I love the way that every day experiences while parenting can start off fun and then get a little out of hand and turn in to crazy fun. This week, we had the lovely idea to do stretches as a family. I do stretches every morning while water boils for coffee as part of my morning routine. Certainly, stretching with the kids would be fun?
Well, just before bed, we all started stretching. Meg really likes to do a cat and cow stretch. So, I follow along. This immediately turns in to a new game for the kids: Crawl under the parent bridges. Both girls get in on this fun. And then, they encourage us to crawl under them! The whole thing turned in to a very silly and very stretchy time.
Frye, Northrop. The Double Vision : Language and Meaning in Religion. University of Toronto Press, 1991.
An erudite series of lectures on the role of language in the Bible delivered by Northop Frye. He talks about all sorts of things. Thomas Pynchon, one of my favourite novelists, makes an appearance. There touching little moments of Canadiana, where he writes about issues that would only speak to the heart of an Ontarian.
Lubchansky, Mattie. Simplicity: A Novel. United States, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025.
I picked this one up from the library on a whim. It was sitting on shelf and I thought it looked cool. Turns out, it is very cool. It heavily riffs on the Shakers. As a Quaker, I felt like the novel projected out what Shaker-infused Quakerism might look like in ~60 years (after an apocalypse). Very queer, very trans, very interesting. Absolutely could not put it down1. Here is Cory Doctrow’s spot-on review: Pluralistic: Mattie Lubchansky’s ‘Simplicity’ (01 Aug 2025).
I read this Wikipedia page Onifim, a kid who doodled on his homework in medieval Russia, and it had “fl. c. 1220–60” as the dates. I didn’t know what “fl.” abbreviated, so I moused over it and got the clarification: “floruit (flourished – known to have been active at a particular time or during a particular period)”. That just felt so tender and sweet in this context.
Last week, we rushed to finished the on heart sequences and braids before the Bridges deadline. I don’t usually write according to any external deadlines, so this was an intense experience: “Ack! This has to get done by Friday.” It is neat to run a course like this because the student and I are both bound by the deadline; we’re both facing the same time pressure. I like this version of things because we face a common challenge instead of the usual “professor challenges student”-dynamic.
A braid re-drawn from D92: Koura Commutivity made it in to the paper.
Now that the Bridges paper is off the table, I feel like I can sink in to the growing linearly independent sets stuff. I’m excited to spin up that project and get it out the door2. I met with my co-author and we have a pretty compelling narrative of what we want to say.
It’s fun and I am trying to make it the thing I reach for instead of my phone for baths, quilting, workouts, making my eggs.
My set hacky up is a bookmarklet that copies a command to my clipboard that I can quickly paste into a command prompt. This calls a bash script that calls a python script.
Published: Feb 28, 2026 @ 00:01.
Last Modified: Mar 2, 2026 @ 22:06.
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