It has been an odd week. I spent Tuesday going to the dentist and physiotherapy. As I wrote in the 2026 Webpage Jam, I have an overuse injury in my right thumb. Two weeks ago, the situation got so bad that everything involving opposing the thumb to my fingers hurt. I chose to completely set aside handwriting and string figures.
This week, the physiotherapist gave me the go ahead to start writing again in small sessions. I wrote in my journal and played with the string for the first time in two weeks. It was great to “come home” to these core sources of joy in my life. I only had enough writing time to say: “Wow! It’s great to be back.” And yet, that was enough.
Mabel is getting to a sweet spot where she can play with Mira unsupervised. She is able to partcipate in imaginary scenarios and act things out. Sai got the girls Puffin Rock stuffies and they love playing with them. Mabel acts out long stories about thunder storms and making deeper burrows for puffins. It is such a delight to watch.
Mira was home this week. She’s been hanging out with Meg all day while I’m in the office preparing courses and finishing off summer projects. We’ve got together a few times as a trio to play games. Meg and I taught her Schnapsen, our current favourite two player game. She learned a trick taking game! We can also enjoy decently long gaming sessions. One afternoon spent a couple hours playing Gubs, Jaipur, and Schnapsen. We played each game twice.
Senechal, Marjorie. “Coloring Symmetrical Objects Symmetrically.” Mathematics Magazine, vol. 56, no. 1, 1983, pp. 3–16. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2690259. Accessed 28 Aug. 2026.
A lovely piece on colour symmetry: how colourings of symmetric objects interact with the symmetry group. If you have a symmetric object $X$ which is coloured by $n$ colours then you want the symmetries to interact nicely with the colouring. In particular, applying a symmetry to $X$ should permute the colours uniformly. All the red patches should go to blue patches, all the blue patches should go to some other colour, etc. This uniformity means that you want $\varphi : \operatorname{Symm}(X) \to S_n$ to be a group homomorphism. Lovely stuff. Senchel is an awesome writer. Great expository style.
Bringhurst, Robert. “Everywhere Being Is Dancing, Knowing Is Known.” Chicago Review, vol. 39, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 138–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/25305732. Accessed 28 Aug. 2026.
I bumped in to this via Kevin Rowe. Reading literary theory by poets is an experience. Thoughtful, obviously poetic, and a little intoxicating. This piece opens with the following lines and just keep escalating from there.
I do not know how poetry knows. What it knows I cannot say myself, though I have heard poetry say it. That it knows seems to me only a kind of tautology poorly phrased. I would rather say that poetry is one among the many forms of knowing, and maybe it is the purest form we know.
This week has been all about making revisions to the piece on Growing Linearly Independent Sets. It got accepted at Math Horizons while I was away at Family Camp. I sent in the revised piece today.
A fair chunk of time was also spent planning another piece on loops, braids, and string figures. It would be nice to have the full theory laid out together with the recent progress on Flock of Birds and Milky Way.
The garden is in full swing. We have about five pumpkins and a dozen gourds. It seems that Cucurbitaceae really like our plot. The raspberry patch annex was nice while the plants were accessible but now it is a weedy mess again. I think next year we’ll turn the main plot in to: pumpkins, gourds, and flowers. We have been eating tomatoes and beans from the porch garden too. The sun-hot tomatoes, picked by excited kids, are hard to top.
On an indoor gardening note, my first eucodonia just had its first bloom. It is a sort of funny Dr. Seuss plant. Huge foliage and tiny little flowers. A streptocarpus with massive leaves. Now that I have a eucodonia, primulina kohleria, two streptocarpi, and a bunch of violets around, I am starting to get a feel for a small part of the gesneriad family.
What I built, thanks to the lack of a single shelf, is a lifestyle, a family habit and culture, where books are as essential and natural as our couch, or bed, a part of a normal life; and that a life or home without any books would feel less like home, less like life. I created a home for books.
Published: Aug 27, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Aug 28, 2026 @ 21:01.
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