometry of hand-sewing : a romance in stitches and embroidery from Alabama Chanin and the School of Making: My recent interest in sewing lead me to pick up a bunch of books from the library on sewing. This one is the coolest. Though, I’m a sucker for anything called “The Geometry of …”
I made a little journal cover. This is a prototype that I made in order to try out the pattern and learn the stitches. The comments on /r/handsew were very polite. The bookmarks are five loop braids — braided as twin braids.
I put together a little green house for propograting some cuttings. It is full of african violets with a couple other gesneriads: episcia and kholeria.
On a plants note, a colleague, Marcelo Ponce gave me this little kalanchoe plant. It is so cute. He’s grown a few of these plants as gifts for his computer science colleagues as natural example of recursion.
This is what Paul Atreides sticks on the radio as he traverses Arrakis on the worm.
Two years, three months, and twenty-nine days — but who is counting? ↩︎
Published: Dec 19, 2025 @ 00:01.
Last Modified: Dec 19, 2025 @ 15:48.
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