A fairly ordinary week in Chateau Steelypips, with our routine broken up a bit by a visit from my parents. My mom had an early Thursday flight out of Albany to visit my sister in California, so they stayed here Wednesday night. The highlight of this was having their dog, Argos, around for Charlie the pupper to wrestle (more on this later).
I’ve been trying to limit my computer time somewhat, because I’ve been having problems with my neck getting sore, but still did a fair bit of blogging this week:
Me on Substack:
— Re-Reading Bricks 2: The Brickening: In advance of this week’s Wheel of Time premiere on Amazon (which we haven’t watched yet, because Kate had work), a look back at the end of the book series, by Brandon Sanderson.
— Stats vs. Calculus and the Lesson of “Common Core” Math: I saw another round of “replace calculus as the capstone of the high school math curriculum” posts, and I’m not sure the people proposing it know what they’d be getting into.
— No, Really, the Kids Are Alright: A look at a few items showing that the younger generation is more resilient than you might think.
— Competition and Motivation: Some thinking-out-loud about how best to motivate different groups of people.
Links Dump:
— Probably Enough Probability for You, from DRMacIver’s Notebook: A nice high-level introduction to the subject.
— Renaissance Science XXII from The Renaissance Mathematicus: Part of Thony’s ongoing series, this entry on the development of surveying technology.
— Pop psychology has killed the villain, by Dorian Lynskey: A call for less backstory and more mystery.
— Why Are Salary Ranges Excluded from Higher Education Job Postings? by Debora L. Hatke, Eileen Hoenigman Meyer: An explanation of the logic behind some practices that people often rail against as stupid. Via Dean Dad.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Week:
In honor of Cousin Argos’s visit, we’ll upgrade this to a pseudo-random video:
That’s a brief snippet of a play-fight that went on for literally hours. They’d go out and wrestle in the back yard for a while (Charlie has perfected the move of grabbing either Argos’s collar or the ruff around it and using that to take him down), then come inside to collect treats and petting from the humans. After a few minutes indoors, they’d start up again, and we’d send them right back out.
We’re dog-sitting Argos all next week when my dad goes out to California as well, which is going to be an adventure…
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
I bought a bunch of new music this week for the first time in many months, which included the new(ish) record from these guys. I’m not wild about the lead single, though, so I’ll throw in this, which is one of my absolute favorite tracks of the last mumble years.
(I sometimes idly wonder about where the sub-sub-genre of neo-soul music by young-ish white guys (a sub-sub-genre I really enjoy) falls in the “cultural appropriation” conversation, but generally decide that’s not a discussion topic with much upside, so I’ll get it out of my system by burying it here where nobody will actually read it.)
And that’s some stuff. Here are some buttons:
And the comments will be open.