Weekly digest 24
Sunday, April 20, 2025- I've spent most of the week looking after my boys solo, as my wife has had various things on.
- In the evenings we have been painting our "office" room. This was one of the worst rooms in the house. A horribly busy London-themed wallpaper, the radiator and two cupboard doors painted bright red to pick out the red of the buses in the wallpaper, loads of graffiti on the walls (it had been a teenager's room), and — like much of the house before we got to work on it — utterly filthy.
- Had my family round for an Easter dinner today. We did these enchiladas, a recipe we've used for years and one of our favourites.
- I got a used optical drive so I can rip CDs again, and start building a local digital music collection.
- We've been toilet training our little one. It's going better than previous attempts, but it's still patchy. Some days are big successes, some days (especially when he is tired) are utter disasters (like, 0% success rate), and it's demoralising. But as my friend reminds me, "they all get it eventually", which may not be technically true, but since he seems to be able to physically do it and occasionally gets it right, probably he will be one of the ones who does get it eventually, and I should stop worrying so much.
- My MNT Pocket Reform was finally shipped, after a 6 month wait. I get it, they're a small company in the middle of a global microchip shortage, there have been supply issues. But it's been a long wait, nonetheless. It will arrive next week, and then I'll have to build it.
- Frustrated by the UK's supreme court ruling on the definition of woman. It's not even that I think the definition of woman has an extremely straightforward answer or that there aren't some discussions to be had on whether "biological" women require certain protections beyond women more generally. It's that rulings like this are a clear victory for some of the most odious anti-trans activists in the country and will do far more to harm trans people than protect cis women, and that it basically erases the entire category of "trans woman" in favour of a generic "trans person".
Links
I don't think there's a lot to share this week, I have not been browsing the web all that much due to a busy week.
- Writing is redirecting attention. A great post about how writing about the things you love also increases your appreciation for them. A reminder that it may be okay to occasionally post just gushing about something.
- The Skies Are Falling: Mathematics For Non-Mathematicians. Everyone seems to agree that mathematics education is broken: the curriculum sucks, too many are left behind, and so on. And everyone seems to have their own (often impractical) ideas on how to fix it. This article is no different (though aimed at higher education outside courses on mathematics as such), but I found the style extremely entertaining for an academic article, with liberal use of all-caps for emphasis. By the way, the thing that "every competent mathematician knows" in section 12.3 is that 163 is a Heegner number, which I had not heard of, and the almost-integer is called Ramanujan's constant.
On this site
I added a books page. This has essentially been ported from my micro.blog bookshelf page. It's not finished yet.