We are getting the hang of the new school year. It no longer feels like an absolute rollercoaster. I figure that we’ll be back to normal in a few weeks1.
We are entering another Five Words era. I just looked back and saw that the last time I mentioned them was in Week Notes 1! After a year and a half, the series is still awesome. We have it from the library in French and English.
In the mornings, Mira and I continue to play card games. We recently tried out James Bond, a recently invented matching game. It has good “scramble to do all the things quickly” energy.
Berners-Lee, Tim, and Fischetti, Mark. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. United States, HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.
A delightful read so far. It is putting a lot of things in context for me. Prior to read it, I didn’t understand how much of the technology of the web was already available at the time Tim Berners-Lee developed it. In the late 80s, there was already a lot of software for editing and reading hypertext. TCP/IP were already functional. The internet “was a thing” as they say. Usenet and e-mail worked. Beners-Lee’s key insight was to do hypertext over the internet in a decentralized manner. To do so, he created URLs, HTTP, and HTML.
It blows my mind to think that there was hypertext before the Web. Berners-Lee went to bunch of hypertext conferences, saw their hypertext browsers and was like: “It would be amazing if you made this work over the internet.” And people said it was a bad idea! Or that it was too technical, or would never work, or whatever.
He repeatedly emphasizes that URLs are the biggest innovation. That the ability to address anything was crucial. This, of course, puts me in mind of my paper ecosystem.
The piece on Growing Linearly Independent Sets got accepted at Math Horizons. It was a collaboration with a fellow mathemagician, Eric Hart. Now, we just wait for page proofs. I’m excited to see that piece in print.
The piece on Flock of Birds and Milky Way is tumbling along. I had to rearrange the architecture of it last week. I’m feeling a lot better about the piece and it is steadily coming along now. This paper involves a lot of graphics that I am making with TikZ/braids.
I have such a love/hate relationship with making diagrams for papers.
My students are headed in to midterm season. The midterms for my two classes are Friday October 2nd and October 9th. It is a lot of preparation. One has to draft the midterms, check them, re-check them, make all sorts of announcments, get the TAs organized, etc.
This week I’ve been reflecting on how scripted my teaching is. So many FAQs are written directly in the notes. It’s helpful to have them there but can feel a bit mechanical at times. I suppose that, ultimately, this too is an artifact of scale.
I started playing with Cory Doctrow’s flashbake.
It is a tool to automatically commit changes to files.
There is a bit of tooling to send e-mails and monitor blog feeds.
The idea is that it produces a sort of log of the writing process.
A nifty piece of tooling but I find it odd that you need to specify the exact files you want it to watch.
It doesn’t seem suitable for the structure of this website or the courses that I’m writing.
Reading about flashbake got me playing with
ZFS, Syncoid, and Sanoid.
And this, ultimately, pushed me to finally hit publish on
backup system,
which has been a draft for four years.
I really like back up as a problem.
Added SageCell support to my website. And now, you can solve Hanoi interactively in the browser. Magic! Apparently, you can even link cells together.
And here is a nice rainbow plot of the complex sine function.
Vijay Ravikumar reached out to ask for a video about this one. We met when attended my workshop at Bridges. I was glad to make the video for him. When I posted my video on the string figures listserv, a few people pointed out the following excellent video tutorials.
Famous last words, of course. In a few short weeks, it will be November — the worst month. ↩︎
Published: Sep 25, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Oct 10, 2026 @ 19:37.
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