30nov2021

Heh.

Well, well, well, now we have omicron. Yippee. It will be interesting to see how deadly this one is—as a rule, viruses tend to become more infectious and less deadly over time. (At least one corona-virus version of the common cold is supposed to have started as a pandemic in the 1880s.) So I'll hope for that, but I'm getting mortally tired of this pandemic. As is, I assume, everyone else (especially the medical community, who are having to shoulder the brunt of it.)

I'd like to say I'm gonna start posting again, but we'll have to see. I do at least have a couple of ideas, if I can just whip them into a shape I like.

Today's entry is about a rosary I made as a grave good: I've lost two family members this year, one more-or-less expected to cancer, the other, suddenly and unexpectedly from heart disease piled on top of comorbid conditions (diabetes in particular) that frankly never should've happened, and probably wouldn't’ve, but for the isolation coming from living alone and, because of being immunocompromised, taking the covid rules so seriously the other conditions snuck up for lack of regular medical care.

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27jul2021

Hi all.

I see I totally missed the boat on Pride Month. Well, trusting you had a happy Pride Month! I can't help admitting a certain appreciation for a holiday—and movement—that celebrates with rainbows:)

My library has opened back up for browsing, huzzah, and I recently went over there to pick up a reserve, Shape, which I'd ordered some time ago on the basis of some recce or other online. I'm not sure what I was expecting—possibly some deep delve into social justice concerns from a mathematical perspective, I suppose—but much of the book is simply the author exploring the joys of math in general and geometry in particular.

Geometry, he explains, is “the cilantro of math” —you either love it or hate it; because it was (as the title of this book implies) more about pictures than symbols, it came (a bit) easier to me, putting me firmly in the ... not hating it camp. I haven't got much to say about this book, because it's the sort of thing where, to get the maximum enjoyment out of it, you have to do the work and I haven't the mental energy to take even the simplest problems on.

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26jul2021

Ooooh, linkies.

Everyone likes linkies, right?

• The Revival of Stocism...besides, perhaps, its audience, which (stereotypically) are rich atheist technodudes of the silicon valley sort (or hopefuls wishing to become such), there's nothing wrong with stoicism; in fact, its appeal distinctly reminded me of people getting into yoga and transcendental meditation back in the day, except yoga became too girly and old-fashioned as its popularity transformed it from an exotic pursuit of a few, determined (male) hiker-travellers going to India to (mostly women attended) studios found on every US street corner moderately well-to-do city/suburb...the thing is, dig into yoga, or stocism, or buddhism, (or whatever the spiritual-answer-du-jour is) past the sound-bites and memes of ‘follow this path and become healthy-wealthy-and-wise’ and all of these disciplines tend to emphasize those pesky ethics & concern for neighbor (especially marginalized neighbors) that get stripped from the popular packaging.
• Cool (women) makers making engineering cool stuff!
• Via the NYT's puzzle page featuring math fonts, I figured this glass cane font would be, I dunno, like pictures made of shorts, all different colours, mebbe, but it's not: it's a recipe for making (if you used white and clear, at any rate) latticino that reads as letters in cross section. Pretty cool, and utterly beyond my technique to create, though I expect it would be child's play for the average Italian cane maker.
• This trans blogger's searing reaction to (admittedly) a horrifying experience of a trans person's effort to explore that part of herself via fiction is the sort of reason I have difficulty claiming trans-ness: sure I was enraged by a relative's effort to undermine my gender presentation but have never undergone the agony cited here: Twitter has a lot to answer for.
• Murders of Crows and other fun collective nouns (the comments are especially fun, and I won't spoil them;)

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12jul2021

Well, since CRT (which, cuz I'm old makes me think of Cathode Ray Tubes, instead of ‘Critical Race Theory’) seems to be the current bogey[wo?]man du jour, some linkies associated with that...

• To start, a SJW's primer, or at least touching-upon, of CRT with some commentary. The second link is only about 5–6 minutes, by a prof working in the discipline and can be summed up with, ‘CRT wanted to explore why the Civil Rights/Voting Rights (etc) laws of the 1960s didn't fix racism (as we hoped they would)—see, not scary at all!’
• the first video by some dude named T1J, who is not a CRT theorist (but is promoting anti-racism) is longer, in the 20–30 minute range, and a good place to begin, I think, for people who want a bit more nuanced take from someone who's adjacent but has criticisms to make.
• For those of you wishing to discuss the controversy at a more advanced level (well beyond my pay grade—any time I suspect people are being disingenuous but I can't tell for sure is pretty clear evidence I'm in over my head) Crooked Timber has an essay, Not CRT but critical thinking about race which has some lively, interesting comments.
• Some of those comments wandered into interesting territory, such as the one reccing a pair of essays about hiring orchestra musicians —I thought I'd read the NYT essay so I skipped to the rebuttal which had kind of an interesting effect on my feelings (evidently I tend to sympathize with the folks who get their opinion in first? Kinda like being in the beginning of the slide caroulsel for juries, I guess) but eventually I sided with the dude wanting more explicit efforts to hire PoC for orchestras. I don't, however, like his suggestion for fixing the problem, which was to get rid of blind auditions. As a female bodied person I frankly think is a mistake; the real problem, as a number of people pointed out—in both essays—is the lack nurturing musicians of colour further down, that is, focusing on the beginning of the pipeline...

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19jun2021

Happy Juneteenth, all. I haven't been posting much, because nothing seems quite good enough; and so decided simply to throw up an assortment of pix I like, however imperfect, out-of-focus/fuzzy-from-high-ISOs (or better yet, both) at full resolution they may be.

Enjoy, and wishing you a delightful Juneteenth (& if I don't get my act together, Summer Solstice as well).

18jun2021

Oh look, pages two days in a row. (Aka procrastinating over something else I should be doing...) but first, a brief rant about tiktok: It's not the wiggly logo, wretchedly short attention spans, kids these days—no, I can deal with all that. But making it impossible to turn down the volume before the damn thing starts playing? That's just rude. Boo, hiss.

It boggles the mind that people still in this day and age say things like you sound white (but only to Black people) as if it's a complement (which it isn't—no-one has ever complemented me on my pretty-close-to-broadcast-standard speech^[1] any more than they have on my having a head on my shoulders) because, hello

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