We had a strange week here. Monday was a snow day, so we were out of school and work. I cancelled all my classes but forgot about a meeting. (Ooops! I’m so sorry.) That evening, we ordered in roti for dinner, and everyone who ate chick-peas got a bit of food poisoning.
I am really enjoying reading a PDF of La Kunularo de L’Ringo on my Kobo, now that I’ve gone ahead and hackily implemented amber PDFs. I couldn’t resist and even went a step further to make scrolling easier. Now that I’ve tinkered sufficiently (perhaps too much!) I’m just going to enjoy reading the book.
This week, I read The New Girl to Mira as a bedtime book. It’s about a girl moving to Montreal from Romania as she turns twelve, the arrival of her period, her struggles to learn French, and make a new friend group. It is really freaking good. There’s a strong inter-cultural vibe. People are talking Romanian, Mandarin, French, and English. They’re sharing food and figuring out friendship.
Early on, the main character, Lia, is practicing her French. Mira got curious about this, and wanted to learn how to introduce herself. She can now say: “Je m’apelle Mira. J’ai cinq ans.”
I finally went ahead and banged out short piece about seminar: Undergraduate Seminar: A Place to Sow Seeds. After looking at the submission guidelines for the venue I had in mind, I realized they had a “short communications” section which takes things up to five hundred words. That’s not much writing, but it counts!
This week, I got very excited about the geomtric interpretation of the power series for $\sin(x)$. I’ve previously given a talk about the sine x button for highschoolers as an introduction to calculus. \[ \sin(x) = x - \frac{x^2}{2!} + \frac{x^4}{4!} - \frac{x^6}{6!} \pm \dots \] “A Problem” by Leo Gurin, gives a geometric interpretation of the formula using iterated involutions. It’s so good! There is a great video of the proof here. I gave this as a talk at Seminar this week.
Having worked for years as a lounge lizard, I was smitten with the insight that the cocktail pianist is signaled out to conduct his ritual of group urban chanting on the themes of love and existence—a kind of medicine man at the ever-present altaric piano, surrounded by his boozy tribe sipping sacraments in the circle of our common misery. — Piano bar - Wikipedia
Published: Jan 30, 2026 @ 00:01.
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