Week Notes 73: The End of Summer and First Week of Work

This post is 73 of 73 in the series week notes.

General #

Life got away on me there! I was enjoying the end of summer with the family. A couple trips up to Port Perry were just magical.

I wrote a bit about the summer, as a whole, in Semester Notes 4: Summer 2026.

Parenting #

This week, I took Mira to her first day of Grade 1. It was a joy to see the neighbourhood families together again. We spent the morning before drop-off playing cards on the porch. I think we’ll be playing lots of cards before school.

A mathematical curio that came up while playing Go Fish. We played a round which involved almost the whole deck. The next two rounds were over in just a few turns each. What happened? Who shuffled the deck?

Writing #

I started working on a piece about Flock of Birds and Milky Way. It got way out of hand as I tried to put everything that I know about braids and string figures in to it. Eventually, I decided to pare it down to the basics. I’m essentially just going to flesh out what is in that note.

Reading #

Bringhurst, Robert. The Solid Form of Language : An Essay on Writing and Meaning. Gaspereau Press, 2004.

Last week, I read an essay by Bringhurst. It was so far out that I had to put holds on all his stuff. I read this one on the way to see Twelfth Night in High Park. The Solid Form of Language was a good read. Thoughtful and deep writing about language, culture, and writing from a poetic typographer. Full of absolutely stunning typography. You don’t often think about the relationship between polyphonic music and typographic polyphony, but you definitely do when reading Bringhurst.

Also, I love this bit from the Navajo story The Origin of Horses.

The rhythm of the storytelling is so strong.

Links #

Self-tiling tile set - Wikipedia
Bhartrhari’s Paradox - Futility Closet: Unnameable things are really really unnameable.
[2608.08421] A SAT Attack on Tarski’s High School Algebra Problem: The smallest countermodels ARE of size twelve.
Japanese Play-by-Postcard RPGs: Net Games
“the whale does not owe us a translation” – escarpment: thoughts on cetacean language
Sallows, L. The lost theorem. The Mathematical Intelligencer 19, 51–54 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03024415
In Quest of a Pangram by Lee Sallows (Abacus 1985)

Of course there is already a discpline whose concern is with the creation of over-determined textual structures: a highly technical field in which the distillation of meaning and the coalescence of form with content have ever been focal concepts. Its name is poetry.

Published: Sep 4, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Sep 8, 2026 @ 20:49.