These notes are a growing collection. Some of the notes are thoroughly developed pieces of writing (e.g. Alan Lakein’s Life Goals Exercise). Others are just stubs (e.g. juggling). Despite their length and level of polish, they’re all things that I thought were worth noting.
The best way to navigate them is to use the Notes menu, and search. Alternatively, you might find the Tags helpful to find notes around a similar topic. There are tags which group posts according to how polished or sketchy they are.
These notes were inspired by:
My porch garden over the years.
Hasty notes from a retreat.
Thoughts on a persistent problem.
A website can have visible and invisible parts much like an iceberg.
When does a function have a nice antiderivative?
A couple years ago, I hit my storage limit on Google. I had a massive archive of e-mail and wasn’t using most of it. As a pack rat, I decided that I should archive all the e-mail, put it in backup, and then delete it all from my Google account.
How we sort exam papers.
Don’t read a book alone! Do something social.
A working draft of a short piece about sundials.
A summary of the Kangaroo Volunteer Orientation 2025
A pair of string figures from Mary-Rousselière’s Les Jeux de Ficelle Des Arviligjuarmiut.
Instructions for the Australian aboriginal string figure Bunk.
General advice about applying for to a lot of academic jobs using a spreadsheet. In particular, an outline the tools that I used to successfully get a job during the 2020 job season, at the height of the third wave of the Pandemic, with a newborn child at home.
A small collection of my favourite math-y puzzles.
As a teacher, I think a lot about questions and getting students to participate in class by asking questions. I call the infamous phrase “Do you have any questions?” the meta-question.
A mathematical magic trick based on Markov chains.
This is a checklist of things that I need to do on a weekly basis for work. It was inspired by Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right.
Advice that I offer to all students everywhere.
A list of things to prepare for a generic course.
Some personal reflections on reading, writing, and worship.
A couple AI generated images of an emblem that says: Trust the Process. It’s all Connected.
These are some notes about and care tips for the plants that I have in my office.
A collection of resources about exercise. Why it is important, how to do it with minimal equipment, etc.
A list of recurring topics of interest.
Some pictures of samples of three loop braids.
This note collects various references related to blogging. Why people blog, how to blog, etc.
A visual comparison of various low-tech ways of photographing a braid.
Recordings are great, until they are not.
A list of common $\LaTeX$ errors that beginners make and their solutions. Helpful reading for people writing their first documents in $\LaTeX$.
Personal best practices for writing documents in $ aTeX{}$. Helpful reading for people writing their first documents in $ aTeX{}$.
Language independent literate programming with noweb.
A bit about my writing ritual.
Against vim mastery.
How to add line spacing and line numbering to a $\LaTeX$ document.
Thoughts on how to prepare a probationary review dossier as a teaching stream faculty at UTSC.
This is a list of texts that I often recommend to people together with comments about those books. It is especially heavy on mathematics books, speculative fiction, and writing advice. Links to the Toronto Public Library and UToronto Library are provided.
What I pack when I travel.
This is a quick tutorial on how to use Simple Mass Downloader by George Prec for Firefox to download all the pictures of your kid from Lillio.
Thoughts about how to undo the effect of docstrip.
At the University of Toronto, we receive annual merit-based pay raises through a process called “Progress Through the Ranks”. This note is to intended to describe a setup for keeping track of information and documents relevant to PTR. For an overview of the process, see the Academic Administrative Procedures Manual. At the end of each year, your department will send you a batch of forms to fill out which will then be used by a committee to assess your performance. These forms are:
How I use newsboat and sfeed to generate a static page of RSS feeds that I follow.
How to get your course evaluation data and format it in $\LaTeX$.
If you’re a student doing things, please make a website.
Things I wish that I’d known when I started teaching.
What does the $\sin(x)$ button on a calculator really do?
A write-up of a question about loop manipulation and braid groups.
This talk introduces infinite limits by playing with a mysterious function in Python. It was originally given at Lester B. Pearson Collegiate in Scarborough on 2024-02-12.
Thoughts on how to design assessments which are valuable to students beyond completion, and which can be re-used over multiple years.
Links to juggling resources.
How I’ve set up my ttys on Linux to be more user friendly. Switching fonts, keys, and backlights.
How I use a twenty year old word processor to write code and upload it to the cloud.
I’m a fan of an old book on time management: How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973) by Alan Lakein. The language and examples are a bit dated, but the content and ideas are timeless. Every year or so, I dip into it and learn some new insight about managing my time and priorities.
Last year, I did all of my course document preparation using docstrip, a standard component of LaTeX. It was revolutionary; docstrip allowed me to prepare all of my course documents in one large LaTeX project while maintaining a consistency of style across many formats including slides, quizzes, tests, and even posts to our learning management system.
MathPrograms.org has tonnes of undergraduate research experience opportunities, but primarily focussed on the US. If you’re interested in mathematics, and based in Toronto or Canada, then there are a number of opportunities worth investigating.
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