This week, I got my beloved Kaweco Sport Brass pen working again. It has been out of service for a couple years, sitting sad and unused in my desk.
How did it get back in service? I realized that I could reach out to a friend who knows about fountain pens and ask their advice. Realizing that you can ask for help is so important! The friend was immediately enthusiastic about getting the pen working and even forwarded my comments to some other pen enthusiasts. I soaked the nib for a few days, brushed the interior with a soft tooth brush, let it all dry and re-assembled it. Ta-da! Magic! The pen lives.
Another example of parenting going from fun to crazy fun: over the weekend, we took the girls to the grocery store1. I started to say things like: “Scouts, go find us some beans.” The girls loved it and happily fell in to their scouting roll. We were a goofy bunch of hunters with advanced scouts going ahead to survey the aisles. Crazy fun.
The Bridges people pulled a nice little bit of sleight-of-scheduling: Papers were due on March 1st. After the deadline, they let us submit revisions until March 8th. Yay!
We got quite lucky, a friend read the paper and found some genuine errors. We were able to get those revisions in before the deadline! Thanks, Oliver, for the initial read.
Now that the Bridges paper is cleared, I am pounding out the Growing Linearly Independent Sets paper. It is coming quickly because I have been thinking about the ideas for a few months now and the target journal is quite open-ended.
I found out that Overleaf supports git integration. Now, I can write
collaboratively with the full power of vim2. After years of poking and
prodding at it, I feel like I am using git “for real” now.
Sherman, M. (1991) “Rationally Designed String Figures: Variations of the Kwakiutl Figure ‘Two Trees’.” Bulletin of String Figures Association 17:29-106.
Diaconis, Persi, Ronald L. Graham, and William M. Kantor. “The mathematics of perfect shuffles.” Advances in applied mathematics 4.2 (1983): 175-196.
Diaconis, Persi, and Ron Graham. “The solutions to Elmsley’s Problem.” Math Horizons 14.3 (2007): 22-27.
Now that the major writing project of MAT D92 is written and submitted, we are looking for other things to do. I’ve decided that I want to play through and read Mark Sherman’s Rationally Designed String Figures.
It introduced this beautiful framework for thinking about variations of string figures. I have been wanting to read it for ages, and think this might be the time. As part of reading/playing through the article, I filmed this little YouTube video.
I really enjoy going grocery shopping, because it’s the closest I ever get to exhaustion hunting gazelle on the wild savannah. Also, I get to discover new food option! ↩︎
I have been using vim exclusively for so long that all my
muscle-memory is vim. My hands just “do vim” and it is a pain to use any
other editor. ↩︎
Published: Mar 6, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Mar 6, 2026 @ 19:41.
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