Week Notes 43

This post is 45 of 45 in the series week notes.

General #

Life is going well. The new semester is rumbling along. My new course MAT A02: The Magic of Numbers is a blast to teach. Everything is quite experimental, and I’m writing the notes as I go. So far, the best class was an hour-long deep dive in to The Fitch Cheney Five Card Trick.

Reading #

I finished up reading A Meeting at Corvallis by S. M. Stirling. This is the same series of books that I mentioned in Week Notes 39. After three books in the series, I think I’m done with it. The Emberverse series is quite long and there is a lot left to go. But, like, I think I’ve got what I wanted from it. A lot of people on Goodreads don’t especially like the books with good reasons. Things I would have liked to see more of:

Exploring the exact scope of the Change. The hard sci-fi fan in me wants to know more the precise nature of the failing of technology. What pressure, exactly, is not attainable? What is really going on with electricity?
Adapting to the technological situation. It seems that everyone takes up Medieval weapons and warfare. The biggest innovation over medieval times in these books is people using bikes and rail ways. Oh, and at one point, they use hang gliders to aid in aerial reconnaissance, but that’s about it. I think there was a lot of room for exploring how people could use defunct technology in clever ways. (For example, what about solar energy?)

Reading the first three books of the Emberverse made me put The Lord of the Rings (in English and Esperanto) on my Kobo.

I’m still getting used to the Kobo. It seems really good at handling epub files, but the handling of PDFs is a bit clunky. I can’t quite figure out the navigation, and need to zoom and scroll around a great deal. The default Kobo software can’t invert the colours of PDFs, so vibe-coded a means of amber-on-black-ifying PDFs.

Writing #

This semester, I’ve got a reading course student who is working on a piece about: The Formal Calculus of Loop Manipulations. I’m glad that I finally have a reason to get that paper out the door.

Next week is the deadline for FYMSiC’s newsletter. So, I might put together a really short ~500 word piece about Seminar, like I’ve been promising to write for ages now.

Playing #

Norman Levine asked the string figure mailing list for a quick demonstration of Jayne’s figure Rattlesnake and Boy. I found my old notes about the figure from March 2024 and filmed them.