It’s reading week, so I’m not teaching. Mostly, I’m catching up on things that I ought to have done long ago. For example, I went to the dentist for the first time in three years. Turns out that once you stop being nervous and the dental hygenist starts telling you stories about Tanzania, it’s a pretty great experience. All the weird tooth things that I was worried about are actually non-issues.
I pulled Lappar, La Antikristo by Endre Tóth off the shelf. La Baza Legolisto has a number of collections of short stories on it. I grabbed this one as a place to start reading more short stories. The style is all over the place. Off the top of my head, the first three stories feel like riffs on: Lord of the Flies, No Exit, and The Library of Babel.
I continue to enjoy reading La Kunularo de L’Ringo. I just got to the part where Gandalf reveals to Frodo that he has The One Ring. So gripping.
On a bit of a whim, inspired by metasyn, I downloaded and started to read1 some anarchist stuff.
My piece2 about Seminar appeared in the FYMSiC newsletter. Woo-hoo! I’m glad to have that piece out the door. This week, I’ve mostly been supervising my student’s writing of our Bridges paper. I’m eager to move on to the project about growing linearly independent sets, but that can wait. There is no deadline on that project but the Bridges paper has to be submitted in a few weeks.
I got excited about electronics projects with eink displays and ESP32s. It seems like there are entry level projects that can do awesome stuff. I haven’t gone out and purchased anything because I don’t have the headspace for this stuff right now. I’ll have to queue these up as “summer projects.”
One thing I have in mind is a little box to display all possible 10x10 binary pictures. I remember seeing such a project on an artists website when I was a teenager; it would flicker through all $2^{10 \times 10} \approx 10^{30}$ images using a Gray code, so that one pixel changed at a time.
I got talking to some folks at the UTSC Garden Club about their website. Right now, it seems broken. So broken, in fact, that I won’t even link to it here. It sounds like they’re paying a crazy amount for a broken website. I’ve offered to host the website for free. This evening, I even went ahead and registered a fresh domain.
On a website maintenance note, I am starting to get confused about my notes vs blog distinction. It’s happened a couple times that I go to look for something, and I’m not sure where to find it. If I could go back in time, I’d tell myself not to make this split. However, now that it’s made, I’m not sure how to fix it:
ref shortcode extensively will be a pain. There are also RSS feeds to think about, although probably only a dozen people read them.posts and then tag things as blog or note as needed. Using tags to distinguish these might have been the way to go all along. Again, the issue of RSS comes up. Hugo generates feeds for tags, so it would be easy to re-direct.Mathematicians are really powerful, in part because of their amazing ability to invent language all the time. Sometimes it even leads to rare natural language grammar, like “subspace preserved under addition”. All four words are math inventions with a precise meaning. Take a page out of the math book and dare to get freaky with the language for whatever you’re doing. — fi-le.net
Side-loading stuff on the Kobo makes it so easy to dip in to things. Pre-Kobo, I don’t think I would have seriously read this stuff on my computer. I also don’t think I’d get physical copies either. As a tool for reading, the Kobo really opens doors to new kinds of reading. ↩︎
There’s a local copy too. ↩︎
Published: Feb 14, 2026 @ 00:01.
Last Modified: Feb 20, 2026 @ 14:37.
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