It has been a hard week for me. The beginning of the semester is always tough. There are so many little things to handle. A lot of students, especially first-years, are quite anxious early on in the semester. It takes everyone a little while to get used to the new routine of life.
One highlight of the week was celebrating Mira’s birthday. We had some friends over to the park by our place and went home for cake. It was wonderful. She got a copy of First Crush by Cassandra Calin. So good!1
She also got a collection of card games. We’ve been playing card games before school and enjoying them very much. The collection is a bit quirky: it’s a bunch of re-themed standard decks of cards. There is an Old Maid deck, a Go Fish deck, a Crazy Eights deck, etc. It is good to be playing new games. I enjoy our little gaming session in the mornings.
Kids book idea: a story that incorporates a bunch of standard deck card games as tropes. A sort of fairy tale thing: meeting an Old Maid, Going Fishing, etc. Rules at the back of the book.
Gwyn, Douglas. Apocalypse of the Word: The Life and Message of George Fox (1624-1691). Friends United Press, 1986.
This is a re-formatted doctoral thesis. The introduction paints a very convincing picture of early Quakerism as an outgrowth of radical Puritanism. I like the way it frames the religious situation of seventeenth century England together with the socio-economic situation.
Gwyn also does a brief, albeit devastating, take-down of Rufus Jone’s mystical re-framing of Quakerism. I love the mid-twentieth century American academic read of Quakerism, à la Thomas Kelly and John Yungblut, but it was totally its own thing. Gwyn is much more historically based.
I guess that I’m reading this because I want to be more informed about early Quakerism and also to learn about significance of the Apocalypse.
Last week, I started poking away at the Flock of Birds and Milky Way piece. I had some draft material of a related piece from the Summer of 2025 on hand when I started writing. I made an attempt at completing that draft. After a little while of working with that draft, I realized that the piece was going in two different directions. It was trying to do too much; the achitecture for the piece just was not sound. And so, I spent a good long while working on a new plan for the piece from scratch. After a couple sessions working with the new plan, I feel like the piece will work out fine.
It was a sort of “measure twice and cut once” situation.
All consuming. Teaching, and the related administration, is my life.
I gave another Seminar talk about Hanoi. We had a record number of people come out. We even ran out of coffee! My talk covered the usual recursive solution to Hanoi and contrasted it with Buneman and Levy’s cyclic solution. Related to the talk, I asked the question below to a bunch of friends and haven’t gotten any solid leads.
Is there a nice name for the fact that different algorithms to compute the same thing can “feel” very different?
I am put in mind of this because of Hanoi. I know two very different algorithms that produce the same unique optimal solution path for the puzzle.
Or, like, are they even different? What is “difference” here?
I can point out objective things that make them different: the recursive one uses more storage space, or function call depth. The iterative one uses less space.
I continue to enjoy this middle-grader graphic novel era. They’re all so good. ↩︎
Published: Sep 18, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Sep 18, 2026 @ 16:52.
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