Week Notes 22

This post is 22 of 22 in the series week notes.

General #

This week zipped by! I didn’t do any daily updates to the weeknotes draft, so it this is all coming at the very last minute.

Reading #

At NASK, I asked around about La Baza Legolisto. Three friends who have read a lot of Esperanto literature said: “Yes, reading the whole list is an interesting project. However, it is very hard to find the books.” This got me curious about exactly how hard is it to find all the books on the list. What would I need to do in order to get digital copies of all the books on the list?

And so, to answer this question, I made a spreadsheet of the prose section of the list. It turns out, most of the books are available through Libraro Ludoviko, the Canadian Esperanto book library.

Playing #

I got a Kobo ebook reader. It is a nice piece of technology. Initially, I was worried that it wouldn’t play well with Linux. After some initial hiccups, Calibre works great. I had to install the latest verion 8.6.0, to get it to work with the Clara Colour. Once I did that, everything worked just fine.

I bought it so that I could take War and Peace with me on the road traveling. (Yes, after 20 weeks, I’m still reading War and Peace.) It seems to do a good job of it. I’m still sorting out epub, kepub, mobi, etc. Suddenly, I appreciate those formats a lot more now.

I have a lot of PDFs of literature related to string figures. If I were to go back and scan those documents again, I would do it slightly differently. It seems that single page per PDF page provides a better experience on e-readers.

Writing #

Most of my week was sucked up by writing a five hour long mini-course on Euler’s Identity for Green Path. It was a nice rabbit hole to go down. The mini-course built on some material from a previous workshop that I’d given on The $\sin(x)$ Button, which I wrote as an answer to a question I was curious about in highschool: “What does the $\sin(x)$ button on your calculator really do?”

While write the mini-course, I was astounded to learn the purely geometric derivation of the power series of $\sin(x)$ and $\cos(x)$ from this article.

Gurin, L. S. (1996). A Problem. The American Mathematical Monthly, 103(8), 683–686. https://doi.org/10.1080/00029890.1996.12004805

There is a 20 minute long YouTube video of the proof here. It is wild. I am amazed that this was mathematical folk knowledge in 1930s Russia, and that one could communicate it to an eight grade student.

Gardening #

We have a small pumpkin! Megan is excited to see that her pumpkin patch is working out. She recently visited the garden with a good friend who teachs gardening. It was very eye opening, and she learned a lot about our plot. For example, there were a bunch of tomato plants that we “inherited” with the plot. We had no idea they were there.

I see a lot of people talking about digital gardens online. I wonder whether that metaphor is accurate. It seems to me like a real hands-in-the-dirt gardening has a lot of experiences that don’t map on to maintaining a website. I’m curious whether the digital gardeners have ever tried physical gardening.

This summer, I planned to go really hardcore on gardening. It was my “big project” or whatever. One totally delightful thing that I didn’t anticipate at all is that Megan really likes gardening. It’s a total surprise to both of us. We’re already scheming what to do next year.

Links #

Brevity Magazine literary flash non-fiction.
A Problem by Leo Gurin: produce a series expansion of $\sin(x)$ using just the facts $\displaystyle \lim_{x \to 0} \frac{\sin(x)}{x} = 1$ and $\displaystyle \lim_{n \to \infty} \frac{x^n}{n!} = 0$. This article gives a geometric intepretation of the series expansion of $\sin(x)$.
How to Remember Anything Forever-ish: An interactive website about spaced repetition and the forgetting curve.
WP: The Forgetting Curve: Ebbinhaus’s forgetting curve.
Reddit: Chaos Gardening

Published: Jul 18, 2025 @ 11:00.
Last Modified: Jul 18, 2025 @ 21:11.

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