This blog is for more informal writing which I don’t intend to revise or edit.
It’s just day-to-day stuff, quick updates, or ephemeral writing.
For more formal writing, see the notes.
For everything, check the archive.
This list generates an
The 5’th week of classes. Between term tests.
A driving lesson about test anxiety and a bit of tablet weaving.
I just keep the wheels turning.
The Toronto Botanical Gardens hosted a simultaneous sale of african violets and cacti.
The 3rd week of classes. Getting the hang of the school year.
The 2nd week of classes.
The last week of summer.
Associate professor dossier, Family Camp, Bridges, and CMESG. Oh my!
Thinking about tags on this webite and tidying them up.
Apples, strawberries, and kiwis.
The first bloom of a Dr. Seuss gesneriad.
A return to writing after physiotherapy. The end of summer approaching. Class preparation starting.
A week spent doing other things.
Chilling with the family and enjoying Toronto at the end of the summer.
Lots of knots and braids. Travelling to Bridges in Galway via Dublin.
A week in the woods with a bunch of Quaker families.
A purple and white flower.
A delicate yellow and purple streptocarpus.
Mabel’s third birthday. Mira plays a bunch of board games.
A purple bell-shaped african violet
Playing with braids in the summer.
A light summer week ending in a talk on string figures and braids at the Relatorium.
A purple streptocarpus
From a camp trip to a wedding.
About to go camping at Presque-Ile.
Mira finishes Kindergarten.
A quick reply in favour of titled week notes!
A photo of a small pink african violet.
Public pool, walking to school, and the summer
Some thoughts about general handiness and skills that I had forgotten that I had.
A rough week before the start of the elementary school summer.
A reader asked for a search feature!
A trip to Kingston for CMESG.
All the stuff that I brought to CMESG 2026
An Esperanto trip, tk
The 4th week of summer.
A mushroom that I spotted by the community center
The 3rd week of summer.
The first bloom of my kohleria plant.
The 3rd week of exams.
Writing online as a bunch of link
A home fantasy turns into a nightmare.
Another visit to the Lakeshore AVS. Only three plants this year.
The second week of exams.
It’s nice to hear.
The first week of exams.
Redesigning MAT A02: The Magic of Numbers.
Braids and vertigo.
A translation of a newpaper article about Esperanto being used as a spoken language.
A little juggling break at the community center.
The 11’th week of classes. One year of Week Notes.
The 10’th week of classes.
The 9th week of classes. Pi Day. Carol Deppe.
We went to a seed exchange!
The 8th week of classes. SET Magic and Two Trees Variations.
Seventh week of class. Back to teaching.
An extended quote about interest formation from Cory Doctrow’s newsletter.
Reading Week. A bit of time to catch up.
Sixth week of classes. Terribly nerd-sniped about random linear algebra.
I like chill blog posts. Little slices of life. Quick moments that give me a sense of the blogger I am reading. My natural inclination is to always write advice, or technical stuff, or week notes.
Fifth week of classes. An anniversary. A new card game.
Fourth week of classes. A snow day!
Third week of classes.
Second week of classes.
Back to Work!
Christmas Time
A little anecdote about the folk process.
A quick update after exams.
The CMS Winter Meeting and crafts
The end of term approaches
Another week of Term Tests
A peaceful Reading Week
The last week before Reading Week.
A quick note between midterms
Learning to drive. Website history.
Midterm season continues.
Midterm season begins and vertigo.
Ooops! The Term!
The first week of the new semester.
The first summer with Mira.
Gearing up for the next term.
Back to work after the East Coast.
Back from the East Coast.
Thoughts on two books about textiles.
Hanging out on the East Coast
Community Camp at NeeKauNis
A silly artistic riff.
Writing and teaching a mini-course.
A week of microfiction at NASK.
A short story in Esperanto.
What it feels like to think no particular language.
Riffing off phenotypic variation.
We spent the week camping.
Making peace with less productivity.
What is the process?
Thoughts about the phrase: Trust the Process.
Getting back in to the rhythm of family life after travel.
A trip to Montreal for EMF.
Really, I’m just a student.
The start of gardening season.
A photo of a small white african violet.
A photo of a small blue and purple african violet.
A visit to the Toronto Botanical Garden Spring Sale 2025.
The first visit to the garden plot.
A conference, a retreat, and some flowers.
A photo of some new african violets.
A hustle before heading to a retreat.
An e-mail from a student about my teaching and blogging.
Feeling odd during exam week. Also, lots of poetry?
An Esperanto translation of the poem Hokusai Says.
The eye of the cyclone week before exams.
RSS, e-mail, and conscious consumption.
Lovely weather and a bit of a phone defeat.
Getting excited about summer and such.
Ramping up to Pi Day. Spring is sprung!
A string figure formed from two loops.
Phones, minimalism, and the Amish.
A picture of a heavily pinned string figure.
Coming back to work after Reading Week.
A week offline at home.
Notes from Reading Week of Winter 2025.
I saw some deer remains on the walk to work.
Parenting in a new place as assembling a village from spare parts.
A photo of a small pink african violet.
My first week notes!
Some loose thoughts about people, labels, and approximation.
A translation of a string figure from Juegos y Lenguajes de Hilo en El Gran Chaco
Thoughts on AI and writing.
An image of a circular braid.
I collected up some cards for from my cardfile related to a topic.
A rant about why old Esperanto literature is neat.
A photo of the math department with the sun rising.
Some random stuff Mira typed on my computer.
A picture of an elegant string figure position from Nauru.
A photo of a recently bloomed african violet.
A picture of the books on my book shelf.
A photo of a recently bloomed african violet.
Reflections on community and religion.
Do people maintain plant diaries?
A link dump of cool things I read about exercise.
The best exam that I ever took.
A picture of some three loop braids on a pin board.
A photo of some white water in Highland Creek.
We saw a deer on the ride in to work.
A physical example of the complicated braid relation.
A bunch of braid diagrams.
A picture of the relation between twists and passes in $LB_n$.
Some strawberry trailers re-potted in yoghurt containers.
Testing out my new photo upload script.
A photo of the african violets I got at the Fall Sale
These are scattered bullet point notes from Lauren DeDieu’s Margaret Sinclair Award Lecture
A physical puzzle related to braiding.
Surprising candour and playfulness from Artin in an Annals paper.
While writing a piece about mathematical braiding, I try actual braiding.
Thoughts on taking a four year old to a memorial Meeting.
A poem about the cost of mortality.
After print-and-playing a game, I discovered a couple accidental games.
After a long trip, take a couple days of rest.
Creating a repertoire of mathematical experiences for sharing with others.
Gratitude, exercise, and meditation as a means of overcoming the grumps and improving well-being.
Too many books is a great problem.
The doctor said to exercise and then my basement flooded. I exercised anyway.
Shanxi Province, sandstone, 11-13th century, Song dynasty.
A sunflower that Mira grew from seed.
Nature produces a surprising quantity of food.
A trip to La Renkontiĝo de Esperantistaj Familioj (REF) in Geyer, Germany.
Thoughts about why it is so easy to overthing blogging.
A poem by Nanao Sakaki about the distance that one could walk in a lifetime of walking.
We played the Claude Soucie game Divide and Conquer at the laundromat. It was very good, but we found the hand management to be hard. It was too difficult to imagine what the other player was holding.
We’ve been trying to think up a large multi-player game that can be played asynchronously, doesn’t involve lying or back-stabbing, and isn’t going to be wrecked by the players communicating with each other. In fact, it’d be great if the game encouraged players to communicate and work collaboratively. Such a game is still in the works; but, while we were working on it, the following occured to us.
I’ve just finished playing a hundred games of Catchup (BGG). Here are the rules. Below I’ll talk mostly about how Catchup feels and what it makes me think of.
Last Friday, Parker and I began a new project: a six-week-long children’s program that is part homework help, part games workshop. Each class consists of forty five minutes of tutoring and forty five minutes of game play and discussion. Our first game of the workshop is Hex.
A very deep almost-tie in Catchup.
Zendo is a great game. It’s a really, really, great game. It’s one of those perfect examples of a game mechanism distilled to its finest and packaged into a game that really works. Kory Heath, the game’s designer, really hit on a genius idea. It’s also a very general game. You can play Zendo with Looney Pyramids, designed by Looney Labs, one of my favourite game companies, or almost any other set of things that are plentiful and can be assembled into a large number of configurations. I’ve played Zendo with pictures on a chalkboard, and with words over e-mail. As an illustration I’ve included below a game played with strings of zeros and ones.
Raj is my new ’new favourite game’. I learned about it by reading up on what Boardspace.net has available, and after reading the rules I instantly fell in love. Raj has that essentialness which is shared by certain abstracts. It is the simplest possible expression of a fundamental game mechanic and yet it still playable as an interesting game in itself.
At a staff Meeting on Tuesday, August 21st, my coworkers and I were asked to come up with a goal to achieve by Tuesday, September 25th. Since I’ve been wanting to play games more often, I decided on this goal: play games twenty times by the deadline.
The first trick-taking game I ever played with Parker is French Tarot - the most complicated trick-taking game I have ever come across. We both enjoyed French Tarot and still talk about playing it again, but it took a while to get used to the rules. We soon after discovered 500 (a simpler form of French Tarot) and, because of our experience, took to it quickly.
Tablanette is a two-player card game. Parker and I discovered it when we were looking through the Pan Book of Card Games by Hubert Phillips. We have not played Tablanette in a while, but I remember enjoying this game and hope to play it again soon.
My mom and step-dad absolutely love the card game Rummy. As a result, my sister and I have also come to love this game. During my high school years, it was our main go-to game on homework-less evenings and slow weekend afternoons.
It is easy to carry around a handful of dice. So, the more dice games you know, the more fun you can have with only a handful of materials.
Oddball is a game that Parker and I created when we were visiting my mother on Gabriola Island, BC. It is inspired by the game Paletto.
Cribbage is my favourite card game. It is a two player game, but can be played with three players. The modifications for a three-player game are listed at the end of the rules.
Yahtzee is a bit like Poker but uses dice. It is a game where Probability is either on your side or not on your side.
Parker and I absolutely love Entropy. We do not, however, love the Domino Bead Game. The moves seem very forced to us, and the scoring is too extreme. So, we have combined a game that we love with a game that we wish to improve.
Eric Solomon’s Entropy is a perfect example of the theme of Chaos versus Order. Each player gets to assume each role once. As Chaos, you try to prevent your opponent from organizing patterns. As Order, you try to create as much structure as possible.
Recently I was wondering why Y has received so much less attention than Hex. In any discussion I’ve seen about connection games or the elegance of modern abstracts, the name Hex comes up – why doesn’t Y? It seems as though Hex has become a much more widely known classic than Y.
Thoughts about playing board games.
For a game with so few materials, Pig can be very risky, stressful and intense. It is well suited for playing with children and impulsive gamblers.
Megan and I found out about Cinq-O while looking for simple dice games with few components that aren’t Yahtzee or Ten Thousand. We’re always on the hunt for interesting games with few components; games which can easily be carried about. We also want to find nice strategically interesting dice games for two. Cinq-O is great for the former, but not so great for the latter.
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