A huge accomplishment this week: I finished my twenty hour online driving course! It was a grind. I have so much to say about online learning, forced marches, and pedagogy. A few of the videos were beautiful and got saved to Bookmarks. There are still ten hours of “online homework” to complete before I get to the in-car driving experience part of the course. As a friend in my writer’s group said.
Parker is already closer than Parker has even been. Parker will one day take road trips with the family and sing songs and drum on the steering wheel while winds blow in from windows or a sunroof.
“Are we there yet?” will mean so many different things. But it definitely means we’re moving.
A couple nights ago, the girls were wrestling with me on the play mat. Mabel, the younger one, accidentally kicked Mira in the mouth and knocked a tooth out. This was a moment of panic for me and Meg, but it turned out that Mira was thrilled. The tooth had been wiggly for a long time and Mira was excited to get money from the tooth fairy. Crazy fun.
We did a weekend trip to Peterborough and I got a chance to stop in at Mark Jokinen books. It is the ideal used book store: mounds of books everywhere, piles on piles, and treasures everywhere. Mark even had a secret stash of mathematics stock hidden away in the bathroom. I came away with an awesome armful of books and can’t wait to go back to get another armful.
After leaving, I realized that I had left my sun glasses behind at the bookstore. Meg encouraged me to go back and look for them. I retraced my steps through that trackless wilderness of books but didn’t find the glasses. As I gave up, Mark said: “Hey! These sunglasses have been on this shelf for at least five years. Please, take them instead.”
Seminar continues to tumble along. We just heard two talks on topoi. It was a nice mix of logic and algebraic geometry. Very heavy theory-building work. Seminar moved to a new room and I realized that I should update the page. It hadn’t been updated in three1 years! I did a quick refresher on the webpage.
I’m trying to lean in to the LISTSERV as a mechanism for handling communications. It turns out that LISTSERV was released by L-Soft in 1986. Hopefully the Lindy effect keeps it running for a while.
I continue to play with the pair of figures Milky Way and Flock of Birds. I filmed a rambly video about the relationship between the two figures and a bit of loop manipulation analysis. This is the first video where I didn’t worry about going out of frame or have to contort myself to display the figures. The trick? Film much higher up!
I also realized that I would need some software tooling to check the relationship between Milky Way and Flock of Birds. This led to me playing with Sage. It is really nice! I can do Python-style programming about braids fairly naturally. The diagram above was generated with this code.
koura_pre_twist = \
move('twist_towards',0) * \
move('twist_towards',0) * \
move('cross_away_over',2) * \
move('cross_away_under',1) * \
move('cross_towards_over',0) * \
move('insert_towards_over',1) ;
koura_post_twist = \
move('cross_away_over',2) * \
move('cross_away_under',1) * \
move('cross_towards_over',0) * \
move('insert_towards_over',1) * \
move('twist_towards',0) * \
move('twist_towards',0);
product = koura_post_twist * koura_pre_twist^(-1);
braidPlot = product.plot(color=["black", "black", "orange", "orange", "red", "red"], orientation="left-right")
This is a variant on the diagram that appeared in Week Notes 55 and this blackboard shot D92: Koura Commutivity. The little Sage program that I wrote verified the commutivity from that blackboard shot.
I realized that I don’t especially like outdoor gardening yet. I like plants, I like being outdoors, but I don’t especially like growing plants outdoors. It seems that my preference is for indoor gardening. Different people have different preferences. Meg loves outdoor gardening and but doesn’t care for indoor gardening. My mother is the same way. I think it is a beautiful and poetic thing to grow your own food but have not enjoyed it as much as I expected.
The big garden news this week is that a twelve foot long tree branch fell in the middle of our garden plot. It did not crush of any Meg’s pumpkins fortunately. We got a saw and cut it in to smaller pieces for disposal. Cutting up the branch, and felling a couple small black walnuts near our plot, was much more fun than lamenting my tiny crop of beets. I’m still figuring out the sort of outdoor gardening that I enjoy.
It is no accident that the Seminar page hasn’t been updated in three years AND Mabel turns three years old this weekend. ↩︎
Published: Jul 17, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Jul 18, 2026 @ 08:35.
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