Week Notes 9: In the Calm Middle

This post is 9 of 11 in the series week notes.

General #

This is a funny week for me work-wise. I don’t have any teaching, so I am much less scheduled and planned than usual. Every morning my internal monologue is saying: “Alright, I’ve got this to-do list, but I could just as well stay home or go downtown. I should probably go to work.” I should add a little note about this to my almanac page.

Reading #

The Bonhoeffer book on community showed up from the libary. It is a “collected works”-type volume and has his book on the Psalter as well. I’m excited to read them both out.

On a more mathematical note, I think I’m going to give a seminar on “integration in finite terms”.

Integration in Finite Terms: Fundamental Sources
Integration in Finite Terms by Rosenlicht (1972)

Writing #

After the insight from Week Notes 7, I couldn’t resist starting up a spreadsheet to process the figures in Tom Storer’s Red Book. That’s now available here.

A list of ideas from Week 7 Notes.

Sundials?
Language learning micro-climates
Why students probably don’t want to write deferred tests / exams. (Spoiler: The averages always come out terribly lower, despite my sincere attempts to make the tests of equal difficulty.)
Why I care so much about RSS support, even though nobody will probably use it.
How I do reading courses
A complaints / feedback policy for my courses
The frame illusion in string figures
Jotters and “clearing your cards” regularly
What good is a static site generator?
Why do I ask so many Google-able questions to people in real life? (Spoilers: it’s about building community.)
Why we (probably) shouldn’t use the word “wiki” for personal sites.
An approach to teaching antiderivatives: prove the fundamental theorem of calculus via Riemann sums to motivate the introduction of antiderivatives, do a couple examples, and then name the process of taking anti-derivatives.

Moving #

Years ago, I messed up my shoulder. This has made it hard to get back in anything resembling weight training. Early this week, I tried a little bit of inverted rows and left my shoulder sore all week. I gotta remember that I should just avoid everything to do with my right shoulder. The search for non-painful upper body exercises is too painful.

Playing #

I posted a few photos of string workshops held during my classes: https://stringfigures.ca/workshops.html
Make a rough-and-ready translation of ~k16’s index of string figures.
I emailed with ~zkbro and Taylor about gardening. A great insight was this: I should plant lower-maintenance stuff, like onions, in the garden plot and put any higher-maintenance stuff on my porch.
Added header links to the site; now it’s possible to link directly to specific headings on pages.

Links #

Blueprints for Survival: Zines
Textile Museum of Canada: Temporarily Closed: I am saddened to learn that my favourite museum is struggling financially and has to close down temporarily.
Viktor Lofgren on An Off-Ramp from the Digital Ikea Maze
Wikipedia: Bloom’s Two Sigma Problem: The most important (intractable?) problem in education that I learned about this week.
The Diggers Archives: an archive of a hippy movement.
Song.Link: a tool for linking to songs which gives links to YouTube/Spotify/etc. Very cool!
Re: Re: Reading Indie Blogs Right
YouTube: Gideon Elson: Lots of fantastic two ball juggling.
todo.txt: This is one of those things that I keep opening up and never implementing. Do I need this in my life? Probably not.
- todo.txt-vim there is nice vim tooling
YouTube: Faierie Knotting has very far out and experimental string stuff. The videos are by Joaquim Almeida Escudeiro, pictures of his knot work are in Knotting Matters.
String Figures Wiki: It looks like someone put up a string figure wiki. Exciting!
YouTube: Mukuxí Pleiades popped up on my feed. Incredible!
Hugo Markdown Documentation

Published: Apr 11, 2025 @ 23:15.
Last Modified: Apr 12, 2025 @ 17:03.

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#week notes #reading #writing #moving #playing

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