📝 Notes on Parker Adey

Commutator Intuition

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 15:51:01 -0400

What is a commutator, really?

Of Loops, Braids, and String Figures: The Loopy Calculus of Cat's Cradle

Wed, 27 May 2026 10:37:06 -0400

The hands out and slides for a talk at Bridges 2026.

How to Build Spot It

Mon, 25 May 2026 09:01:02 -0400

A bit of projective geometry builds a Spot It deck or the Fano plane.

Digital Magic: An Introduction to Base Systems

Fri, 22 May 2026 16:12:28 -0400

An old magic trick is used to introduce binary.

Missing Symbols PDF

Wed, 20 May 2026 10:27:26 -0400

Attention conservation notice: This is a fix for a very niche problem. Unless your printer is eating certain character from your print job, you had best move on. The punchline is: flatten the PDF.

The printer at work, a Ricoh IM C6500, doesn’t get along well with me. Sometimes, when printing a PDF it will garble the output and omit a lot of symbols. It drops math symbols and particular kernings, in particular ff. This makes it di icult to read papers.

$\LaTeX{}$ Lecture Notes Template

Fri, 08 May 2026 15:59:54 -0400

The $\LaTeX{}$ template that I use for writing lecture notes.

Why Do You Suck at Juggling?

Tue, 05 May 2026 16:31:06 -0400

A story that I often think about.

Gamma Correction

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:05:23 -0400

Some quick calulations about gamma correction.

Navaho String Games

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:06:20 -0400

A long excerpt from an anthropologist talking with the Navaho.

Pigeonhole Principle and the Dimension Bound Theorem

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 19:30:05 -0400

A little note about the equivalence of pigeonhole principle and the dimension bound theorem for finite vector spaces.

FAQ: TA Hiring

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:15:12 -0400

How TA hiring works at UTSC.

Garden Summer 2026

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 13:21:14 -0400

Various notes on gardening in the summer of 2026.

Friendship Fantasies

Thu, 12 Feb 2026 21:45:57 -0500

Some journal writing prompts about friendship.

Growing Linearly Independent Sets

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 20:50:49 -0500

A note about the expected size of a linearly independent set in a finite vector space.

Schnapsen

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:20:29 -0500

Immediately after learning Schanpsen, I want to start mucking with the game. It is played with a small deck of AQKJT9 in four suits. The standard point values are as follows.

Undergraduate Seminar: A Place to Sow Seeds

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:36:25 -0500

An article for FYMSiC about Seminar

Hack: Make PDFs Amber-on-Black

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:57:36 -0500

Recently, I wanted to read a scanned PDF on my Kobo. The white-on-black PDF was quite “bright” for my tastes as I usually read at night. The Kobo supports dark mode for epubs but it doesn’t seem to have a means of inverting the colour of PDFs natively. Moreover, I like to read things as amber-on-black. A bit of vibe-coding and fiddling around yielded the following terrible script to make a PDF “amber on black.”

FAQ: Memorization

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 12:10:52 -0500

How to memorize things in mathematics.

Anki

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 17:35:29 -0500

Using spaced reptition to increase language fluency.

Supporting A Departmental Culture of Undergraduate Research

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 11:52:31 -0500

Slides for a talk on Supporting Undergraduate Research