This week was reading week which means that all my teaching was cancelled. It is a period of time for students and prefessors to get caught up. I spent a lot of it catching up with my family and finishing various projects.
Every year, for Megan’s birthday, I organize a small puzzle hunt. This year, I got her the complete Sandman series. I wrote the following doggerel verse to explain where the volumes were hidden. Each stanza or couplet was separate clue.
On your birthday, strange stars gleam;
Six Tomes have vanished from The Dream!
The first lies where the monsters dread:
Go search The Darkness beneath your bed.Where things go missing by the hour,
the next lurks in a desk drawer.Coats hang limp like ghosts of night,
go seek there your next fright.Where pumpkins rest, quiet and still,
you will find your next thrill.Where towels and sheets hide in the gloom,
the next spots conceals a tome.Quick now, before the Final Doom,
Go search the living room.
The girls got very excited about helping Meg find the clues. Of course, the actual graphic novels are not suitable for kids. So, the kids were tasked with finding the six volumes but not looking at them.
Privat, Edmond. Historio de La Lingvo Esperanto Vol. 2, La Movado : 1900-1927. F. Hirt Esperanto-Fako, 1927.
A while back, I read the first volume of this history. It is neat what you can learn from 100 year old books in Esperanto. As I read this one, I was surprised by the rapid growth of the Esperanto movement in the period 1900-1905. Privat reports that around five hundred groups formed in this time. It amazes me that a few commercial firms even had secretaries working in Esperanto.
In this same period, Privat reports that the primary growth of the language was on two fronts: literature and bureaucracy. The latter terminology was crucial to the development of both community infrastructure and the language. In the footnotes, he gives lots of examples of archaic Esperanto business-speak: komisio > komisiono and *riprezenti > reprezenti.
Another surprise for me was the amount of blind people who learned the language. I had seen various tributes to, or announcements about, blind Esperantists; however, I didn’t understand why this was such a strong part of the community. Many blind people learned the language to access Braille literature that wasn’t available in their own lanuage. In the Anglosphere, there is a relative abundance of blind-accessible books. In smaller minority languages, there was not as much literature available.
I finally sent the Flock of Birds and Milky Way paper to BISFA! It looks like I’ve been blogging about it since Weeknotes 71 but the paper has really been on my mind for about three years. The papers at EMF and Bridges were leading up this piece.
The final paper was thirty-two pages which feels rather auspicious. After a whole lot of fiddling, I am finally happy with all the diagrams in it. Hopefully, it will make it in to BISFA 2026 which is a memorial volume for Tom Storer. In the Introduction, I wrote the following context.
Our deeper aim in this paper is to introduce a new tool for string figure analysis: the heart group relations. We do so to honour and extend the work of Tom Storer on heart-sequences by bringing his ideas into conversation with the language of braid theory. Mathematicians pay tribute to their ancestors by revisiting their work, finding new perspectives on old ideas, and making explicit what may once have been only implicit. We suspect that Tom already understood much of what we have developed here. If so, we hope this paper helps make some of that understanding more accessible to others.
At the end of the paper, I wrote the following Acknowledgements.
The heart group perspective emerged from a long collaboration with Eric Vandendriessche and Alfredo Braunstein. Many thanks for those wonderful conversations. Ness Schattman first did all the calculations in this paper soon after Bridges 2026 in Galway, Ireland. Many thanks to Ness for continuing to play with this material long after her course on the mathematics of string figures ended. Our workshop participants, especially Karl Schaffer and Nancy Scherich, were a huge inspiration to continue this work. And, of course, a hearty thanks to Tom Storer.
Mark Sherman, the editor of BISFA, got back to me almost immediately. He was pleasantly surprised by the piece and asked if I could write another piece for the memorial volume. That’s quite the response!
The garden is quite finished now. I’ve baked a couple of the pumpkins in to loaves. We also roasted a pumpkin and ate it. Next year, we’re going to focus on edible gourds. The flower garden was also quite lovely.
Jamie Tanna added a lovely heat map like calendar to his page. I thought this was very cool, and so added a Calendar to the Archive.
“Done! I’m Done! 96/09/23 - 97/10/07!!”
Published: Oct 30, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Oct 29, 2026 @ 21:14.
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