This week, I joined Tablet Weavers’ International Studies & Techniques (TWIST). Their archives are fantastic. So many cool ideas. Joining them has got me thinking about “geek groups.” It turns out that I’m happily a member of many geek groups.
We went to a parent-teacher night at Mira’s school and got acquainted with her teacher. I’m glad we made the connection. It also opened up a few connections between parents. Now, at drop-offs, all the parents are a bit chattier and friendlier with each other.
I am in the home stretch of the Flock of Birds and Milky Way paper. The paper is trying to put across, in writing, things I’ve been thinking about for the last three years. It turns out that writing about things that you’ve thought about for so long is hard. Putting it all down on paper involves a lot of re-thinking, re-figuring out, and essentially re-doing everything. It is all good fun though. Writing the Bridges paper was a good warm up.
This is a diagram illustrating braid region of the figure Milky Way. The setup for generating these diagrams is described in Week Notes 66.
My students continue to have term tests. In fact, the MAT B41 students are writing their term test as I write this blog post. I am excited for the end of this round of midterms. Our next round will start up in early November.
Kris Leet in The Willful Pursuit of Complexity, a booklet about skipped-hole techniques in tablet weaving, makes a brilliant point about technology and knowledge.
In addition, as more archaeological sites are discovered and catalogued it becomes overwhelmingly apparent that the human race has forgotten much more than it currently knows. We are so defined by our current technology that we cannot conceive that people without our ‘advantages’ could have produced objects that we cannot seem to reproduce.
Lots of my play time in the evening has been spent playing with tablet weaving. I made an improvised loom inspired by Gudrun Polak’s Simple Looms.
And here are the weights underneath the loom.
Very observant readers will notice that two photos are a bit out of sync. I wove a bunch between the two photos and the warp got used up, so the weights lifted above the table.
Published: Oct 9, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Oct 9, 2026 @ 22:23.
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