Posts on For Your Consideration

Big Blog Update

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 13:18:28 -0400

I moved my blog from WordPress.com to Bluehost and the open-source version of the WordPress engine back in 2018. I wanted more control, and wasn’t willing to pay the Automattic folks for the right to add more plugins to my blog. Instead, I probably paid even more money to a different corporation because, well, it felt better.

Technology has evolved, and I’ve decided to move backwards and save some money. With three or four hours of work, I migrated my entire blog off WordPress and into Hugo, a lightweight static blogging engine, relies directly on Markdown, and is simple and cheap to manage on a hosting provider like Netlify.

Childish Delight in a New Jersey Warehouse

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My favorite summers were in middle school and early high school, when a few friends and I would monopolize three consecutive backyards to play a version of baseball with a pitcher, batter, and one or two fielders. We used tennis balls. Once our metal bats made it too easy to hit balls in the swamp, onto roofs, or over the tree line into the fourth consecutive backyard of the Harley’s¹ we switched to a heavy wood bat I bought at a hardware store years prior.

youcubed Data Science Curriculum

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I recently finished helping a small online high school create a new data science course, the foundation for which was Stanford’s youcubed Explorations in Data Science. It’s a snappy curriculum that is thoughtful and modern in its topic selection and a bit ragged at the edges of its resources. Its lesson layout is clear, its tools of choice are accessible and modifiable, and in the spirit of decades of statistics-oriented education, it helps students be wary of practitioners who lie and misrepresent either through thoughtlessness or malice. While I wrote this course to run in a format that relies heavily on self-directed work, wholly different from what youcubed anticipated, the curriculum was an excellent base that created ample opportunity for differentiation. By all accounts, students are loving the results.

Passive Voice Was Used

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hey, Pokémon Go. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Come on over here, I have something to say.

Look, you’re a good game. I like you and your whole deal. Walking around, catching Pokémon, getting outside with friends, creating fun styles for my trainer. It’s all great.

But I’ve hated this since the first day.

The Rattata wasn’t just caught. It didn’t happen to walk sidelong into the waiting maw of a Pokéball that was hanging around in the air.

SmarterEveryDay Deep Dives on Disc Golf Physics

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What a great video. Destin is always captivating, and I enjoyed the crossover into one of my favorite sports.

My only comment is near the end, where he takes issue with the terms “overstable” and “understable” to describe different disc flights. While it’s the opposite of what one might consider as stability for aerodynamics, it makes perfect sense in the context of the sport: an “overstable” disc is extremely stable in different wind conditions and forgiving of angles.

The Best Baseball Countries

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

With the World Baseball Classic coming up, I pulled every baseball player in the Lahman Database whose name perfectly matches a country. Here are some simple statistics among the country representatives with a batting record.

Country Name	Total Hits	Total Homers	Total AB	Batting Average	AB/HR
Jordan	5669	450	21717	.261	48.26
Chad	3854	384	15903	.242	41.41
Germany	2569	56	10346	.248	184.75
France	662	74	2514	.263	33.97
India	482	63	1905	.253	30.24
Chile	142	0	627	.226	NA
Holland	127	3	618	.206	206.00
Jersey	111	2	727	.153	363.50
Portugal	89	2	450	.198	225.00
Poland	39	0	211	.185	NA
Israel	33	6	132	.250	22.00
Monaco	2	0	13	.154	NA
Ireland	1	0	7	.143	NA
Ceylon	0	0	18	.000	NA
Total	13780	1040	55188	.250	53.07

Here’s a fun bit of trivia about these Jordan folks: Until 1999, every player matching Jordan had it as their last name. Since 1999, all but two have the first name Jordan.

Guthman Musical Instrument Competition

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What a delight. Musical instruments exist at an intersection of craftsmanship and engineering, and this competition gives an outlet to people who want to travel to the far reaches of those axes. It asks wonderfully inventive wackos to build fun and genuinely new instruments that they also need to be able to play. As a percussionist who has always been delighted by ratchets and vibraslaps, and was enthralled by a theramin in high school, the finals for this competition will now be on my radar as a ridiculous excuse for a quick trip to Atlanta.

Two Rounds of Trivia

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoy hosting trivia, and have now done so twice over Zoom for a core group of friends back in San Francisco. I thought I had shared the first batch on here back in 2024, but evidently not. So, here are both rounds, obviously geared towards my interests and inside jokes among these friends. They are provided as slideshows without the answers, so test yourself and have fun.

November 2024

Claude Built Me a Markdown Reader

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Core to my effort to improve this blog and my writing more generally is a better revision process. I now use tools to catch mechanical errors or to point out when I’ve slipped into passive voice accidentally, but that doesn’t address the flow of prose, the feel of the words washing over the reader. Reading out loud is a superb way to improve, but I’m not always in a position to do that.

Lisbon: Long and Winding Roads

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We were lucky to see Lisbon during a “coastal event”, as our weather apps described the inclement system to us. Serpentine cobblestone streets glistened in the aftermath of an afternoon shower, the sun that much more appreciated for the damp and cold that threatened our plans. Wicked gusts whipped through the narrow, curving streets and pinch points like someone testing for leaks in the plumbing, a few catching us head-on as we headed uphill. All of this added to the character of our visit and further reminded us of San Francisco, a familiar city with its own set of hills and odd streets, cable cars and coffee shops and eccentricities. San Francisco also has a cool tower, though Lisbon has a thousand-year-old castle. Parallels abound, except for Lisbon’s lack of parallel streets.

I won’t further debase Lisbon by comparing it to a city so far its junior.

From the Vault – Möbius Strips

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I last edited this draft back in 2020. I vaguely recall wanting to write more here and probably revisit the diagrams, which were made entirely using Asymptote. But it’s a good post and worth publishing.

I made my first Möbius strip during my sophomore year of high school in math class. Since then, I have been fascinated by their construction and mere existence. I share them with every person I can, basing my own presentation on a mix of my math teacher’s introduction, provided so many years ago, and a wonderful talk given by Matt Parker at the Royal Society.

Food Page

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve added a Food page to the sidebar to document what I make this year, or to admit when a week has slipped by with minimal kitchen time. It’s a mixture of accountability and a desire to track how this Year of the Kitchen goes.

Sorta Same Job in Nearly a New Place

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I officially left Art of Problem Solving on January 1. After over 7 years of full-time employment, and over 8 years total when I include contract work and my summer internship, I have my second post-college employer: Inflection Point Learning. The upshot is that AoPS partially own IPL, and nearly every person in our small Institutional Sales department moved with me. My job title is the same, my immediate boss and one direct report haven’t changed, but the new context gives some sparkle and flavor to this second phase in my career that I’m beginning just shy of thirty years old.

2025 Reading List

Mon, 12 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I finished 34 books in 2025. I maintained a more consistent pace than last year, and technically achieved my goal of reading more physical books. I read 9 physical books this year compared to 8 last year, but that’s over 26% of books in 2025 compared to less than 20% in 2024. Small victories.

While I read 17% fewer books than in 2024, I only read about 7% fewer pages. A few books were rather long. (I’m looking at you, Sophie’s Choice.)

According to the moods in StoryGraph, I leaned away from the darker books and more into properly emotional or reflective literature. I expect my dalliance with Jane Austen helped with that pivot, though books like The Handmaid’s Tale and Kindred are not for the lighthearted reader.

It was a solid year for my reading. Other than trying to get through even more physical books, ideally ones I already own, I have no goals in mind for 2026 outside my usual attempts at reading across broad publishing dates within the genres I like.

Enjoy the flurry of charts and the full list of books I read in 2025 at the end.

2026 Year of the Kitchen

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You can’t outrun a bad diet, but you can sure outspend your budget by frequenting restaurants. After a successful Year of Fitness, the next obvious step towards a healthier lifestyle is to control my eating habits. That means learning to love, or at least accept, cooking at home. 2026 will be the Year of the Kitchen.

Scooby-Doo Stocking

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I never thought to write about this longtime childhood staple of Christmas until my younger sister mentioned how nice it’d be to go back in time to share reviews of items that lasted a surprisingly long time. While the mechanical jaw of my Scooby-Doo stocking broke long ago, pressing its ear still manages to trigger one of three Christmas songs sung in an R-heavy voice (Rappy Rolidays!)

Year of Fitness 2025 Review

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Among my thoughts when I announced my Year of Fitness, this segment at the end most clearly stated my intentions:

I want my weight and impulses under control, and an exercise routine I can stick with that keeps me healthy and able to participate in all the sports and activities I enjoy for as long as possible.

Health and fitness are lifelong projects, so this theme focused on rebuilding a stronger foundation that can support further growth while being resilient to those stressful days and difficult weeks that grind good intentions to dust. I needed a base to return to when I inevitably falter.

Both the data and my gut suggest a clear success.

The Verge is Really Good

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I upgraded to a paid subscription to The Verge this year. They’ve become a premier independent media outlet covering a broad set of topics while maintaining freedom from external influence.

I’m sure everyone gets something a little different from the subscription. For me, it’s the newsletters. Victoria Song does great work on Optimizer covering the intersection of health and technology; even though I’m not in the market for any of it, she writes captivating pieces about balancing the positive and insidious sides of progress. Tina Nguyen’s Regulator has become my favorite way to read a mild amount of political news without being inundated by the firehose of the news cycle proper.

State of the Blog 2025

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen Hackett briefly discussed some changes to 512 Pixels on last week’s episode of Connected. Some of those thoughts temporarily live on his Now page. Here’s the main thrust:

… my hope is to have fewer — but more meaningful — things in the RSS feed in 2026.

He also mentioned putting this on the Now page rather than in a separate post because he can’t bring himself to blog about his own blogging. Few people read my site, so I have no such reluctance.

Promising Forever

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While navigating the house of technology you build for yourself, please hold onto banisters and sturdy bits of furniture because the rug may be pulled out from beneath you at any time.

Software companies have a silly habit of doing one or both of the following:

Taking a one-time payment to access their premium version forever.
Giving away a free version of their product forever.

The former exists to both gather capital (I presume) and ensnare people who are anti-subscription and have an outdated or incorrect understanding of software. The latter is solely designed to convert free users to paying customers.

Here’s the thing: these same companies have another silly habit where they conveniently forget their marketing promise and request more money, or hoover some up with advertisements. They’re making a bet that enough users will convert to a subscription (or swallow the ads) compared to the number they alienate by this move, that they come out ahead. When it’s a service with few alternatives and all with similar business models, it’s difficult to hold any of them accountable.

Not every company that has made these promises has proceeded to pull out the proverbial rug. There are at least a couple in each category that have remained steadfast, and those are just as intriguing to consider. Here’s a survey of the software and services I’ve used that have explicitly offered me forever at the cost of free or some fee, and where they are now.

The Beautifully Broad Scope of SABR

Mon, 08 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I first joined the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) as a student member around 2016. Back then, I only knew about SABR by the semi-eponymous term “Sabermetrics” that roughly refers to the growing list of statistics and measures used to evaluate baseball. I was studying math and dabbling in computer science with vague hopes and dreams that I could bring those interests to bear on the game I loved. I knew little else about the organization, so when I met some excellent members of the Halsey Hall chapter in Minnesota at TwinsFest that winter, I was a bit shocked to find them all rather old. Not that they couldn’t have been career statisticians or have other relevant skills to analyzing baseball, but I was an introverted college student and didn’t appreciate the interaction.

NaNoWriMo 2025 Recap

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I thoroughly failed this year, but I learned two connected lessons:

I will always have distractions from writing.
Writing projects require consistency.

Distractions in life are a given. Friends and family visit us, we go visit family, people randomly invite us to some local event, and unexpected projects appear. My own hobbies distract me from my other hobbies. So much can demand my time and attention, and I have to prioritize where to place my effort.

Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott

Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The secret to writing is never held in a book explicitly about writing. Rather, it’s in the collective hours and thousands of pages spent reading anything one can get their hands on. It’s in the act of noticing how an author’s actions work, of forming opinions about whether a bit of prose succeeded in accomplishing its goal, so one can determine whether it’s a new tool to emulate or an ineffective path to avoid. Then, it’s in the act of writing. Of joyously beginning with a clear approach, then hitting heads against walls, falling into despair, becoming convinced the whole effort is worthless, and coming out the other side with a workable bit of narration. Do that over and over, while also reading, while also exploring the world, and one may just become a writer.

Local LLM Thesaurus

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It’s always more fun to work on something other than what I should explicitly be doing in the moment, so ideas and small projects naturally arise from procrastination. I was having trouble returning to my NaNoWriMo work after my sisters visited last weekend, and I took fifteen minutes to learn how to locally run an LLM.

My ninety percent use-case for LLMs is word refinement. While writing I will get a word stuck in my head, the wrong word for the exact feeling I’d like to describe. So, I tell some LLM (often Claude) to provide several more synonyms with varying connotations. This doesn’t rely on having up-to-date knowledge or internet access, so a nimble, offline, and local LLM would fit the task perfectly.

Broadway Folks Know What They're Doing

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I saw Harry Potter and Cursed Child at the Lyric Theatre on Broadway last weekend. I did not anticipate the depth and detail of any component of that experience, and I left more fully appreciating what can make high-end theater so incredible.

First, there’s the environment. While I theoretically knew that a show would take over a single theater for the duration of its run, I did not play that out to its conclusion. Everything about the Lyric—the lobby decor, concessions, how people dressed, how they talked to you, the merchandise—was created knowing that they had a Harry Potter show. No corner was left untouched by this knowledge, and in hindsight, that’s obvious. I bought Butterbeer, and our in-seat delivery order during intermission included a complimentary chocolate frog. All of that was a significant first step towards immersion.

2025 MLB Playoffs Recap

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

It comes down to extra innings and squandered opportunities, a year of firsts and not quite enough. Series were earned and given away, and the emotional pendulums of games were like rocket-propelled swing sets.

My 2025 NaNoWriMo Plan

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NaNoWriMo, the organization, is on the ropes, or perhaps entirely dead, after a change in focus and an AI-related public relations snafu. None of that affects my plan for participating in the core of the event: writing at least 50,000 words in a month.

I initially wrote this post with the intention of delaying NaNoWriMo until February. This November will be hectic: I’m transitioning roles at work, we have visitors for two long weekends, followed immediately by a trip home for Thanksgiving. The likelihood that I will write 50,000 cohesive words in November is slim.

Boston!

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This month’s expedition took Erin and me to Boston for a conference she was attending. While the highlight of the trip was getting to spend time with our friends from San Francisco, that’s what we call out of scope. I’ll focus on what I loved while roaming around the city.

Book Review: "Sophie's Choice" is Oscar Bait

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I read three other books between the day I began Sophie’s Choice and when I completed it. It was among the strangest books I’ve read: it had moments of pure drudgery, of self-indulgence, of compelling storytelling, of discomfort, of confusion, of literary triumph. When I reached the moment of the titular choice, all my struggles through the purple prose and plodding details felt worthwhile. But at that moment of completion, I had no words to describe my experience. Only a few months later did my feelings, and this post’s title, coalesce.

An 1859 Note on Citizenship

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While reading through the Springfield Daily Republican to investigate early baseball games, I found an opinion piece discussing naturalized citizenship in the United States. This paragraph stuck with me in light of the current administration. The emphasis partway through is mine.

The truth is that Mr. Cass and his party have receded from the doctrine always hitherto held by our government. The right of voluntary expatriation has always been the American doctrine. It is the true doctrine, for if there is any universally acknowledged civil right it is the right of each human being to choose his place of residence on the globe. This right is as unlimited as is the corresponding duty of each man to submit to the government and laws under which he has placed himself. When a foreigner becomes a citizen he is not admitted to half citizenship, but is wholly a citizen, endowed with all the rights, subject to all the liabilities and entitled to all the protection of a native born citizen. The constitution and laws make no distinction between the two classes, with the single exception that the president of the United States must be native born."

Amherst Wallops Williams in Two Consecutive Years

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

While the modern iteration of Amherst College’s baseball team is approaching three decades of minimal success in NCAA Division III, its origins date back over 165 years. That’s before John Smoltz was regularly announcing how much he hates baseball on national baseball broadcasts, before Nolan Ryan demonstrated the thrilling force of old man strength, before the Shot Heard Round the World, before the Iron Horse, before the Red Sox were cursed or Mordecai Brown lost the end of his index finger.

The team began before rules were consistent.¹ Starting at 11 in the morning on the “cool, clear, and bracing”² day of July 1, 1859, Amherst faced Williams in the first recorded “Base Ball” game between two colleges.

Elevator Info for an Elevated Mood

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My several-year-long nerd snipe has comprised inspecting the inspection certificate in every elevator I enter. Who watches the watchers? I do. I focused on Connecticut legislation throughout this, though I expect the broad strokes are similar in many states.

Miscellany from September 2025

Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This has been a hectic month, and I need more time to finish some planned posts. So, I’ll fall back on that old crutch of using this blog as a limited journal of a few notable events.

Pizza

Erin and I participated in New Haven’s record-breaking pizza party. We were two of the proud 4,525 people who ate two (small) slices of pizza and drank eight ounces of water in the generous span of fifteen minutes. We then walked around and enjoyed the festival: I tried Sally’s for the first time, had a cannoli, drank some local beer, and received a promotional 10" pizza box for the effort.

Toronto

Mon, 22 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We spent a long weekend in Toronto, and much like our trip to New Mexico, I’m not sure that I’m capable of fully sharing that experience in words. Unlike the trip to New Mexico, I’m going to give it a shot.

The Life and Times of Artemis Diehl

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Enjoy these brief scenes featuring Artemis Diehl, an American businessman renowned the world over.

Satchel Paige Project

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Mark Armour has worked on his Satchel Paige Project for a few years. It’s an amazing feat of historical research about one of the most enigmatic characters and players in baseball history. It’s worth looking through regardless of your overall interest in baseball.

If you’d like to hear a good conversation about the project, I suggest listening to episode 2352 of Effectively Wild, which is how I first learned about this work.

Relay for St. Jude 2025

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen Hackett at 512 Pixels:

September is around the corner, and that means our campaign to raise money for St. Jude is back!

I’ve listened to Relay shows for years, and I’m always excited about and proud to nominally participate in their fundraising campaign for St. Jude each year. I’m one audience member who gives what he can, but I know every little bit makes a difference.

Whether you care about podcasts or this podcast network in particular, supporting the resesarch and medical care that St. Jude provides for pediatric cancer is important. I’m a regular donor to a few organizations but St. Jude is my largest recipient, partially because of what they do, and partially because it’s thrilling to be part of a community joining together to do amazing work. The Relay network isn’t huge, but its generous and wonderful community members make an outsized impact.

My Favorite Tech Media

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have a work trip to San Diego and all my other blog post ideas need more time, so here’s a quick list of my favorite tech media. I stick with these outlets for their staunch commitment to quality and independence; they’re all owned and run by excellent people with that ineffable and intangible quality of taste.

These lists aren’t in any particular order.

Websites

Podcasts

I Might Be a Runner?

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

And it’s a potentially positive identity crisis.

Throughout college, I ran two Turkey Trots in St. Paul, and two Goldy’s Runs at the UMN Twin Cities campus. None of those 5K races were completed without pauses to walk, and I don’t believe any of them were finished in faster than 35 minutes. I played baseball, which famously doesn’t involve much beyond sprinting. I never thought I’d catch this particular fitness bug.

Omelet

Mon, 11 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I nearly made an omelet.¹

Omelets are simple and almost unattainable. I last made one two weeks ago while attempting scrambled eggs. Is there a metaphor in there?

I cut up two bacon strips, half a green bell pepper, and bits of onion from a baggie in the fridge. I did not wear goggles. I cooked the bacon first, then mixed in the veggies to sauté for a few minutes. This was all done in my trusty fifteen-dollar medium nonstick pan, which, naturally, was also where I wanted to cook the eggs. So, I transferred the filling into a separate pan on low heat, added a bit of oil to the main pan since much of the bacon grease had gone with the bacon, and poured in the eggs.

Summer 2025 Writing Process Update

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Each time I commit to sharing my writing process, I jinx myself to undergo a radical change within a month. Yet, my hubris tells me that this update is different.

Surviving the Card Aisle

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a certified card guy. A notable greeting card enthusiast. A frequent mail-based correspondent. I think Bob at my local post office recognizes me.

I purchase two or three birthday cards from my local grocery and drug stores each month, and I don’t cut corners. I am steadfastly selective. Below are my card criteria I recommend everyone use to ensure a meaningful choice, and to encourage card manufacturers to improve their options.

Mario Kart World

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve played hundreds of hours of Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch,¹ and though I don’t fancy myself a leading expert on the game—I’m still short of my 10,000 hours—one picks up a thing or two after seven years of gameplay.

I bought the Nintendo Switch 2 to play Mario Kart World and have played a few hours in both solo and split-screen modes. I’m conflicted by their new take on the original Grand Prix while remaining intrigued by the new Knockout Tour option, and I’m too afraid of my free time to dive into Open Roam. Since I’ve spent most of my time with traditional Grand Prix races, I’ll focus my thoughts on them.

Revisiting Morning Pages

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I discussed morning pages just over one year ago when I was one month into the practice and, as it turned out, one month away from dropping it. My last set of morning pages was July 27, 2024.

I’ve been in a creative rut over the last couple months, often writing blog posts last-minute, not making progress on other projects, and not even taking time to read consistently. It’s hard to pin down a cause but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t try a treatment. I’ve written 1000 words of morning pages each day of the past week, having made two changes that I hope will help it stick.

Catchers Get Bigger

Mon, 07 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fairly confident all Major League Baseball players have gotten bigger over time, but I specifically decided to use the newest version of the Lahman Baseball Database to look at the average weight of catchers by the decade in which they debuted. Their listed weights are static so we can’t be certain what their debut weights were, but we’re looking at large trends. I also required any catcher in the list to have caught at least 200 career games.

Update to "Zero-Sum Series Splits of One Run"

Sun, 06 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I just updated my post answering a question from a coworker. It feels good to put that to rest.

The Lyttle Lytton Contest

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This delightful contest celebrating the command of language by constructing concise opening sentences to hypothetical novels bursts into my awareness each year as internet denizens share the best (worst?) entries. Nominees display subtlety and nuance by brazenly breaking as many written and unwritten literary rules as possible with fewer than 200 characters.

This contest appears built for social media, despite starting in 2001. It drives to the core of good and bad writing by isolating a single sentence, perhaps two, given only the context that it begins a book you’ve just plucked off the shelf. The analysis of each worthy submission is deep and, most importantly, funny.

Indiana Pi Bill and Irrelevant Authority

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There are better sources for exploring exactly how the current political regime’s actions rhyme with other populist and fascist movements. Instead, let’s consider a story that is tamer while also being emblematic of current policies.

In 1897, a state representative in Indiana attempted to legislate that a disproven mathematical statement was true and, in the process, implied that π is equal to 3.2.¹

Tapestry

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Tapestry by Iconfactory has significantly improved my internet experience. Similar in some ways to feeeed, which I wrote about last fall, Tapestry combines my social media accounts and RSS feeds into a single timeline. While feeeed separates itself by a larger number of built-in source connections and its “magazine” approach of curating recent items, Tapestry is focused on a linear display that holds place. You don’t scroll back to find older items you may have missed; instead, your position is held, and you scroll forward in time to see what has happened since you last opened the app. It’s the only sensible way to interact with news and media, and matches what I and many others love about the Mastodon client Ivory.

A Quick Note on "Sports Fan"

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t recall what I was listening to when this popped into my head, but I was curious about the origin of fan used to mean a “supporter” or “devotee.” I recently installed Terminology across my devices and set the Online Etymology Dictionary as a preferred resource.

According to them:

1889, American English, originally of baseball enthusiasts, probably a shortening of fanatic, but it may be influenced by the fancy, a collective term for followers of a certain hobby or sport (especially boxing)… Fan mail attested from 1920, in a Hollywood context; Fan club attested by 1930.

Zero-Sum Series Splits of One Run

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres split their four-game series last week, with each team winning two games by one run. In our #social-baseball slack channel, my coworker asked:

any data whizzes wanna figure out how many MLB 4 game series have ended 2-2 with all one-run games?

I put myself on the case.

UPDATE JULY 6, 2025

I finally took the time to do this properly. I exported game-by-game data from Retrosheet since 1900 and (with the help of Claude) used pandas to analyze the data for these split series decided by one run each game.¹

Tulsa Sandlot Baseball

Mon, 02 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t know Isaiah’s age or last name. He’s a stocky, tanned, thickset Sooner with a thick mess of curly brown hair and the same twang as all his teammates. His acned baby face and constant smile endear him to everyone around, which wouldn’t matter without that naturally generous and hospitable attitude, a tremendous work ethic, and an easygoing manner that brings everyone together. Most importantly, for the weekend I spent in Tulsa, Isaiah fully understands what Sandlot Baseball means and embodies it in a time when polarization emphasizes the importance of everything he, the Tulsa Breeze, and every other Sandlot Baseball team works for.

A Great Twins Winning Streak

Mon, 26 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, the Twins’ 13-game winning streak came to an end at the hand of the Brewers. I don’t professionally write about baseball, so I’ll leave the detailed breakdown to Jay Jaffe at FanGraphs. I’ll instead focus on how this streak felt as a fan.

It was magnificent.

More on New Mexico

Mon, 19 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our recent trip to New Mexico was excellent for two reasons: it was a distinct kind of trip from what we’ve typically had over the last few years, and the landscape was unique and gorgeous. You can look back at the pictures to understand that second part—mountainous terrain scarred by terrible fires that continues to fight back paired with high-altitude meadows, all of which abut scrubby desert; amazing cultural artifacts dating back centuries that speak to both a proud indigenous history and an impactful, conflict-ridden European influence; plus a smattering of my hobbies like baseball and disc golf to round it out.

These wonderful elements established how we would spend our days, but we didn’t solely plan this trip to see a place we’d never visited. That will come in the future. This was a trip to spend time with two people.

Pete Rose, a Threat to Integrity

Tue, 13 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A quote from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, pulled from the CNN coverage on the 17 players reinstated from their permanently ineligible status¹:

Obviously, a person no longer with us cannot represent a threat to the integrity of the game.

This is not obvious to me.

With institutions of culture like MLB, each notable player is a symbol, an icon, representing something greater than themselves. Who the institution allows to represent them fundamentally describes their standards, ethics, and beliefs as an organization. By walking back names from the—ahem—permanently ineligible list, Manfred is himself compromising the integrity of the game and claiming the reason Rose was banned was solely as personal punishment to he man, rather than a level enforcement of rules against betting on baseball that, though indeed having the effect of punishing the individual, also acts as a clear signal that the actions are not tolerated in the least.

Evolution of My Desk

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What with all the moving I’ve done as an adult, my desk setup has changed dramatically over the years. I wish I had a comprehensive album, but I’ve still scrounged together a good set of pictures of various desks, culminating with my first dedicated desk space in a room separate from where I eat, sleep, and/or socialize.

New Mexico

Mon, 05 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I returned late last night/early this morning from visiting her brother and his wife in New Mexico. It was our first trip there. We spent most of our time near Los Alamos, and had a day trip to Santa Fe. It was glorious.

While I intend to write a bit more when I’m not running on fumes after a long travel day with several delays, here are the highlights through pictures.

Bad Hall of Fame Seasons

Mon, 28 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post isn’t about who does or does not deserve to be in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s simply this: which Hall of Fame players had the most bad seasons, or the worst seasons in general. My thanks to Sports Reference’s Stathead for existing and making this easy to find. Let’s get started.

How Bold of You, California

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I received a surprise letter in the mail this week from my friendly, not-so-neighborhood California Department of Motor Vehicles, specifically the collections arm of that renowned institution. Since I didn’t do them the justice of notifying them I had moved to Connecticut, their system assumed I was illegally driving my car around California with expired registration for the last seven or eight months.

Now, let’s not worry too much about the double jeopardy implied by the fact that if I were doing that, I certainly would have received a ticket or two at this point to go with the fees I already allegedly owe.

AoPS Hackathon 2025

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My company held its second Hackathon last week, when (most) regular work pauses or slows down, so we can instead focus on new ideas aligned to our mission.¹ We get to explore and build, play around, meet new people, and add to our general culture of inquisitiveness, curiosity, and hard work.

I used it as an opportunity to get back to my curriculum roots. I ran text adventure Math Jams in our online classroom for three years in the same fashion I do with OHAC. The main difference is I’m working with around 200 students who are voting on what to do—it gets chaotic.

Ella Black Series on Effectively Wild Podcast

Sun, 20 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Effectively Wild, a fantastic baseball podcast from FanGraphs, put out the third and final installment in the scripted series Only a Woman: Ella Black, Lost and Found. It’s an excellent historical dive into the first known woman baseball journalist in the late 1800s, who is woefully not generally known and has certain mysteries hanging around her work. Each episode is thoroughly engaging and well-constructed, and I only wish they were YouTube videos with basic imagery so more people would stumble across them.

Escape the Dungeon or Die! A Text Adventure

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In OHAC 62: Push the Red Button, we played Escape the Dungeon or Die!, a text adventure I wrote with some assistance from a coworker over three years ago. I finally turned it into a proper PDF, similar to my others.

I wanted to take a step forward from Dream Sequence and created what’s essentially a series of escape rooms, each with a puzzle to discover and solve. Per usual with my text adventures, a spiffy title captures much of the information about the world of the puzzle. It’s a double entendre—either you escape the dungeon or die, but is it a dungeon that you’re escaping or a six-sided die?

The New Behemoth

Mon, 07 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just as the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A fearless leader with a torch, whose flame

Is the unleashed misery, and his name

Torment of Exiles. From his warding-hand

Burns world-wide scorning; his wild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Bring, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries he

With blazing lips. “Take back your tired, your poor,

My First Article For the SABR Games Project

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I rejoined SABR a couple of years ago and focused my volunteer work on fact-checking articles for the Games Project. These accounts of past MLB games are notable in some context of the author’s choice. They could be historically impactful, meaningful within a player’s career, highlighted by a rare event, or any other such factors that make an otherwise mundane day in baseball history something worth remembering.

Last month I decided to try writing one of these articles. I trawled through the archives of Minnesota Twins history for interesting seasons and landed on an early game in 2009 that defined the year for Jason Kubel.

2025 Fantasy Baseball

Mon, 31 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some of the fine folks I met last fall through a casual baseball league expressed interest in playing fantasy baseball this season. Most of us had never played it or hadn’t played in years—my first and only time was sophomore year of high school. It turns out that making and running a league with good-natured people and without money on the line is straightforward and made even easier with a smartphone.

Jane Austen

Mon, 24 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Jane Austen was a notable gap in my reading knowledge that I finally filled in the past month. Erin got me a Barnes and Noble collection of her works for Christmas, and so far, I’ve read Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.¹ Once I picked up on Austen’s voice and tone—a few pages into Sense and Sensibility, I had to search “Is Jane Austen satirical?"—I was sold. I adore Austen’s sass and snark and social satire. These two books are self-aware romance novels that are still relevant today, particularly Pride and Prejudice.

Review: Eephus

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Eephus is a new independent film by Carson Lund, and I had the pleasure of seeing it on Saturday at Cinestudio in Hartford.¹ The movie is superb and deserves all the praise it’s received. I’d liken it to an alternative take on The Sandlot, where instead of reliving the magic of youthful summers and dynamic friendships of boys, it’s a funny and somber reflection on the twilight years of adult baseball and the particularities of male relationships that rely entirely on weekend activities. I’d love to have it as a double feature against The Sandlot and force the emotional whiplash.

The Performer

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I initially drafted this story as part of a broader writing effort related to The Last Question. All the idiocy happening in the US government and in the world of large corporations encouraged me to finish it.

You can also find it on my fiction writing site.

Coding with Baseball

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Last month, I finished going through Nathan Braun’s Coding with Baseball, a book I purchased around four years ago. If you’re at all interested in baseball statistics and want to build a quick foundation for exploring them, I highly recommend the book. It doesn’t hold your hand—it’s not a reference text, and you’ll need documentation for pandas, seaborn, and scikitlearn for the exercises—but it’s an excellent, concise overview that teaches exactly what you need with a straightforward style and relevant examples. It encouraged me to set up the Lahman Baseball Database on my computer and led me down a few rabbit holes, one of which I’ll explain here.

Review: An Update on LLM Satire

Sat, 01 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I gave Claude (3.7 Sonnet) the same prompt I provided ChatGPT two years ago: Write a short article in the satirical style of The Onion, titled “Optimistic AI Just Happy to Be Here”.

I also went back to ChatGPT to see how it has improved.

Claude’s attempt.

Two Interchangeable Mushy Veggie Lunches

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As this post is going up, and ideally not while I’m writing it, I recently had three wisdom teeth removed. It’s mushtown for my meals, and that reminded me of two nearly identical lunches I started making in the last couple of months. They differ only in their spices.

My website isn’t a recipe blog, so let’s start with the important information.

Two Good Essays

Sat, 22 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

These are two essays by a couple of “guys on the Internet” whose work I enjoy. John Gruber created Markdown and now works in the Apple/tech media space. Merlin Mann used to be Merlin Mann, one of the first modern productivity gurus. Now, he’s essentially a comedic personality. Both are tremendous writers, and these two essays are supremely affecting and have unique styles that show the authors flexing their muscles.

Art As a Whole

Mon, 17 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Erin got a record player for Christmas, so I also have access to one. We each picked out albums from our parents to bring back to Connecticut and stopped into a local record shop last month. Her dad’s copy of Elton John’s Honky Cat was hilariously warped—it sounded like the left and right speakers were playing a quarter-beat different from each other. At the shop, she found a copy of an original press of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that the shop proprietor had forgotten about. It had a slight scratch, so he priced it at five dollars.

Vinyl is terrible, except for all the ways that it’s great. Most of those ways amount to coming full circle in an attention-starved economy where billionaires who thought Snow Crash had some pretty good ideas for the future are fighting for each second of our lives, fully aware that we’re near to bursting yet desperate for the next second to be the best second we’ve experienced that day. Beyond that, it’s about the vibe and process.

All this to say, putting a vinyl record on a turntable is an intentional act. Those records contain albums that are entire pieces of art, comprising individual songs that are each a bit of art but none of which capture the complete work. Experiencing art as a whole, accepting it as it’s provided, is powerful and often requires patience and an open mind. That becomes more important as the temporality of the art increases.

I Wrote My Representative

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dear Representative DeLauro,

I’ve never written to my representatives. I’ve voted in elections, chatted idly with friends at times, but otherwise admit to not being terribly participatory in the political process.

I’m writing now because I am deeply concerned about recent policy decisions—or attempts at policy decisions—from the Trump administration that affect my friends and millions of Americans’ well-being. The rapid pace and nature of these changes threaten the democratic principles I believe we all value.

Taskmaster is Wonderful

Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I have been binging Taskmaster on YouTube. It’s an absolutely delightful show full of British humour¹ and absurd feats of… wit? Orthogonal thought? The show has remained precisely itself for years, yet each series is fresh; tasks are never repeated, and the new crop of contestants creates a different dynamic.

The brain behind the show, Alex Horne, has managed to craft hundreds of unique challenges. Of course, there are recurring task types—Do the most “adjective” thing with this object is one of my favorites—but the combination of Alex’s inventive approach and the comedians actually performing the tasks ensures that you can always expect the unexpected.

Department of Education AI Toolkit

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Education¹ released a toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable, AI Integration last October. I finally made the time to read it and love what I found. As with most things in education, if it’s sensible in that context, it is worth considering in every context.

Self-Satirizing Nonsense and The Department of Education

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

From a recent Chalkbeat article by Erica Meltzer and Marta W. Aldrich:

Former Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn has been named to serve as deputy education secretary in the incoming Trump administration.

President-elect Donald Trump announced the pick in a post on Truth Social Friday evening. […] He also misstated her name as Peggy Schwinn, rather than Penny.

We again enter a period of time where The Onion has its work cut out for itself. The next paragraph of this article is also pitch-perfect in its matter-of-fact approach to reporting on how ridiculous everything is.

"Un-American"

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The great kind of insight someone outside the United States can provide. The tough thing when I discuss Trump & Co. with friends is the disbelief and necessity of accepting that a good chunk of the country likes what is happening.

Guy English on Mastodon:

The least you all could do is to refrain from using “unAmerican” to describe the distinctly American things that are going to happen.

Inauguration

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m fortunate to have been in seventh grade precisely when I was. Every four years in October, my middle school’s seventh-grade social studies classes held an election unit. Students were selected to be presidential, senate, and gubernatorial candidates; there were campaign managers, Secret Service agents, lobbyists, fundraisers, and speech writers.¹ It was good-natured, well-constructed, thoughtful, and impactful. Twelve years old was a good time for this, too: we were mature enough to engage with some of the policies but not cynical or set in our ways beyond whatever influence our parents had over us. I don’t recall any personal conflicts. Everyone focused on embodying their roles as best as possible, and I had a tremendous amount of fun.

2024 Reading List

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m thrilled by how many books I’ve read over the last two years, enough to consider whether it behooves me to increase my typical goal of 24 books.¹ I topped my 2023 result of 38 books with 41 in 2024, although there were a handful of novellas among what I tracked this year.

2025: Year of Fitness

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Choosing Year of Fitness as my 2025 theme wasn’t difficult, but it was intimidating. My previous themes have leaned philosophical and emphasized a change in mindset that would affect broader habits; this year’s theme is direct and requires a higher level of personal accountability.

What is Good Mathematics? by Terence Tao

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Terence Tao is a gift to the mathematical community. He is an excellent collaborator, a talented communicator, and one of the broadest and sharpest minds working today. Eighteen years ago, when he was just past thirty years old, he wrote the essay What is Good Mathematics?. I discovered this when Steven Strogatz invited Tao onto his podcast The Joy of Why to discuss how well this essay holds up.

Both of these are great, but start with the opening section of Tao’s essay, where he lists twenty-one ways to measure mathematics as being “good.” It displays his impressive clarity of thought and writing ability and evinces how the professional mathematics scene isn’t what one may have expected.

Year of Opportunity 2024 Review

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At the start of this year I wrote this about the Year of Opportunity:

Characterized by a desire to explore and treat new experiences with more positivity and excitement, I hope to make the most of what could be our final year living in California while also increasing my appreciation for the life I’ve built.

It certainly was our final year in California, and that shifted my mindset to focus not only on the opportunities in San Francisco but also any that would be available once we moved.

A Dumb Salesforce and Spreadsheet Thing

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

There are two separate issues with the technology I use at work that conspired to confound me earlier this year.

Salesforce objects have two different unique ID constructions.
Common lookup functions in Google Sheets are case-insensitive.

Scuttlebutt

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Scuttlebutt is objectively an excellent word. It’s fun to say, has a playful connotation that lands better than “gossip,” and is a great example of a multisyllabic word that is even more amusing when you switch up the consonants that begin each half. Buttlescutt.

I wanted to understand where this word came from.

NaNoWriMo 2024 Results

Mon, 02 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I did it. I was on the ropes a few times but always found the time, energy, and creative hook to keep my story, It’s Like Jazz, moving along and hitting the requisite 50,000 words.

A Sad Baseball Boy

Mon, 25 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had this print of a painting for around twenty years.

I bought it at a garage sale in my neighborhood as a kid, and I’ve brought it with me everywhere I’ve moved since. Despite having it for so long, I’ve never closely looked at it until writing about it now. Doing so revealed two things: The painting is titled Troubled Pals, and the artist is Keith Ward.

Once I realized that, I tried to track down anything else about this painter or painting. The first result was a painting with a similar setup but an adjusted setting.

NaNoWriMo 2024 Check In

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This has been a great experience so far. I had a great start, followed by a few rough days after a five-day trip to Denver. I caught up this past weekend and am back on track, though I’m looking to keep pushing hard because going home for Thanksgiving will only complicate my attempts to write.

Even with that said, I’m proud of what I’ve done so far. Compared to 2019, I’ve started building a better story. I’m more thoughtful about creating characters and pushing a plot forward. I certainly won’t have told a complete story by the end of the 50,000 words, but that’s not necessarily the goal.

Idle Minnesota Twins Statistics Exploration

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Given a thoroughly disappointing end to the Twins’ 2024 season, I wanted to look back to interesting (and hopefully excellent) Twins performances throughout my lifetime. As I often do, I started at Stathead and began exploring. Here are two batches of unimportant tidbits.

I Voted for Kamala Harris

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The oldest posts on this blog comprise a three-part series I wrote in fervor after the 2016 election. I was a college student who couldn’t drink alcohol yet but had learned a tremendous amount about the world while working as a residence advisor. I empathized with the experiences of others with incomprehensibly different life stories. I saw the fear, frustration, and numbness that came over people I loved and cared about. It was awful.

NaNoWriMo 2024 Announcement

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’m doing it again.

I plan to return to the basics for the first time since my initial attempt in 2019. I’ll be sitting at any number of devices—I have half a mind to resurrect my old ThinkPad that runs Pop!_OS and make it a dedicated writing computer—and writing a new novel wholecloth. I feel both intimidated and energized by the prospect. I’ve been working hard on other side projects, including writing blog posts in advance, to make sure I have the space to give this a good effort.

Digital News

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In addition to receiving a physical copy of the Sunday edition of the New Haven Register, my subscription includes access to their “E-Edition,” which amounts to a digital scan of the paper. It’s perfect for reading on my iPad.

Clicking on an article opens it in a dedicated and simplified reader view, avoiding the need to flip through the paper to continue reading. Plus, I can still read the daily comics.

Some More Apps I Like

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wrote about feeeed and decided to highlight a few more niche apps I’ve been enjoying since getting an iPhone last year. These are in no particular order, but I find them all sufficiently useful and well-made to give them my official okey-dokey.

Aim For the Gaps

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Sports offer excellent metaphors that are used for general success in life precisely because they exist to be entertaining microcosms of life itself. Individuals or teams vie in a competitive landscape typically officiated by imperfect referees. Preparation is allowed, but on-field performance is all anyone remembers. Sports reflect real life in numerous ways, and each sport brings its own flair to the conversation.

Golf of any variety is a wonderful mix of planning, tactics, and execution. It’s about discrete decisions, managing each shot based on given strengths and the likelihood of success. I became overwhelmed each time I tried untangling these metaphors. It was too much.

Let me instead focus on one mindset adjustment I first jokingly heard in a disc golf YouTube video, but which I found impactful: The woods are mostly air. Aim for the gaps.

The Sunday Paper

Mon, 30 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Wake up to a slight chill in the air, a quiet morning with leaves strewn across the sidewalks, brown and red and orange and yellow, preparing to crinkle later that afternoon once the morning dew glistening upon them evaporates. Throat is a bit scratchy. Pull up the covers for an extra moment of soft warmth before stretching out, rolling to the side, bare feet on wood floor.

Wipe eyes, grab some water, and go shut the window accidentally left open overnight leading to this moderate discomfort and grogginess. On second thought, it’s going to warm up today. Not too much. Just enough to keep the window cracked and let some warmer air make its way through.

We Are So Back with iA Writer on the iPad

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

With iOS and iPadOS 18 out, I decided to give iA Writer another shot on my iPad. I adore it on my MacBook, and it’s been frustrating not having a consistent interface for my personal writing.

Lo and behold, I discover that iA Writer has been properly working with Dropbox since May! Dropbox decided to hop aboard the “modern File Provider API” train, leading to a slightly worse experience than many years ago¹, but a significantly better experience than when using any Dropbox text file would result in errors and conflicted files.

Slough House Book Series

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year I read the Slough House series by Mick Herron, prompted by rave reviews of its TV adaptation on Apple TV+ and my unwillingness to dive into such an adaptation until I read the associated books.

In short, I adore this series.

I’ve always jived with wry British humor that somehow mixes a superiority complex with a dismal outlook, all while providing cutting insights into the absurdity of life which are provided via a superb command of the English language, turning phrases that I could not have conceived of. Mick Herron hits all of this precisely right with his set of outcast characters, each with glaring personality flaws that range from endearing to horrific.

A Presentation on Word Doodles

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year I wrote about doodling with words. Last month I expanded on the idea, turned it into a fun presentation, and presented to Erin’s lab for one of their meetings before we moved as a fun diversion. I used Keynote to put it together, and had a really fun time.

Enjoy.

Impressions From Cross-Country Road Trips

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Driving east from Minnesota is a lot of the same, but that sameness is plenty of forested beauty.

/more

Though my opinions may change after more of these journeys, I found it striking that there seemed to be so little difference as we crossed state lines. Parts of Pennsylvania had more hills as we went over a nominal mountain range, and the speed limits could vary wildly (along with the respective tolls) with each new border, but nothing distinguished Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, or New York from each other en route to Connecticut. They all shared gentle curves and slopes, tree-lined interstates with hefty medians, a calming aesthetic for a journey from where, to me, feels like a cultural halfway point between the East and West coasts when, in reality, I’m starting nearly two-thirds of the way across the country.

Erin's Completed PhD Thesis

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My wife, Erin Gilbertson, officially has her PhD in Biological and Medical Informatics from the University of California, San Francisco. You can read her entire thesis, entitled Machine Learning Insights into the 3D Genome: Diversity and Gene Regulation in Human Populations, online here.

I’m incredibly proud of all of her work. It’s been amazing watching her grow, learn, persevere, and succeed in so many aspects. I’m thrilled I’ve been some part of that journey.

feeeed

Mon, 09 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I started using feeeed after reading about it on MacStories. It’s a neat app that, though lacking a certain style and polish, is a wonderful way to create a personal list of suggested content using only sources that you provide. I can take in a fun mix of baseball subreddit posts, articles on several blogs I follow, random photos from my library, and a handful of other options.

I’ve tried the RSS game, but as someone who leans toward completionism with my content, I find it difficult to see the list of unread articles grow, yet I refuse to declare feed bankruptcy. feeeed offers a better way for me to access this content naturally. I can always open a chronological list view if I want to find something in particular, but the default view that serves you a mix of content and then cuts you off is ideal. It’s not for everyone, but I’m glad this app was made.

Literal Comfort Food

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Much like two years ago, Erin and I made it back to the Minnesota State Fair for a few hours. We didn’t eat much. However, walking through those busy streets that look absolutely packed from above but are fairly navigable on the ground was an absolute joy and comfort that helped smooth the transition away from San Francisco.

The spirit of The Great Minnesota Get Together inhabits everyone there. I felt light despite the cookies and corn dogs. I was calm and cool while roasting in the sun. Everything is a little nicer, a bit more joyful and fun at the fair. The familiarity of the fairgrounds, the pleasant conversations at a few booths, and the overall pride for our state all made a huge difference in my mood and outlook after a difficult couple of weeks.

Farewell to San Francisco

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Well, I lost my head in San Francisco
Waiting for the fog to roll out
But I found it in a rain cloud
It was smiling down

San Francisco by The Mowglis

Farewell, San Francisco.

I never meant to love you. People asked me, “How do you feel about the city?” I would always respond, “It’s good, plenty to like. But I’ll be ready to go when the time comes.”

Packing Up Stinks

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

My thanks to Jack Prelutsky.

Packing! Oh, Packing!
I hate you, you stink.
I wish I could throw
All this stuff in the drink.
These terrible boxes
Are crowding my floor.
I’m getting so flustered
Each time through the door.

Packing! Oh, Packing!
You’re making me ill.
These thick cubes of cardboard
Are getting their fill.
The crumpling of paper,
The ripping of tape,
All makes me just want to
Run off and escape.

Managing Multiple Computers

Mon, 12 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A pickle I’ve avoided for a couple of years has finally been unjarred.¹ Two years ago, I was issued a company-owned laptop that was precisely the same make and model—down to the color—as my personal computer. I was loathe to use two computers and felt uncomfortable doing my extracurricular tasks on the work device, so I continued exclusively using my personal laptop as I’ve done since I started there.

To comply with various data privacy laws and ensure the company can provide tech support, it was recently made clear to me that work had to be done on the work laptop. I now have to maintain feature parity between two computers, bring them both with me while traveling, and generally be inconvenienced by this change.

Angel Stadium

Mon, 05 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A short post during a hectic time. I’ve officially visited all MLB stadiums within a reasonable distance of the Pacific Ocean: Petco Park (San Diego), Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles), Angel Stadium (Anaheim), Oracle Park (San Francisco), Oakland Coliseum (Oakland), and T-Mobile Park (Seattle). The next two closest to the west coast are Chase Field in Phoenix and Coors Field in Denver.

On my way to San Diego this weekend, I stopped in Anaheim to see the Los Angeles Angels play the New York Mets. It was a toasty experience in 90º heat, but I found the stadium beautiful and the game itself was good. Going to a stadium surrounded entirely by parking lots is weird—I’ve grown used to Oracle Park and Target Field in Minneapolis, both nicely nestled within their cities—but the setup was nice. It feels good to check it off the list.

There's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity

Mon, 29 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

AUSTIN, TEXAS—Staring deep beyond his bathroom mirror, George Kurtz, CEO of Crowdstrike, repeated “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” under his breath. He let his head drop and began absentmindedly splashing water on his face, hoping the bags under his eyes would disappear before the back-to-back-to-back interviews that began the next hour.

Looking back up, he wiped down his face with a nearby hand towel embroidered with the phrase “Keep Austin Weird” and forced a haggard smile across his face.

The 2024 Red Sox Stink at Fenway

Mon, 22 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Going into the MLB All-Star Break, the Boston Red Sox have a respectable 53–42 record, good for third in the AL East. However, their 24–25 record at home is surprisingly poor. I had to investigate what could cause that. Spoiler: I’m left with more questions than answers.

Octavia E. Butler's "Parable" Duology

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

While looking for a new book to read from the library on the Libby app, the name Octavia E. Butler popped into my head. I don’t know when she first came into my awareness, but I searched her name and there was Parable of the Sower. Its various blurbs mentioned it alongside 1984 and Brave New World. I love alternative and dystopian fiction, so I was immediately sold.

After completing Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, I’m convinced that these are the most relevant pieces of dystopian fiction for the modern world precisely because they are not hyperbolic science fiction that acts as a metaphorical warning. Instead, their story is a grounded and horrific extrapolation of economic stratification mixed with modern democratic fascism.

Two Baseball Charts

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I made two more charts in the past week that are worth a brief discussion. The first looks at injuries by team, and the other considers team winning percentage at home or on the road.

Morning Pages

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I began writing morning pages in June. I first came across the concept via Pagi when they made a post about it being rejected by App Store review. It was a funny way to be introduced to a new creative method, but I didn’t give it additional attention. The idea was tossed into some filing cabinet in my memory.

Morning pages resurfaced in the second episode of Paper Places, a new podcast about writing on Relay FM. Hearing a conversation with actual writers let me more fully connect with the practice, and I decided to give it a shot. Every morning since June 3rd, I’ve taken time in the morning—not first thing, I do my puzzles before anything else—to sit down at a device¹ and write about 1000 words, letting whatever pops into my head flow onto the page.

Here Come Your Nuts!

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I went to Modesto this past Friday to watch my first Single-A baseball game between the local Modesto Nuts of the Seattle Mariners organization and the San Jose Giants, creatively named after their parent organization, the San Francisco Giants. The environment reminded me of a mid-season high school football game, complete with inexpensive food vendors, large groups from local church and youth sports organizations, and season ticket holders who maintain conversations from several rows away. There are angry dads, town heroes, and four-dollar hot dogs. I adored it.

My Daily Puzzle Rotation

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I love puzzles. I was lucky enough to coauthor a puzzle book at my job, and I’ve been fascinated by any logical, engaging game I can find. I’m no expert, but I am an enthusiast. Over the last several months, I’ve nailed down a set of puzzles that bookend each day, getting my mind working in the morning and letting me wind down in the evening.

Making MLB Team Scatter Plots

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

You may have seen any number of scatter plots on the internet that show data comparisons among players or teams in a given league. These are part of my daily experience on the /r/baseball community, and I finally decided to scratch my statistical presentation itch by making my own. This post isn’t to cover what statistics to compare, just the process I’ve settled on for now to turn a table of comparisons into precisely-designed charts suitable for sharing on the internet.

Holding Onto Yourself

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project is an excellent collection of pithy and useful observations about the world. They range from the purely practical, to the advisory, to the somewhat absurd. It’s worth a read.

I follow a Mastodon Bot that posts something from the document every six hours, and save any that catch my eye. This one resonated with me:

Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.

Plug and Play TV Consoles

Mon, 27 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Until my older sister got a Nintendo DS, the only gaming devices we had were those cheap handheld ones that had a single game on it—Sudoku, a baseball simulator—and the similarly-cheap Plug and Play TV game consoles that typically comprised a joystick, a button or two, and composite video cables. They required batteries. They were slow. I loved them.

Comical Start Episode 304

Mon, 20 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last week we published episode 304 of Comical Start, We Were Very Stupid and Did Stupid Things. It featured our first ever proper guest—that is, someone we didn’t go to high school with. The whole thing felt surreal as it was happening, but it was cool that it happened at all. Give it a listen. It was a unique experience.

I Just Learned What BBCOR Means

Wed, 15 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In early high school, I remember all the hubbub about requiring metal baseball bats to align to the BBCOR standard. Given the pronunciation of this (“Bee-Bee-Core”), I always assumed it was a regulation about what specific materials must be used to make the bat. That’s only true insofar as the standard actually defines a material property.

BBCOR stands for “Batted Ball Coefficient of Restitution”. In other words, the standard tells you how elastic the collision between ball and bat is allowed to be. This standard was designed to dull metal bats in an effort to protect pitchers, the most likely players to be grievously injured by a batted ball. It was adopted by the NCAA in 2011, and most youth leagues that I’m aware of followed their lead. I used BBCOR-certified bats throughout high school, and continue to do so in my adult league.

ASCIImoji

Mon, 13 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you grew up around the plain-text internet and pre-smartphone texting, you may be aware of the distinction between emoticons and emojis. The latter are separate unicode characters that are increasingly-detailed artistic renderings of various faces and items, like a Ferris wheel: 🎡. The former are clever constructions of non-emoji characters, which provide some intangible level of whimsy and cleverness that never fails to delight.¹

Consider this shrug: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Or someone flipping a table in frustration: (ノ゜Д゜)ノ︵ ┻━┻

The Mouse and the Motorcycle

Thu, 09 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I was talking with Erin on our way to a coffee shop, and I had a sudden memory of a movie where a mouse needed to scurry about to find medicine to save a young boy who had quite a dastardly fever. Naturally I thought it was a Stuart Little movie, somewhere along the series, but that didn’t feel quite right.

Luckily, the subreddit /r/TipOfMyTongue had me covered, when someone asked about this exact movie two years ago. It’s called The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and has a runtime of only 42 minutes. I haven’t rewatched it quite yet, but I was delighted to find the answer.

The Fallacies of Millennial Impact

Mon, 06 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In college, I started seeing low-effort headlines claiming yet another corporate industry death at the hands of millennial. A typical example is the casual sit-down restaurant, and you can see a compilation of such claims (along with subsequent refutations) in this CB Insights post. I’d rather focus on the broader phenomenon and the various fallacies of thinking that lead to these poor and useless critiques of an entire generation.

Settling on Firefox

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve bounced between browsers over the years. Chrome or Chromium were my default for many years while I ran Linux, with a few small dalliances with Chrome-powered alternatives like Brave. I tried Safari when I switched to a MacBook and used it for months. I then hopped on the Arc Browser bandwagon, which introduced me to features that I now consider essential. That experience wouldn’t last forever.

Tony Wan at EdSurge, on AI Writing by Students

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A short article that mirrors my thinking rather well. In particular:

Each little metacognitive act of constructing a sentence, though, reflects valuable thinking. Knowing how to use conjunctions, for instance — the ifs, buts and therefores — is an important exercise in logical reasoning. How much should we outsource that to AI? Too much, and the writing experience may feel like a fill-in-the-blank exercise like MadLibs.

A Mario Kart Milestone (Again)

Mon, 22 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I previously wrote about my excitement that Mario Kart 8 was receiving more courses. Two years later, all the courses are released and have been summarily conquered by my Gold Mario character. I have 3 star trophies across all 24 Grand Prix cups, in all available speed levels.

Though I fell off playing Mario Kart regularly in the last year—that change has been for the best—it remains a relaxing activity on a lazy weekend afternoon or a fun evening game to play with Erin. There are no more explicit accomplishments left for me in the game,¹ so I can launch it when it strikes me as fun, and otherwise spend my extremely self-limited gaming time playing the several other Switch games I’ve purchased over the years. Among those I’ve started and hope to complete are Cuphead, Röki, Bastion, Firewatch, and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It may take me years, but I’ll make progress!

Doodling With Words

Mon, 15 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Doodling is more than scrawling sketches and shapes in the margins of your notes. It encompasses any idle, unguided, and spontaneous bursts of creativity.¹ In a light-bulb moment a few months ago I rediscovered my love of doodling with words, and it’s now something I try to do when I have spare time. Doodling is a phenomenal way to passively develop a skill while enjoying the process.

Local Business to Make Play for Enterprise

Mon, 08 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ELKHART, INDIANA—John Wheedle, founder and owner of Wheedle & Sons Whittling, presented his plan to “go after the big market, starting with those hotshots down in Fort Wayne” during a gathering of business professionals and entrepreneurs at the Elkhart Community Center.

The evening’s theme was Aim for the Stars. Group members were encouraged to present on ambitious, long-term plans and then receive constructive feedback. Wheedle was third to go. On his way up to the podium, several attendees recall him saying “This is going to knock their socks off.”

MLB Player Country of Origin

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was talking with a friend of mine late last year about baseball and the Ohtani signing. He idly speculated that the ratio of foreign-born to domestic players in the MLB had stabilized a while ago, perhaps around the 1960s. This was mostly a gut check, and I wasn’t convinced. I went digging for more info.

Playball for Terminal

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I came across the javascript terminal app Playball. It’s fun and slick, and I’m enjoying using it. It gives you a way to view MLB Gameday data from the terminal, and it’s beautifully done.

When you first run the app after installing it via npm, you are greeted with the day’s schedule, and the box scores of any games.

Keyboard navigation hints are shown at the bottom of the window at all times, so you can easily look at scores from previous days, or check out the schedule in the future. You can jump back to the current day at any point. Navigating any screen can be done with either the arrow keys or vim keybindings.

Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy

Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In my weekly perusal of education newsletters, I came across a Time magazine article about new attempts to bring AI and machine learning to monitoring student behavior on school devices. While the article focuses on student mental health—suicide prevention in particular—I looked into the companies mentioned therein and discovered that the scope of monitoring efforts is broad and deep. It is a fascinating and discomforting topic, with each company working on a different aspect of student safety with rhetoric to match.

Frankenstein and Retelling Old Tales

Mon, 18 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished Frankenstein, which I last read during my British Literature class in high school. It reminded me of the phenomenon of Disney retelling an old story with key details removed and altered to make it kid-friendly,¹ though in Frankenstein this happens in reverse.

Every representation of the monster² in popular media that I’m aware of is a green, slow-moving, large man, often with bolts in his neck. In reality, the book shows a monster who learns much about the world by observing a small family in a cottage, eventually becoming literate and quite eloquent. He also possesses superhuman speed, strength, and stamina while requiring only a limited vegetarian diet. It’s a fascinating tale that explores the concept of sin, revenge, and responsibility; most of that is lost in the classic “monster movie”.

Elemental, a Pixar Film

Mon, 11 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve watched nearly every Pixar movie. I have some I entirely adore and will happily rewatch whenever the opportunity presents. The others I still enjoy but they don’t have an ongoing impact on my life. Elemental is firmly in the second category. Its charm and inventive physical humor kept me delighted, and its role as a modern fable about immigration and racism makes it worth watching, but its story had inconsistent pacing with confusing characterization.

Writing With Care

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I read a short dialogue with the previously-mentioned Frederick Hess, in which he complains about researchers intentionally obfuscating their ideas behind a wall of jargon. He argues that plain writing, using diction that is clear and precise, is the ideal way to present ideas. Anything else is grandiose and an attempt at an appeal to authority. While I don’t agree with several details in that discussion, or the flippant attacks hidden among the core of his argument, there is insight worth exploring.

Cory Wong in Oakland

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After a bout of COVID in November of 2022 stopped Erin and I from seeing Cory Wong in San Francisco, I’ve been eagerly awaiting his next tour. He announced tour dates last August and I immediately jumped on tickets and invited friends along. It was a magnificent concert, easy to enjoy, fun, funny, thoughtful, and precise.

Cory is a musician’s musician, but straddles the line of speaking to a knowledgeable fan-base while creating music and entertainment for a broad audience. His Cory and the Wongnotes variety show dives into musical topics in collaboration with amazing musicians. His On the One series discusses details of music production and what decisions go into making a finished piece of music. Meanwhile, Wong on Ice is impressively absurd.

"The Great School Rethink" and Assessing Ideas

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last fall I read The Great School Rethink by Frederick Hess, who works with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He focuses largely on education policy initiatives, many of which might be familiar: school choice, assessments, funding distribution, and curriculum adoption, among others. While I find these topics and the debates around them interesting, my main takeaway from reading this book was broader. It reminded me that a person is not static, and when we talk with someone we have to focus more on the thoughts they’re presenting and not conflate that with our notions of who the person is when taken as a sum of their parts.

Vision Pro Part 2: Inside Looking Out

Thu, 15 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve completed my Apple Vision Pro demo in what felt like record time—seventeen minutes, when everything I’ve heard referenced half an hour—and I can firmly place myself in the camp of people who simultaneously very interested in a Meta Quest 3 right now, and excited about the next several versions of Vision Pro.

Vision Pro Part 1: Outside Looking In

Mon, 12 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, Apple launched Vision Pro. I’ve read and listened to commentary, and watched many reviews and demos since its release. I have a good sense of what it can and can’t do, but that’s hugely different than experiencing it. Here is my current understanding of Vision Pro and what I find most important and interesting without having used it. This Wednesday I’ll be going to an Apple store to demo Vision Pro, and I will follow up with what I’ve learned.

A Winter Sunset

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The world plays tricks on us. Nature can be brutal and unforgiving. It simply is; if you are on the wrong side of it being what it is, so much the worse for you. But look closely: there are moments of pure fairness, perhaps of generosity, that peek through.

Consider the late afternoon on a viciously cold winter day. A biting wind winds its way through the air, its icy tendrils working its way in the gaps of your scarf, slapping at the inch of exposed skin between sleeves and gloves, sweeping across your nose. The air is pure and frozen. Snow deadens the world; it muffles sound that paradoxically travels farther and clearer.

Bar Trivia Format Smackdown

Mon, 29 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As a wily veteran of two pub trivia locations in San Francisco and an occasional purveyor of other events when traveling, I’d like to compare the three formats I’ve become the most familiar with: Geeks Who Drink, Trivia Mafia, and SpeedQuizzing. Consider this a pub trivia personality quiz.

Joe Mauer Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

Wed, 24 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

From Anthony Castrovince on MLB.com:

The St. Paul, Minn., kid made good on his 2001 selection as the No. 1 overall Draft pick by his hometown Twins to become a six-time All-Star, five-time Silver Slugger, three-time batting champ and the 2009 AL MVP. He was a member of four division-winning Twins teams.

Though his catching career was cut short by concussions and five seasons as essentially a league-average first baseman complicated his Cooperstown case, Mauer made enough of an impact at his primary position to stand among the greatest to ever don the tools of ignorance. His .306 career batting average is tied for the sixth highest among catchers with at least 3,000 plate appearances, and his .388 on-base percentage is tied for third. He’s the only catcher with three batting titles, and his total of 44.6 bWAR during his 10 years as the Twins’ primary catcher from 2004-13 was by far the best at that position in that timeframe.

Team Spirit

Mon, 22 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Groups of people can’t be forced to mesh. The intangible qualities of a team that works well together develops naturally through experience with each other and a shared understanding of their goal. It often requires leadership. Once everyone is flowing together, occupying their well-defined roles, the planned injection of a some humor or event to bond over becomes a layer of glue rather than a wedge of forced corporate optimism.

George Saunders and Writing Better

Mon, 15 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Two authors have had an outsized impact on my continued desire to hone my writing craft: Kurt Vonnegut and George Saunders. At the end of 2023 I read Lincoln in the Bardo and completed Liberation Day to begin 2024, both by Saunders, so he is front of mind.

2023 Reading List

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I had a strong year of reading in 2023. I blew past my annual goal of 24 books in September and kept on going. I always had my Kobo by my bed to read at night, while making sure I found time and space on the weekends. Erin also read voraciously this year; being synchronized in that effort was helpful. My highlight was binging The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. It’s amazing.

This year I decided to put together charts for the genres I read and the number of books I completed each month, in addition to the full table of completed titles. Let’s dive in.

A New Place for Fiction

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve created a new website, markrichard-fiction.org. I’ll reference any stories or other writing I post there on this blog, but they’ll mainly be hosted there. It’s using the Write.as service, which is a sleek and quick spot to make an incredibly simple blog. I wanted to separate what I write here—almost exclusively blog and essay fare—from stranger projects I hope to undertake.

2024: Year of Opportunity

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s once again time to be thematic. I’m calling 2024 my Year of Opportunity. Characterized by a desire to explore and treat new experiences with more positivity and excitement, I hope to make the most of what could be our final year living in California while also increasing my appreciation for the life I’ve built.

The Appeal of Pageless Documents

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Today I discovered that Google Docs has supported pageless documents for over a year and a half. I learned this at precisely the right time, and now I’m rethinking how I handle many of my digital documents.

Return of Winter Break

Mon, 18 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year my company is officially taking a break starting the weekend before Christmas through New Year’s Day. I haven’t had a break from work this long¹ since graduating college, and I am thrilled by the concept.

Several of my coworkers are nervous about this change—we have customer support teams and we need to ensure our sites don’t suddenly break while everyone is gone—but I plan to revel in it in the intended fashion. I get to enjoy time with family and friends without distraction, without needing to burn additional PTO, and come back refreshed with an eagerness to get work done.

Theme Retreat

Mon, 11 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I spent a weekend north of San Francisco in a small house among the redwood trees. It overlooked a misty valley that offered the perfect balance of seclusion without isolation.¹ We set up this small retreat to disconnect, focus on ourselves, and also discuss our yearly themes.

Ohtani to Dodgers

Sun, 10 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sarah Wexler, reporting for MLB.com:¹

After a fervent sweepstakes, reigning American League Most Valuable Player Shohei Ohtani has agreed to terms with the Dodgers on a record-demolishing 10-year, $700 million deal, according to his agent, Nez Balelo.

This is incredible, ridiculous, and frustrating.

Incredible

No free agent in any sport has ever received a contract worth this much. It’s a huge play by the Dodgers, and a windfall for Ohtani who definitely has nothing to worry about financially. Time will tell whether the deal is good when considering Ohtani as a player long-term, but as a move they can leverage as marketing it’s likely going to pay for itself rapidly. Ohtani is a superstar across the world, particularly in Japan and the United States. Between the merchandise the Dodgers will sell and the butts in seats they’ll get even in the next two seasons, I have to imagine they know it’s worth the investment. If they can make some deep playoff runs, that’ll do even more.

NaNoWriMo 2023 Recap

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I just completed my NaNoWriMo project for 2023. I wrote three stories for The Last Question world in thirty days, totaling 30,984 words. You can find the drafts on the NaNoWriMo page of this blog, with the caveat that they are indeed drafts. Let’s get into how this all went.

Let Work Be the Work

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoy playing with technology, trying new apps, and adjusting my processes. I listen to podcasts that nominally focus on productivity and the tools to get work done. You can look at my track record of changing writing setups to understand what I mean. It’s easy to conflate optimizing how you work and the work you’re trying to do. It’s rarely the case that these are one and the same, so it’s good to remember that the only way to accomplish a task is by doing it.¹

NaNoWriMo 2023 Check In

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’m behind my 30,000 word goal, which is why I’m writing this post as a fallback instead of something longer and unrelated to NaNoWriMo. It’s still possible for me to maintain a pace that gets me done on time, but I haven’t been making as much progress in my free time as I’d like.

My biggest issue this year is that I’m still not allowing myself to write freely. I’m thinking a little too much in the moment, trying to self-edit, and not just getting a story out there that can be refined at a later date.

Problem-First Thinking

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was in a position to provide some talking points for my company’s upper-level math textbooks. It was written in the aftermath of customer-induced pique regarding how we sell ourselves. While it’s focused on my company, the core idea of a problem-first approach extends beyond what we do in particular.

2023 World Series Review

Mon, 06 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Texas Rangers won the World Series in five games over the Arizona Diamondbacks, and by the end it looked as inevitable as the 4–1 victory shows. I was fairly neutral going in—I have some connections to the Rangers via the Twins, but felt myself rooting for the underdogs in Arizona more often than not—and so my hope, as always, was for a tense series that went at least six games. That didn’t transpire, and viewership was down as the matchup was panned across popular sports media, but that hardly matters to me.

NaNoWriMo 2023 Announcement

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve done something for National Novel Writing Month each year since 2019. That first year was the only time I’ve “won” by getting to fifty thousand words, but I’ve always appreciated the exercise and change of pace required to make a reasonable attempt. November is just around the corner, so it’s time to consider my plans for this year’s effort.

(Another) iPad Writing Setup

Mon, 23 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I switched back to Ulysses and refined the Writing homescreen on my iPad. I have no idea how long this particular setup will last considering the short time spent since I previously discussed this, but it feels stable, all my writing can live in a single app, and I can drop the dance I’d tried with iCloud to make iA Writer work across all my devices.

Tracking Tasks at Work

Mon, 16 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I had a moment of panic followed by clarity and motivation when I realized my tenuous approach to managing tasks at work was no longer tenable. I needed to make a change.

Our First Wedding While Married

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last night the wedding of Erin’s younger brother and his lovely now-wife. It was fun to participate in the process of wedding preparation from a new perspective—one where we have tangible advice to offer, a calmer presence from experience—only one year after our own.

This took form in a few ways. Erin saw how our coordinator worked through each little detail as we got closer to the date, so she made sure to do the same with the bride who had painstakingly planned venue decoration. I mainly acted as a role model to the groomsmen who, though absolutely great friends and nice guys, still end up a little immature for self-governance.¹ This also meant during decorating in the morning and post-reception teardown, I could yield my influence to direct their help.

Switching to iPhone

Mon, 02 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

With the iPhone 15 series switching to USB-C, my last tangible reason for holding onto Android phones has been erased. In part thanks to the huge trade-in promotions offered in exchange for cell carrier lock-in, I’ve given up my Pixel 6 Pro and switched to an iPhone 15 Pro.

Netflix and Value

Mon, 25 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I decided to cancel Netflix the other week after subscribing for about eight years. I’d been infrequently toying with the idea for a few years, but while recording a recent episode of Comical Start Grant asked me something that solidified my reasoning.

First Anniversary

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One year of marriage has sped by. We unintentionally packed it full of travel, hosting visitors, and yet another road trip back to Minnesota. We spent time with friends, watched plenty of movies, found good restaurants, and made excellent meals. Throughout it all was a comfort, security, and joint responsibility of finally being married and working through what that means to us.

Exploring Effective Altruism

Mon, 11 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I recently came across William MacAskill and his books Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future.¹ The former details a template for a model of approaching the world called effective altruism, while the other looks at an adjacent set of ideas called longtermism. While I’m still working through the second book, I’ve become quite interested in the concepts laid out in each and thought it was worth sharing.

Donnie Barrels

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I fulfilled an adult dream of getting season tickets to the San Francisco Giants in 2021. I became familiar with this new team and their players, and something about Donovan Solano—Donnie Barrels to his friends—rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know if it was how he carried himself at second base, or his inconsistent hitting on a team that won 107 games, but I was pretty down on him all year.

After spending 2022 with the Cincinnati Reds, he signed with the Twins in February this year. I wasn’t bullish on this acquisition, but with the season nearing its end I’m all in on Donnie. He’s playing a good-enough first base and seems like he’s always the one with clutch hits. However, I didn’t want to rely on the eye test. I have the tools to determine whether my baseball opinions are correct.

Playdate by Panic

Mon, 28 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sixteen months after placing my order, I was delighted to see my Playdate arrive this past week. While I haven’t spent much time with it, everyone I’ve shown it to has been absolutely charmed by it’s fun design. Who doesn’t like spinning a crank as part of a game?

It’s a novelty that likely won’t see be used as often as I wish I had the time for, but I am happy to have a small diversion available with a growing set of games. The design is fun and fresh, with a whimsy that perfectly fits my aesthetic. It makes you smile when you see it, and I can see having fun with it on trips when I want to do something other than read. It’s not for everyone—it’s expensive for what it is on paper—but I recommend checking it out if you have the means.

Spreadsheets and Queries

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When I first learned about the QUERY function in Google Sheets, I was brought back to the surprisingly large amount of discourse I’ve read regarding spreadsheets and databases, the best of which is contained in Matt Parker’s book Humble Pi. In short, the backbone of spreadsheet software is not designed to let it perform like a database. But because spreadsheets are more explicable, visual, and interactive, businesses and researchers and all other sorts of folk force them into that bucket.

A PSA On Staying Hydrated

Mon, 14 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I fainted for the first time last week from dehydration. I have the scabs on my left knuckle and forehead to show for it, and the memory of losing a hold on my balance and waking up to the impact of concrete.

Rolling Every Number on a Die

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Mikhail for posing this problem.

On average, how many rolls would it take to see every face on a particular die?

A Little Rain Never Hurt Anyone - Joel Haver

Mon, 31 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote about Joel Haver some time ago. He has a second channel, Joel Talks About Movies, which is focused on his ideas about movies and life rather than actual short films he produces for his main channel.

His most recent video on that second channel, a little rain never hurt anybody, was a lovely take on an idea I’ve tried to embody as I grow older. The thesis—which operates as both a direct idea and a metaphor—is to stop worrying about getting wet from the rain. If you get caught in some rain, the worst thing that happens is you get wet and you’ll be dry sometime later.

Barbie, The Movie

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I went with a large group to the Alamo Drafthouse in San Francisco to see a pre-release screening of Barbie. It was an official event complete with props and an opening presenter who shared their adoration for the famous doll. There was a palpable buzz among the groups of people dressed up, an excitement that was joyful with no undertone of negative tension that goes along with, say, a screening of a new Star Wars movie.¹ At the end of the movie, I was excited to see it again with Erin.

Going Back to iA Writer

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve finally decided to go back to using iA Writer on my iPad. This has several knock-on effects, with the most notable being that my drafts will all be synced via iCloud.

I say “drafts” because my plan is still to use Dropbox as long-term storage. I now have a monthly reminder to copy completed blog posts over to the proper spot in Dropbox¹ and will only use iCloud for in-progress work.

Starting on Guitar Maintenance

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

An uncle on my dad’s side has been a guitarist on the side for years. We don’t talk about it too often, but now that he’s getting older and preferring instruments with better ergonomics, he offered me a Stratocaster that he really enjoyed but wasn’t playing anymore. I happily took him up on the offer.

It plays beautifully, with a well-maintained neck that feels comfortable and fast. However, some of the metal hardware has begun rusting.¹ My plan is to use this as a first step in understanding how to maintain my guitars. Until now, I’ve changed the strings and left further setup to professionals. They do an exceptional job, but you pay for it. Considering this guitar was free, it seems appropriate to determine what I can learn to do for free.

Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast

Mon, 03 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve listened to Matt Whitman’s Ten Minute Bible Hour Podcast since it began in October 2019. The premise of the show is straightforward: Discuss the Bible every weekday for about 10 minutes. However, this show is rather special in its approach and is worth your time to check out.

Five Years of Comical Start

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last week I released Episode 257 of Comical Start, Pockets of Conversation. Its publish date is just a few days after the 5th year anniversary of our first episode, Multiverse. Grant was unable to record with me, so here is a lightly-edited transcript¹ of the 25 minute monologue that I did off the dome.

You Should Try iA Presenter

Mon, 19 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

iA Writer has previously been established as my writing app of choice. There is something about both the visual design and snappy interface the team at iA created that is just right for me. When I learned they were making a presentation editor the same week I needed to create some slides, I had to give it a try.

Apple Vision Pro First Thoughts

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had a strong interest in consumer technology for years at this point, though it mostly falls into a category of entertainment via YouTube videos and podcasts. I’m not critic, and tend not to spend much time writing about the latest and greatest in the spaces I follow. But Apple’s new Vision Pro headset is difficult to ignore.

MuseScore and the Democratization of Document Creation

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I find music scores to be absolutely beautiful documents. In middle school I was engrossed by creating my own music and, more importantly, writing it down. There’s video evidence of me being jazzed about receiving a “Lyricist’s Notebook” for Christmas around that time. I also recall purchasing a journal of staff paper for ambitious ideas I had. Yet turning musical ideas into something that can be shared, let alone something that would look good, felt out of reach. When the itch to create music struck me again last week I remembered a new-to-me program, MuseScore, that changed everything.

A Thesaurus for More Than Words

Mon, 29 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve slowly formed my thoughts on the language model tools that have stormed into the foreground of technology over the last few months. My initial utter skepticism, largely founded on people’s misunderstanding of how these tools are designed, has morphed into an appreciation of their specific utility as a thesaurus for any kind of text available on the internet.

Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

Mon, 22 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a refrain in disc golf describing the approach to properly development throwing form. It’s typically attributed to Philo Brathwaite, a particularly smooth player out of northern California. It feels self-evident in the world of disc golf mechanics¹ as you watch different players, but its applicability beyond this origin knows no bounds.

From the Desk of Owl P. Jackson, Esq.

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I went to the 2023 OTB Open this weekend, and had a blast. However, it’s late on a Sunday and I don’t have the time or energy to dive into that right now. Instead, I encourage you to go read the Top 10 Storylines series from “Owl P. Jackson, Esq.” at Ultiworld. They’re a quick, humorous, and insightful set of recaps for each stop on the Disc Golf Pro Tour. It’s probably the best way into the sport of professional disc golf.

Mastodon

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I listen to several Relay FM podcasts, which keeps me engaged in a sphere of technology personalities. They kept me up-to-date on the exodus from Twitter that this region of internet culture experienced, and their settlement into Mastodon.

I’ve never been a big Twitter user. Comical Start has/had an account where I tried to remember to post each week’s episode, but that’s mainly for the practice. Nobody cared that I did that, and I slowly turned that account into more of a personal account that followed the internet folks that I enjoy. I never tweeted at them because it was a show account, so I simply read things when I thought of it and that was that.

Bad Handwriting and Journaling

Mon, 01 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I was recently in San Diego and decided not to fly with a fountain pen.¹ So when I sat down to journal I was back with my original roller-ball Retro 51 Tornado, and my handwriting was awful. It helped me realize how intentional I still am while using a fountain pen, and how that encourages better journaling sessions.

Going back to a traditional pen kicked my brain into a rapid jotting gear that spewed rough characters and jagged sentences all over the page. These entries were initially shorter and had reduced impact. Once I realized what was happening, I took additional care to write slowly and focus on my handwriting. This had a knock-on effect of making me think intentionally about my day and allowing the journaling sessions to improve.

Dean Town

Mon, 24 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been working on learning Dean Town by Vulfpeck on guitar. It’s been a great experience because it takes me back to when I was first working on playing an instrument, both excited by each little step that showed I was better than before, and amazed that anyone could play what I just did so much faster. I want to savor those experiences more.

That being said, the song is an absolute jam. Go watch the original version, and their performance at Madison Square Garden. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the technical chops to play it at speed but I enjoy the process of getting a little better.

Scorekeeping With the MLB Pitch Clock

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Last year, I wrote a long post on scorekeeping in baseball. An hour before I headed to my first MLB game of 2023 with my scorebook in hand, I realized there was a new element to track: pitch clock violations that end a plate appearance. If a batter takes too long, they are assessed a strike. If a pitcher takes too long, the count gets an additional ball. It’s totally possible that a pitch clock violation would result in either third strike, or fourth ball, of a count and directly cause a strikeout or walk without a final pitch being thrown.

Let Hobbies be Hobbies

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am thrilled when I try a new hobby. I’m sure part of that is the hit of getting to buy a few new things, but I also appreciate the initial challenge and the excitement of any initial progress. Yet I often drop hobbies if I feel I can’t devote enough time to become “good” at whatever skills it involves. This post is a message to myself that sometimes a hobby should just be a hobby.

Baseball Ramblings to Begin the 2023 Season

Mon, 03 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A few days into the 2023 MLB season has me thrilled by baseball, and I have a few short thoughts and links to share.

Dynamic Content and Curriculum

Mon, 27 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Textbooks have been the premier mechanism for presenting curriculum for centuries. While the printed word is powerful and, for many people, superior to digital versions, the physicality of textbooks requires that their content remains static. Errors are inevitable, as are changes in relevant topics or pedagogy. New editions are the only tool to fight against the decay of a textbook’s utility.¹ In an educational landscape dominated by digital tools, it’s tempting to have content updated rapidly and frequently. This approach requires a deft hand.

Anthologies

Mon, 20 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been reading How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. Unlike other apocalyptic fiction I’ve consumed over the years, this is written as an anthology of short stories giving snippets of life over the course of time without any stated connection between the characters beyond their shared experience of something rather awful going on. I’m always drawn to anthologies, whether they’re a book or TV show, because I get a wealth of “experience” in the world.

Spring 2023 Writing Setup

Mon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been a while since I wrote about my setup for various writing projects. It’s changed a bit since then, and is still not particularly robust. Consider this a report on the state of the world.

Writing and Thinking

Mon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When you think something, what precisely are you doing? Does the thought take shape in your head, or does it only coalesce as it’s put in a communicable form? About once a year, I go down a little rabbit hole of curiosity regarding language, communication, and the meaning of thought. Here I go again.

Area Mom Going To Whip Up Tacos For Dinner

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

EAU CLAIRE, WISCONSIN—A statement from local mother Sandra Johnson has been obtained regarding the Johnson family’s dining options this coming Tuesday. The contents outline a plan to “whip up” tacos that evening.

MLB Rule Changes in 2023

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Each time I sit down to establish my feelings about the new MLB rules going into the 2023 season, I flounder. I have a hard time separating the baseball I know and love from the inevitable future version it must become if it’s to survive and hopefully thrive. I can only imagine what the players faced with learning these new rules must feel, because some of the changes are rather drastic.

Consider this post a snapshot of my mind right now. It’s not clean or concise, and my feelings will change once I get a few games under my belt this year and see the practical ways these rules affect gameplay. But here’s where my heart and my head lie for now.

Science Museums

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Science museums are awesome, and The Exploratorium in San Francisco is particularly fantastic. We went for their Thursday After Dark series, where they stay open from 6 to 10 at night, and you must be at least 18 to get in. They serve drinks and have a different theme each week with various exhibits and presentations among the standard fare. It was a surprisingly vibrant experience!¹

There are so many opportunities for excitement at a science museum, all stemming from different areas of curiosity and experience. Going to a new museum means new demonstrations and exhibits that I’d never come across. Others are similar to what I’ve seen before, and take me back to my favorite bits of physics classes oh so many years ago now. I get to experience concepts again, sometimes in fresh ways, and marvel at the world we live in. If you have any science museum nearby, give them a visit at least once a year. You won’t regret it.

Multi-Effects Guitar Pedal

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Years ago when I got my first electric guitar, a used Squier Stratocaster in white, my guitar-playing uncle was nice enough to pass along a multi-effects pedal.¹ For hobbyist playing on my own, it was a fun toy that gave me new sounds and allowed me to attempt imitating the sounds in songs I was trying to play.

This memory popped back into my head the other week as I was tooling around with my much-improved Fender Telecaster I bought last year. Despite my excitement about having a guitar with a simple, clean sound, I found myself wishing again for more ways to have fun with playing. While flows like plugging into an interface and using Garageband are viable options, that requires more connections and isn’t any less expensive than where I ended up. After doing some research, I found that reputable multi-effects pedals were way less expensive than I originally imagined.

Managing eBooks

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After broadly explaining the virtues of digital organization, let’s discuss the practical example of eBooks. I’ve moved from allowing a single platform (e.g. Amazon Kindle) to dictate how I organize my eBooks to making sure I own and manage the system myself. You should too.

Review: ChatGPT's Satirical Ability

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I asked ChatGPT to write its own Onion-style article with the same title as what I published yesterday.

My request along with ChatGPT’s response.

Make your own judgement on how it did, and continue on if you’d like to read my thoughts.¹

Optimistic AI Just Happy To Be Here

Mon, 23 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA—In an effort to eschew the tendency for modern AI tools such as ChatGPT to appear neutral while still housing the fundamental biases of their creators within their core, San Jose-based startup Half Full, Inc. announced on Monday the launch of an AI whose goal is optimism, plain and simple.

On Digital Organization

Mon, 16 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We create and accumulate huge quantities information these days. I don’t think that makes us fundamentally different than our ancestors in terms of organization. What separates us is that it’s now possible to have our data completely disorganized in a way that is invisible to others. This requires an increase in awareness and intentionality to reap the inherent benefits of organization.¹

2023: Year of the Future

Mon, 09 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Did I act today in a way that tomorrow’s retrospective would find acceptable, even helpful? Have I established routines and approaches to my life that I can reap next year? These kinds of questions are both common and important. I plan to keep these front of mind for my theme, Year of the Future.

2022 Reading List

Mon, 02 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve stated in the past, my annual goal is to read 24 books each year. While that’s a slippery goal as not all books are made the same — it’s certainly true that I’m hesitant to take on large books because of this goal — it still keeps me reading, and that’s the intention behind it.

This year, I also tracked what genre I’d consider each book to be in, and what medium (digital or physical) I used to read the book. I don’t really use audiobooks, so those aren’t a consideration. Note that genres are not exclusive; sometimes I would assign multiple genres to the same book if it felt right.

In all, I read 25 books by 15 different authors. Among those, 4 were physical books, while all the others I read digitally. My most popular genres were:

Science Fiction (8 books)
Fantasy (7 books)
Literary Fiction (6 books)

And finally, the list itself!

The Lord of the Rings is Good

Mon, 26 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

That’s right, I’ll be the first to put down my foot and say The Lord of the Rings is actually really good.

2022 Blogmas Day 24 - Retrospective

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This Blogmas experience proved to be a fun, engaging, and informative project. I wasn’t sure how it would go, but I’m glad I dove in and made it happen.¹

2022 Blogmas Day 23 - Defensive Runs Saved and Defensive WAR

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hot on the heels of Ultimate Zone Rating is another tool with the same goal: measure a player’s defensive contributions in terms of runs saved. This other statistic, Defensive Runs Saved (DRS), doesn’t just have a better name, but in my experience is favored over UZR in most situations.

2022 Blogmas Day 22 - Ultimate Zone Rating

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks to the wonderful book The Last Nine Innings by Charles Euchner¹ I had an early introduction to some advanced statistics, at least those that were popular a few years into the 21st century. Among these was Ultimate Zone Rating, a first crack at trying to measure how well a player defends their position.

2022 Blogmas Day 21 - Fielding Percentage and Range Factor

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Leading into the home stretch, let’s discuss some defensive statistics. As a category, these represent recent innovations in baseball, as defense is the most dynamic aspect of the game. Players can change where they are positioned, which affects their ability to get to a ball. As we gather more data — ball speed off the bat and launch angle — we can better analyze defensive ability. But it’s still messy.

2022 Blogmas Day 20 - Pitcher WAR

Tue, 20 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve already addressed the concept behind WAR (Wins Above Replacement) in the abstract and for offensive players in particular. Today, we’ll consider how we quantify runs for pitchers and overview calculating their WAR.

2022 Blogmas Day 19 - Leverage Index

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Relief pitchers can enter the game in very different situations, and that should be accounted for when evaluating their performance. Coming in to clean up a 12-0 victory (or defeat) is different than coming in during a close, tense game with a lot on the line. We measure this disparity using Leverage Index (LI).

2022 Blogmas Day 18 - Fixing ERA+ With a Minus

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

ERA+ is a funny, messy statistic. Unlike OPS+, it doesn’t tell us how much better a player is than the league: it instead tells us how much worse the league is than the player. This ignores our intuition and causes unnecessary confusion. Furthermore, it makes it harder to use as a tool for direct comparison: someone with a 200 ERA+ is not twice as good as someone with a 150 ERA+, while that would effectively be true with OPS+ (and similar offensive statistics.)

2022 Blogmas Day 17 - Expected FIP

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

FIP is a cool, clever, and simple statistic to try and normalize how we work with ERA in a way that simply ignores defensive factors. However, we can ignore, or normalize for, at least one other factor to adjust the comparison.

2022 Blogmas Day 16 - Pitcher Miscellany

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Halfway through our pitching posts, let’s take a step back and learn about some miscellaneous statistics that we’ve either barely touched, or entirely ignored. These are all counting statistics that we use to help determine value and ability. While most are not explicitly used when calculating advanced statistics, they have historical cachet and many fans (including me) still enjoy looking at them.

2022 Blogmas Day 15 - Fielding Independent Pitching

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Remember many days ago when we talked about how pesky it is to have a ball in play? That’s as true for pitchers as it is for hitters. So, some enterprising folks struck out to roughly measure ERA in a way that ignores balls put in play, instead focusing entirely on the Three True Outcomes. Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) is a defense-agnostic statistic to compare against ERA, and in some ways is an ideal “predictor” statistic for ERA.

2022 Blogmas Day 14 - ERA+

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

That’s right, the “+” statistics exist in the realm of pitching. Park adjustments and a percentage normalization is a natural extension of ERA, and makes it more meaningful for directly comparing pitchers, even across generations.

2022 Blogmas Day 13 - Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While ERA is a measure of overall pitcher effectiveness, there’s a more nuanced statistic that considers how frequently a pitcher allows runners on base. Walks and Hits per Inning Pitched (WHIP) is easy to calculate, has a cool acronym, and is another factor to consider when measuring how good a pitcher is at keeping hitters from doing their jobs.

2022 Blogmas Day 12 - Other Basic Pitching Statistics

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

While ERA is the best way among the simple statistics to compare pitchers, it does not tell the whole story of their season. Historically, there is much interest in the details of a pitcher’s approach and how that influences their ERA. Does a pitcher rely on power and strikeouts, or precision and defense?

2022 Blogmas Day 11 - Earned Run Average

Sun, 11 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let us leave the world of sluggers and slap-hitters behind us, and move 60 feet forward to the pitcher’s mound. I’ve always enjoyed and valued pitching over hitting in my baseball life. As such, the first ten days of hitting required me to learn more than I anticipated, while I feel more prepared to handle this section of Blogmas.¹ We’re not starting as simple as possible, but we are starting with the most important of the original pitching statistics: how good are you at preventing runs from scoring?

2022 Blogmas Day 10 - Win Probability Added

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

On the heels of evaluating players based on how many wins they can provide to their team, let’s look at how clutch players are. Do they shine in the big moments, or just generally perform well yet fail to make an impact when it truly matters?¹

2022 Blogmas Day 9 - Offensive Wins Above Replacement

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we move onto one of the gems of advanced baseball statistics¹ that generalizes player value beyond concrete elements like hits and runs, and looks specifically at how many wins a player is worth.

2022 Blogmas Day 8 - Weighted Runs Above Average and Runs Created

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s dive back into the weeds. Hitting the ball and getting on base are important jobs for hitters. But what actually wins the game? Scoring more runs than the other team. Today, we’ll look at two ways of quantifying run production, both of which are weighted in the same way we saw with wOBA.

2022 Blogmas Day 7 - Batting Average on Balls in Play

Wed, 07 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Today we’ll look at a statistic that is interesting for both the offensive and defensive side of baseball. When a ball is put in play, how often does it go for a hit?

2022 Blogmas Day 6 - Isolated Power

Tue, 06 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In another day of simpler statistics, Isolated Power (ISO) is derived from slugging percentage. It’s calculated in the exact same way, but ignores singles. Hence, it is isolating the power of a hitter, defined as the rate at which they get extra-base hits.

2022 Blogmas Day 5 - Three True Outcomes

Mon, 05 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s take a step back today and consider an overall shift in the way baseball has been played over the last few decades.

2022 Blogmas Day 4 - Weighted On Base Average

Sun, 04 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

You may have recognized that OBP and SLG each measure slightly different things. OBP is only a measure of whether you got on base, while SLG makes a big fuss over your hits in particular, and how “big” they were. OPS (and even better, OPS+) are a quick summary of these combined, which is cool. However, OPS treats OBP and SLG as essentially equal in their importance, while getting on base is demonstrably of higher value. If you want a more accurate measure of offensive production that is (relatively) simple to calculate, look no further than weighted on base average, or wOBA.

2022 Blogmas Day 3 - OPS and OPS+

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

BA, OBP, and SLG make up what is typically known as the triple slash line for hitting. You’ll often see something written like .275/.310/.382. That is BA, OBP, and SLG in order. However, we do like our summary statistics that reduce how many numbers we need to compare for making quick calls, so we use OPS: On Base plus Slugging.

2022 Blogmas Day 2 - On Base and Slugging Percentage

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We move on from batting average to discuss a much simpler statistic, as well as a weighted version of batting average. These two new statistics, along with batting average, have over the last decade come to comprise the base-level portfolio of a batter’s hitting abilities.

2022 Blogmas Day 1 - Batting Average

Thu, 01 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Though not the most intuitive statistic, batting average was a gold-standard statistic for many decades, and is still considered important today.

2022 Blogmas Day 0 - Baseball Statistics

Wed, 30 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

After a couple of years toying with the idea, I’ve finally decided to do a blogmas, my own take on creative challenges such as Advent of Code. In this case, you’ll be treated to 25 days of posts about the wonderful world of baseball statistics.

Desktop Podcast Editing is Back

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Every few months, I would go check out the Ardour website to see whether support for Apple silicon had gone past a rough beta. Just a few days ago I went there and, sure enough, the official macOS version now runs natively on Apple silicon and it’s wonderful.

While Ferrite has been my main way to edit for a couple years now, and likely will continue to be, it’s nice to know I have other options available depending on my mood and inclination. The main annoyance with Ferrite is needing to move the files between my Mac and my iPad. Having everything stay on the Mac is overall simpler.

Building a World

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

After procrastinating on NaNoWriMo 2022 to a sufficient degree that it has just become another story I hope to finish at some point, this week I’ve turned my attention back to The Last Question, which was my world of choice for NaNoWriMo 2021. I have some ideas for where I’d like to go next.

New Minnesota Twins Jerseys

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Minnesota Twins released new jerseys this past week, introducing a different aesthetic to their main uniforms, and an alternative version featuring inspiration from the Twin Cities, the namesake of the team. Here are a few thoughts.

NaNoWriMo 2022 Check In

Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As is now tradition, I’m giving some attempt to National Novel Writing Month. And, as mentioned in my post about getting into fountain pens, I’m doing it by hand in a notebook.¹

You Need a GIF Tool

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Perhaps the greatest boon to digital communication, other than the hyperlink, is the GIF. They provide succinct ways to show everyone what you are working on, and allows people unfamiliar with technology to repeat a process exactly as shown to them. No need to create a series of images with missing information between them. You need a tool to make GIFs, because you never know when creating one on the fly will be extraordinarily useful.

A basic GIF made with Kap.

A New Writing Implement

Mon, 31 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It’s an odd experience drafting a blog post on paper, but here we are.

A Potential Change to This Blog

Mon, 24 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Whenever I think about this blog, I feel slightly disappointed in myself. My internal impression is that many of the posts are written at the last minute about nothing with any lasting interest. Most frustratingly, I want this blog to be a tool to improve my writing and communication, yet I’m not convinced I’ve set up a framework that lends itself to that goal. I began to think about a change.

My Disc Golf Bag

Mon, 17 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been playing disc golf for nearly a year and a half.¹ It’s an incredibly fun activity that I play mostly by myself in California, and love meeting up with friends to play while back in Minnesota. It’s relatively cheap to get into, lets me explore fun bits of nature, I get to directly compete against myself, and have a clear way of seeing whether I’m improving.

My set of discs has mostly stabilized (with the exception of losing a disc here or there), so I thought it would be good to talk through each disc and why I like to use them.

When the Moon Hits Your Eye

Wed, 12 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Driving south offered the perfect view of the evening sky. I first noticed the red-orange moon rising to my left, hovering just above the Wyoming plains in the distance. It looked unreal, as if someone had set it there for me to reach out and grab. Somehow the moon looked to be angled ever so slightly, as if it were a flat circle that had rotated just a little to make it clear that it had no depth.

Permission to Relax

Tue, 04 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Immediately after coming back from my honeymoon this weekend, I came down with a bad cold. (COVID test was negative, so just your regular funk.) I’m trying to be better at balancing pushing myself to hold to expectations I set regarding my various hobbies and side projects, and giving myself the leeway to relax and take care of myself. Last night, Grant and I recorded a shorter episode of Comical Start without any comics, and I barely did any editing. And for this week, I’m writing this post as a stopgap.

A Hurricane?

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick note, since I’m on my honeymoon: There’s a hurricane on its way through Florida. That’s not something we expected to deal with during our time here, but I think we’re in a reasonably safe spot. It messes with a few of our plans, but we’ll certainly be together for whatever happens.

Thoughts From the Aftermath

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I got married on Saturday, September 17. It’s been a few days, and we haven’t yet gotten used to calling each other husband and wife. They still sound like overly adult terms.

It’s a funny feeling. There’s so much building up to just a few moments in a day when you move from engaged to married. Then everything is over, you enjoy a party with friends and family, then that is over too. You’re left with a scattershot of memories from a whirlwind of an evening, and a lifelong partner. It’s a lot to take in.

The Wedding Approaches

Mon, 12 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing this over the course of several days before Erin and I get married. I’ll note when these thoughts were written down.

Back to The MN State Fair

Tue, 06 Sep 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I haven’t been to the Minnesota State Fair since 2017, just prior to my senior year of college. Since then, my travels home haven’t aligned with the event, so I’ve missed out on the fun and festivities I was lucky enough to enjoy for so many years.

Finally, with Erin and I being back for our wedding, we were able to return. We only spent about 4.5 hours there, but we enjoyed an abbreviated version of the fair trips we looked forward to each year of college. It was genuinely exciting to go back, to have the familiarity of the sights and sounds and smells, and spent quality time together in the unique atmosphere the fair provides.

Buncha Crunch Revival

Mon, 29 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In sixth grade my mom took me to our local Hollywood Video so I could rent Fellowship of the Rings. I had started reading the trilogy, and wanted to watch each movie as I finished the corresponding book. Shockingly, my mom acquiesced — I’m guessing she wasn’t wholly familiar with its contents.

More importantly, I saw a box of Buncha Crunch on the shelf.

The Finer Points of Scorekeeping

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My dad kept score for my baseball teams as a kid, and taught me how to do the same. I would keep score on and off during college when I went to Twins games, and just recently got back into the habit. My goal is — excepting games where it’d be a social faux pas to be nose-deep in a scorebook — to keep score when I attend games in person.

Love, Loss, and Sk8r Bois

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I woke up with the chorus of Avril Lavigne’s punk/pop hit Sk8er Boi stuck in my head. Here is the result.

Intimacy of Improv

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I went to a show by the Secret Improv Society this past weekend, which performs in an odd theater building near Union Square. It’s only the second time I’ve been to a professional improv performance, and I was struck by how special the experience is.

The Good News About Squash

Mon, 01 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I first learned how to play squash during my freshman year of college. I was hooked pretty quickly. That year, my roommate and I both bought rackets so we wouldn’t have to keep renting from the university. I continued to play throughout college, just recreationally with friends, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

When I finished college and moved to San Diego, there was a squash-shaped hole in my life. I suddenly didn’t have any sports to play.¹ I instead began walking about, going for hikes, keeping myself entertained through other means. Eventually, I found a group of guys to play flag football with on Saturdays; that was a great change.

Kurt Vonnegut

Mon, 25 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I first started drafting this post in January of this year. As time has gone by, and it’s been yet a little bit longer since I stormed my way through many of Vonnegut’s novels, my words feel increasingly inadequate to describe how much I admire and enjoy this great American writer. So it goes.

SEL

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The tutoring organization I work with, Step Up, has focused heavily on the social and emotional learning (SEL) of the students in their program. To some extent, this is an expectation of any tutor who is also meant to be a role model. Just as with Big Brothers, Big Sisters, the goal is to improve the student’s outcomes in as many ways as we can; unsurprisingly, helping the student feel better about themselves and their place in the world can be a huge factor in their future success.

Updated Podcast Workflow

Mon, 11 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve settled into a clear podcast routine over the last six months. Near the end of 2021, I started recording on macOS. I continue to use Ferrite for editing, so I’ve fallen into an entirely Apple-based podcasting ecosystem. My process is slick, and additions like Universal Control give me even more flexibility. While there’s room for improvement, particularly through automation, I’m happy with the current setup.

Marriage License Application

Wed, 06 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Turns out, this is pretty easy. Of course you’re dealing with a government service center, so the timing of everything is a little whacky. But, once we got to our counter, it only took a few minutes.¹ One interesting aspect in Minnesota is that they suggest (require?) an online pre-application, which is all the information they need beyond a government ID to cross-check your birthday. This is the stage where you choose to change your name. It turns out, that information does not stick to the pre-application, and they just ask you again at the counter. Better safe than sorry, I suppose.

The Preserve Championship

Wed, 29 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This past weekend, I went to the DGPT Preserve Championship at the Airborn Preserve. We had gorgeous weather, and the course was incredibly well-designed to handle eager spectators. There’s a great central gathering spot with food and drinks, from which you could watch holes 7, 8, and 9 before proceeding to see the rest of a card.

It was my first time fully watching a tournament.¹ I had an absolute blast, and will be doing what I can to attend events in the future. Roaming around, watching the best of the best, taking it in with others just as excited as me, all contributed to a fantastic weekend.

Joel Haver

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

At my friend Jack’s wedding a few weeks ago, someone showed me Joel Haver. He’s an independent filmmaker, working mostly on YouTube. He does a short film every week, with his animations making the biggest splash. However, his live action work is fantastic, with dry humor that sits perfectly with me. After binging his work over a couple of weeks, I sat down last weekend and watched one of his several feature-length movies, Pretend That You Love Me. It’s a very different style, yet beautifully done. I recommend any of his work, but I’d suggest to start with his animations, then choose a few live-action shorts that catch your eye. You won’t be disappointed.

Fear and Power

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In the discourse among citizens, abortion is nearly an undebatable issue. It’s a hill to die on, where opposing views argue across each other about whose values are more important: bodily autonomy, or fetal life. These sides have moved further away from each other. When I was first of an age to even consider the ramifications of abortion, I commonly heard phrases like “pro-life with exceptions.” With the impending overturn of Roe v. Wade, it seems the anti-abortion crowd is taking the ball and sprinting the other way. Whatever common ground existed has rapidly evaporated.

Luis Arraez

Mon, 06 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

He is officially my favorite Twins player these days. He plays the kind of game that connects with me, the kind I wanted to emulate growing up. A true utility player with a great intuition at the plate, he plays smart, and quietly does his job correctly.

A New Chapter Among Friends

Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My best man got married (kind of secretly) the other month, and another groomsman of mine just got married last night. With my wedding coming up in a few months, we’ve entered a new chapter in our friend group. While in some sense, getting married doesn’t change much when we’ve all been with our partners for eight or more years, it is a significant step in life.

I’m excited for my friends, and for myself, as we all support each other with our changes in life. I’m incredibly fortunate to have an excellent group of people around me, and going to a lovely wedding like the one last night helps me remember that.

Baseball Virus

Mon, 23 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I joined a city softball league with some people in Erin’s program (along with some free agent strangers) this past month. It’s been fun getting out and competing again, playing a version of the game that I love. However, it’s caused a problem. After years of not playing baseball (or softball) at all, I fooled myself into thinking I’d “replaced” it with other athletic activities. I assumed the personal challenge of disc golf, for example, would fill the gap left when I stopped playing baseball after high school.

I was incredibly wrong.

Planning Leisure

Mon, 16 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

It turns out that juggling leisure time can be as complicated as juggling projects. Deciding both how much time to spend, and what to spend it on, has been difficult for me this year. There’s a long list of shows I’d like to take the time to watch, yet any given moment it doesn’t feel “worthwhile” in some way.

Part of it is a value judgement, similar to my approach to reading old or new books, fiction or nonfiction. I need to work on striking a balance, while acknowledging that I won’t keep up with everything. If leisure is work, then it’s not leisure. While that’s an obvious statement once spoken, I have a hard time fully internalizing its truth. I want to keep working at arranging my life so that I make good use of my time, where “good” is defined by how I feel about time spent.

Last Question Update

Mon, 09 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Two months ago I revisited The Last Question, a basic RPG I wrote at the start of the pandemic. A group of friends has agreed to start an actual campaign with me later this year — we’ve had trouble finding a good time to get started — so I decided to retool the game itself. I wasn’t happy with the initial set of mechanics; it didn’t seem to mesh with the intent of the game.

Peanut Butter Jelly Time

Mon, 02 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I finished Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut last week. It can be modestly described as post-apocalyptic. In a scene set in a run-down Manhattan, there’s mention of making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I was curious when this modern staple became exactly that.

I left it at a quick dive into the Wikipedia article, and figured it would be good to report here. It seems the first reasonable description of something adjacent to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich comes from a 1901 issue of the Boston Cooking School Magazine. Twenty years later, when sliced bread came out and peanut butter became more of an economical staple, it became something kids could make themselves. By the second World War, both peanut butter and jelly have been on US military ration lists.

A Project Doomed to Fail

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve dabbled with various programming projects over the years. Building a tool to add MP3 chapters to podcast episodes, creating a website using Python, Advent of Code, and creating video games. The list goes on. Nearly all of them were left incomplete.¹

So, as I toy with the idea of yet another programming project, I’m faced with the reality that it is unlikely to succeed.

The Spirit of Competition

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Competition is a slippery idea. In both professional and casual interactions, people often walk a fine line when showing a desire to compete. It can be fun and humorous to have a friendly intensity, but there’s always a tipping point where it becomes uncomfortable for those involved. Competition is one of the most natural things in the world, but needing to play out the act of competition in society muddies the waters.

Journaling Update

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been journaling consistently for a few months, and it felt like a good time to quickly reflect on how this habit has grown.

I’ve been using the app Journey to give me a daily prompt for a gratitude statement, just a single sentence, and have handwritten in a journal each evening. I made it through a Moleskin notebook by the end of February, and have since upgraded to a Rhodia WebNotebook. It’s a huge upgrade in quality, particularly since I’m using a nice rollerball pen that bled through the Moleskin pages.

Mario Kart 8 Booster Pass

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I adore Mario Kart. I first played Double Dash at a friend’s house in elementary school. Soon after, my older sister was gifted a Nintendo DS and I would ask to borrow it as often as I could to play Mario Kart on it.¹ Once I moved to San Diego, I gifted myself a Nintendo Switch and have put hundreds of hours into Mario Kart 8. The first set of Booster Pass courses came out a couple of weeks ago, and I really want to talk about them.

Trip Lengths

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I just wrapped up a 5-day trip back to Minnesota, flying in Wednesday afternoon and flying out Sunday morning.¹ It’s the first trip of less than a week I’ve taken in over two years, and these shorter trips have their benefits.

Thinking About Hobbies

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My hobbies ebb and flow. I will rekindle a strong interest in some skill, old or new, and maintain it for a few weeks, perhaps months. It’s subsequently replaced by another pursuit.

I’ve realized that most of these interests are not separate; they tend to be manifestations of the same general themes. Any specific hobby tends to involve music, writing, sports, or technology, and during any given time period I’m most likely juggling hobbies from each of those four categories. Understanding this dynamic helps comfort me if a project fizzles out: there will be another one along shortly.

Rediscovering Guitar: The Purchase

Mon, 14 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

To satiate my recovered and expanding interest in guitar, I decided to use some money from my bonus this year to purchase a nice electric guitar. While I love playing acoustic—they sound beautiful, are easy to pick up, and always feel comfortable to me—electric guitar opens up a new world of effects, sounds, and styles. Plus, with a pair of headphones, you can have the full experience without much noise for everyone around you. Not wanting to waste my money, I dove into research

Rediscovering Guitar: The Passion

Mon, 07 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I started learning piano in 2nd grade with an unweighted 61-key digital piano, and an assortment of self-guided piano books. Putting time into piano allowed me to join the percussion section once I started 6th grade.¹ Armed with a reasonable knowledge of music, the free time that childhood offers, and experience learning new skills on my own, I began playing guitar in 7th grade.

Antenna TV

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The NFL playoffs are long over, but I still wanted to quickly document my experience using an antenna to watch a fair chunk of it in my San Francisco apartment. I bought an $11 “HD” antenna from Amazon after consulting with my dad. It’s good to see that it’s affordable, and made it an easy purchase. I scanned for channels a few times to find the ideal location for the antenna in my apartment¹ and started experiencing my childhood again.

Practicing Missing

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve watched and listened to hours of disc golf content across YouTube and podcasts over the past few years. Since I started playing about 9 months ago, an increased portion of that has been focused on instructional content: specific videos about form, techniques, tips and tricks, anything to help me feel more comfortable and consistent on the course.

Just like with regular golf, putting is the most frustrating aspect of the game. Particularly in disc golf, where you are approaching this relatively large basket and all you need to do is throw the disc in from 20 or 30 feet (ideally), it looks childishly easy. Yet I have a lot of trouble with consistency. Sure, I can make a few, but overall I’m missing in pretty much every possible direction during my round. In fact, both on the course and during my warmup I am practicing how to miss.

Extravagant Dining

Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I are working on tighter budgeting, eating out less, all that good stuff. We’ve been pretty good since coming home after Christmas. Going out to eat has become something we plan and budget for; it should be an event, not an excuse to not cook on a lazy night.

To that end, for Valentine’s weekend, we booked ourselves two dining experiences.

A Taste of Competition

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend, I played my first competitive round of disc golf. On a whim, I signed up for a league round where everyone pays 5 dollars. What I hadn’t realized when I signed up is that it was a course I’d never played before, so I didn’t have the benefit of being comfortable with either of the factors involved. However, I had been craving a way to force some assessment of my current skills, and also generally some athletic competition that I haven’t had for quite a while. This round gave me plenty of both, and really hooked me.

Juggling Obligations

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve kept myself busy over the last several months. College was the last time I had such a large number of projects and concerns, but most of them were essentially the same. While I would have four or five classes each semester, these all fell under the banner of school, similar to how several work projects are basically the same to me. However, I’ve since begun tutoring and writing curriculum on the side, while trying to maintain some of my other routinized projects. Add wedding and honeymoon planning, and admittedly, some days it feels like I hardly have any time for myself. Working out how to balance all of this is a difficult task.

Rediscovering the Journal

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My older sister gave me a lovely leather-bound journal one month into sixth grade, when all students in my grade went on a week-long trip to a nature center called Eagle Bluff. She encouraged me to use it to keep track of the experience, and I wrote in that journal for most of the next year or two. Looking back, many entries were a bit dramatic, but I think they were accurate to how I felt at the time. It was my first time using a journal, and in particular my first time doing serious introspection. I enjoyed the process, but eventually lost the habit and didn’t try to pick it back up regularly until college.

2022: Year of One

Mon, 17 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

With a new year comes a new theme. I’ve had this year’s theme prepared since last year, and it rings as true now as it did then. My 2022 will be the Year of One.

Agonizing Over Engagement

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Applying mathematical topics and skills to the real world is an often-discussed tactic to engage students who are otherwise dismissive of, or frustrated with, mathematics as a whole. By connecting the math a student does with real life situations—particularly skills they will “need” in the future, but also more abstracted situations that pertain to real life—some people expect students to gain an appreciation for what mathematics can do, and feel inclined to study it so they can actively participate in these various applications.

Reading Goal for 2021 Achieved

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

My goal the last two years has been to read 24 books each year. I’ve managed to read 25 in both 2020 and 2021. I’m not currently on GoodReads or a similar platform, so I’ll just list the books I’ve read the last couple of years, since I didn’t post about this last year either.

Seasonal Theme Update

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I decided this fall would be my Season of Creativity, since it felt like my Year of Transition had nicely wrapped up at that point. I wanted to give myself the freedom to pursue creative projects, and not get myself hung up on what I should or shouldn’t be doing with my time. I enjoy creating, and I owe it to myself to let that enjoyment come through.

I think this season was a mixed success. I spent more time reading and writing, focusing on creative projects, and letting my mind wander. However, I also gave myself more to do, both in volunteer work and some freelance work on the side. While these both can tap into my creative side, it doesn’t feel quite the same since they are often dictated by others and their established timelines.

macOS Podcasting

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Being back in Minnesota for a month really lit a fire beneath me to find a better solution to recording podcasts when away from home. In the past, I’ve either recorded episodes ahead of time, or brought an additional laptop running Linux to do the recording. I wanted to avoid that this time, and so I learned how to use new tools on macOS.

A majority of my podcast listening is taken up by technology-focused shows, and they have a tendency to discuss how they record as part of the show. As such, I was familiar with a few. The standout was always Audio Hijack by Rogue Amoeba. This tool allows you to record any number of devices from any number of inputs to any number of tracks. For my setup, that means a single program lets me record my microphone to a single track, my cohosts on Skype to a separate track (for a rough backup), and a third track that combines the first two as a way to synchronize our voices.

Tasty Cookies

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve been using a new chocolate chip cookie recipe for several months, but it’s now the holidays and I was able to introduce it to my family. In short, it’s been a big hit. Here’s a direct link to the recipe, with none of the blogging excitement.

A key difference in preparation is that this recipe calls for browned butter. I’d never gone through the process before, but it does provide more depth to the flavor. Comparing it to our previous-favorite Toll House recipe, a few other changes are more sugar and less flour. And, specifically with the sugar, this new recipe focuses heavily on brown sugar, whereas the Toll House recipe uses equal amounts of both.

2021 NaNoWriMo Result

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I failed.

There was a part of me that anticipated this. In 2019, I was almost finished by Thanksgiving, which was important since I wouldn’t be able to do much writing that week. This year, I was “on pace” by the time Thanksgiving week rolled around, and I had very little time or focus to continue writing.

I ended up reaching just over 30,000 words in November, and finished three of the six stories I was aiming to write. However, I’m happy with the basic drafts of those three, and am still motivated to keep writing the others. I can make the time to do so, even if it isn’t under the auspice of NaNoWriMo. I won’t be updating the NaNoWriMo page though, as the PDF linked there is a record of my actual progress during the month.

The Subtle Notebook

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I finally bought a couple Subtle Notebooks from Cortex Brand. I won’t go into their whole deal; I’d like to just focus on this particular product.

I’m a notebook hoarder. I’ve always enjoyed having journals around, with different shapes, paper types, and cover styles. Admittedly, many of these are still blank, or only partially filled. Some of them have a specific use-case that has run its course (or has been extensively delayed), while others are too nice, too boring, or just don’t feel quite right for some things I have in mind.

Google Stadia Review

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Because I subscribe to YouTube Premium, I was offered a three month trial of Google Stadia, which is Google’s game-streaming platform. I decided to take up the offer and, with some stale Google Store credit I had lying around from an old phone trade-in, I also got a Stadia controller. These services are very intriguing to me and, whether this particular one stays afloat, I can picture myself making use of them in the future.

NaNoWriMo 2021 Check-In

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m nearly halfway through National Novel Writing Month. You can check out some more info, including a PDF of my semi-current progress, at the NaNoWriMo page.

This is my second time fully committing to this project. My first time in 2019 was pretty straightforward. I just let myself write, and really did not worry about the quality, or whether I was “finishing” the story at any point. This year is a little different. I planned out some ideas ahead of time, and want to use these stories as part of a larger project in the coming year.

Price of Performance

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Apple recently launched new MacBook Pros, complete with their new M1 Pro and Max chips, which are incredibly power-efficient while still maintaining a high level of performance in professional applications. However, the Apple ecosystem of software and hardware remains essentially locked down. They continue to be hostile to user repairs and upgrades, and they certainly are no friend to the open source community. Although I’m not currently in the market for a new computer, it’s impossible to ignore how excellent these computers are, and how Apple’s offerings are going to be uniquely positioned when I am considering my next purchase. As I go through that thought process, I’m realizing how certain philosophies in the computing world are in a strange position. The tradeoffs for remaining with, or switching to, a Linux platform are becoming increasingly skewed against.

Chasing Down Order

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My projects and obligations outside work have grown over the past six months. Alongside my usual podcasts and writing, I started volunteering for a tutoring organization, and am looking to take on a contract role for some extra money. With everything building up, I need to reevaluate the tools I use to keep track of everything so I’m not letting anything slip by. The beauty of them being personal projects is I can use whatever system I want.

NaNoWriMo 2021 Announcement

Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to fully participate in NaNoWriMo this year. You can track my progress over on the NaNoWriMo page of this blog.

Romanticism, Fairness, and Baseball

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After moving to San Francisco this year, I was lucky enough to fulfill a childhood dream by getting season tickets for Giants baseball. There were no expectations for the team. I just wanted to follow baseball closely again, have a team to root for, after being mostly on the fringe after college.

Fall 2021 Writing Setup

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last year, I wrote about my writing setup. It involved a few different apps, and while I had a comprehensive process laid out, I just didn’t get myself to follow it consistently. I stopped using Ulysses, and went back to writing on whatever text editor happened to be available, or typing a quick post directly into my blog CMS. It was rather chaotic, so I’m looking to compromise this year.

Creative Powerhouse Device

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With my Season of Creativity in full-swing, and some potential projects for next year circulating in my brain, I’m thinking more carefully about how I set up my devices. For example, I’ve been working on creating a “work phone” for myself, which I eventually managed by activating separate users on my Android phone. I like this separation of devices, so I’m considering how to setup a creative projects device. Thanks to an older MacBook holding its value surprisingly well, I have enough trade-in value for the newest 11" iPad Pro to take on this new role in my life.

I Love Limericks

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Something so pure and so true
As a limerick spun out of the blue,
Will always leave me
Feeling ever so free
That I can’t help but share it with you.

2021 Road Trip in Three Pictures

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In what is now dangerously close to becoming an annual occurrence, I drove back to Minnesota a couple weeks ago. That trip, while exciting because I got to see some friends, did not generate particularly interesting stories. However, the first day driving back to California is vying for the largest rollercoaster of a day I’ve had during a road trip. Let’s explore.

Dangers of Mathematical Rules

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Do you remember when you first learned how to round numbers? For example, to round 687 to the nearest hundred, we notice it’s between 600 and 700. Since 687 is closer to 700 than it is to 600, we round up to 700. Maybe you even learned a rule: Look at the digit to the right of the one you’re rounding. If it’s 5 or greater, round up. If it’s 4 or less, round down. Rules can be good, but they can also be dangerous.

Season of Creativity

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I discussed in my yearly theme check-in a couple of weeks ago, I’ve essentially wrapped up my Year of Transition, and am looking at starting a seasonal theme.

I’ve decided to go with the one mentioned in that post: Season of Creativity.

Organization At Work

Mon, 30 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Follow me through a brief journey of how I kept track of projects at work over the last year or so. It’s been a doozy.

Year of Transition Check-in

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I denoted this year as the Year of Transition. The overall goal was to look forward to, and make the most of, moving to a new city. Along with that came a change in my position at work, and continued adjustments to my lifestyle as the pandemic took its course. But it might be time to transition to a new theme.

Tin Can Bros

Tue, 17 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently discovered the Tin Can Bros, which I would consider an offshoot from StarKid Productions, the makers of, among other things, A Very Potter Musical.

It’s exciting to come across more genuinely hilarious musical theater. I’m no musical buff, but I enjoy comedy with a modern twist. Anything by either group is worth a watch. They remind me very much of what my friend Tim Radermacher’s style, and I love having more of that in my life. And if you’re not a fan of musicals, check out their Wayward Guide video series.

Goals of Tutoring

Tue, 10 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned last month, I started work with Step Up Tutoring {{LINK}}. It’s been a lot of fun getting to know my student, and it’s been a rewarding experience already. I really believe in this group that I’m working with, so I’ve volunteered my time to help them work on pedagogy and curriculum, with the goal of creating an easy way for their tutors to put together the best sessions possible for their students.

I'm an Author (Almost a Year Late)

Mon, 02 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With everything that happened last year, I managed to never write about my co-authorship of the Level 3 Puzzle Book put out by my company. It was the largest project I’ve been on, and the content I’m most proud of producing. Not only did I get to write and review close to half the puzzles in the book, I managed to learn the basics of InDesign and help compile the book into its final form.

Weekly Check-in

Mon, 26 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I set up a Slack workflow to run every Monday morning at 8 a.m. on my company’s slack. It sends me a form to ask a few questions about how the previous week went, and a few looking forward to the upcoming week.

I find this short check-in to be incredibly useful. It primes me for the week, and helps keep me accountable to myself. Whether it’s for personal or professional aid, I recommend giving something similar a shot.

Quarter Century

Mon, 19 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The last several years have left me unenthused about celebrating my birthday to any great extent. I always did something a bit special, like going to get a dinner I wouldn’t do every week, but it was never much. I think it was the easiest approach when I was by myself.

However, this year just felt different. I turned 25, and wanted to make it feel special. While nothing I did was out of the ordinary—disc golfing, a baseball game, and homemade pizza—telling myself it was special made it better. I brought Erin to the disc golf course I frequent for the first time, and shot a really good round. I upgraded our tickets for the baseball game to be in row 6 off the right field baseline, and managed to catch a ball as a result. And the pizza was excellent alongside the brownies for dessert.

Text Adventure: Watchman

Sun, 11 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last fall I wrote a new text adventure. Now that we finally played it on OHAC 36, I’m posting it here.

It was fun to write. The pun I had in mind to start things out spiraled into a lot of research about timekeeping devices of the past. Writing the little riddle hints was also a joy. I like adding language aspects like that, because it’s an excellent medium for a text adventure. I’m hoping to keep writing more in this vein.

An Overdue Fresh Start

Mon, 05 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I bought my current desktop computer over three years ago during senior year of college. It is a business-class Lenovo desktop that cost me under $400. I slowly added memory and storage as needed. It started out as an inexpensive way to get consistent performance, give me a place to play games, and was a general workhorse I could rely on.

A Brief Encounter

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I watch my shot glide to the basket on hole 18. It’s a short hole to finish the course, but treacherous. The basket is perched in front of a large boulder, and anywhere off a straight line to the basket is a precipitous drop-off.

My shot lands a little short, to the left, but on the flattest line down to the basket. It’s my typical safe shot. I hop off the tee pad and collect my things. As I begin walking down the path, a little tuft of fuzz catches my eye. It’s quite still overall, but the bits of fur at the end wiggle in the light breeze.

They’re mostly black, with a clear white stripe down the middle.

Tutoring Again

Mon, 21 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started tutoring through an organization called Step Up Tutoring. They run online-only free tutoring for students in grades 3 through 6 in the LA school district, one of the largets in the country. They haven’t been around long, but have already developed a great relationship with the district and a pretty robust network of tutors (mainly in California) to work with the students.

Forms of Reading

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’m starting to fall behind on my self-stated goal of reading 24 books each year. I had a wicked start, but have been stuck on a single book for the last couple of months. It’s a good book, but I haven’t been taking the long chunks of time I need to get through it.

Video Theater

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

My friend Brandon wrote a short play, Cameo, for performance over Zoom. It was part of an event put on by Invisible Disco Productions, and was the final of four plays put on, each about ten minutes long.

Virtual Classrooms

Mon, 31 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Every student that was previously instructed in-person by my company has been on Zoom for over a year. While we’re making plans to transition our learning centers back to in-person come this Fall, we have also spun off a permanently-virtual version of these courses. Instead of letting this year be a fluke when considering curriculum and instruction, there has been significant time devoted to improving the experience of student learning in this online face-to-face environment. Here are some reflections on what I’ve learned over that time, both in teaching last year and helping adapt our curriculum.

Evidence-Based Education Part 1

Tue, 25 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

We have had several sets of federal education standards, the most recent being Common Core, but the focus has been on what, not how. These standards outline a broad set of topics and skills students should accumulate, but very little guidance on how to go about it.

The Smell of Home

Mon, 17 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

After a couple weeks in Minnesota, I’m back in my San Francisco apartment.

A key indicator of your living situation is taking a big whiff of the air the moment you walk in the door, because that’s what other people smell when they arrive.

I’m happy to report the smell was pleasant and flowery, as well as comfortable and familiar. Erin and I have discussed what we refer to as “home” these days, and this apartment certainly has a lot going for it.

Starting on Disc Golf

Mon, 10 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve wanted to try disc golf for a couple of years. I discovered it through the fantastic YouTube channel JomezPro, and have been into the sport since. However, I never took the time to buy and mess around with discs, or check with my friends for people to play with.

While in Washington, I discovered that a few friends of mine have started playing. That was enough to encourage me to give it a go while back in Minnesota. It’s already been a lot of fun, and I’m looking forward to working on it even more once I’m back in California.

Some Family Time

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Now that my fiancée and I are both vaccinated, we were able to fly back to Minnesota for two weeks. I don’t anticipate having a lot of time to write blog posts, since the little bit of free time I have outside friends and family will likely be spent editing Comical Start. So I’ll leave this short post as a reflection of my excitement and luck that I get to be back home for a little while. I hope others get the same opportunity soon.

A Week of Washington

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This past week I was lucky to head out to Washington state with some friends. We had all gotten vaccinated (and had mainly been working from home), so it was a nice opportunity to just spend time together and go exploring.

We went to various beaches, went on a whale-watching excursion, checked out the Hoh Rain Forest, and got up early to see a meteor shower (my first ever).

Most importantly, I discovered my phone could take a timelapse. So, I made this nifty video.

First Game of 2021

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With a vaccine in my veins and a cautious reopening of Oracle Park in San Francisco, I was able to attend my first baseball game of 2021, and my first MLB game in nearly 2 years. It was an absolute privilege and joy to do something that has always meant so much to me over the years. I’m incredibly lucky to live just a short walk from this absolutely fantastic stadium.

Evidence-Based Education Part 0

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As part of a new role at work, I’ve been researching aspects of funding for education in the United States. A recurring phrase is evidence-based interactions. I’m going to explore some of the facets of this idea, from its definitions and origins, to potential ramifications of its increasing usage in education.

This post is a placeholder for those future investigations. The educational landscape is of interest to many people, and learning about some of the guiding tenets can help explain a lot of the situations states are finding themselves in. I’m excited to be diving in.

Vector Tweening

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I was messing around with animation this past week. It’s always been an interesting process to me, and I’ve messed with a few hand-drawn animation apps on the iPad in the past. However, any small skill in drawing left me a long time ago. I also had a particular goal that amounted to animating with a vector image I had built using Inkscape.

Lo and behold, I discovered the concept of vector tweening. It’s essentially an interpolative animation process that takes advantage of the mathematical niceties of vector images. Instead of needing to draw every individual frame, you can “skip” frames. You tell your animation software that at frame 6 your vector assets should look this way, and at frame 12 they should look that way. A little voodoo occurs (which I assume could be tweaked depending on the software), and you get all the frames between 6 and 12 automatically generated.

Organization in Organizations

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

There are some excellent tools for organizing all aspects of an entity, whether it’s a single person, a hobby project, or an entire business. Services like Notion have come into vogue as trendy startups available to the masses, with a promise for greater expansion. I got into the world of Notion last year when I accepted a new role at work, which required greater coordination of people and projects. While my resulting setup was vital to my success, it’s put me in a bummer of a position nearly a year later.

Tips for Getting eBooks

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A couple years ago, I made a concerted effort to get back into reading. I’ve started tracking the books I’ve read since college, and have a goal of reading at least 24 books each year, or about 2 per month. While I do enjoy buying books, and I have several shelves of books still to read, I’ve discovered a few other sources for those who don’t want to buy individual books or want potentially more convenient ways of finding new books. Since I do most of my reading on my phone or Kindle, I’ll focus on eBook sources.

Socks and Underwear

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Admittedly, this post is ripping off a conversation that happened on a work Slack channel the other week. Here’s the general idea: If you count in a particular way, there are 12 options for how to put on your underwear, and 12 (ordered) options for putting on socks and shoes. Since there are the same number of options, we can create a bijection between the two scenarios. In other words, each choice of underwear arrangement will correspond to exactly one choice for socks and shoes.

The question is what bijection is “natural”, for whatever definition of natural you choose to have in this strange scenario. Let’s explore it a bit.

Outdated Tutorials

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been revisiting A Complete Beginner’s Guide to Django, which goes through the Django library, a Python tool for developing websites. I had tried it a year or two ago, but it just didn’t click. This time around I’ve found greater success precisely because many of the code examples are outdated and will not run without modification. While I may have more to say about using Django some other time, this experience has instead made me consider the efficacy of teaching using poor or broken examples.

Take My Face

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Right around Christmas last year, Erin showed some interest in VR. My guess is it was fueled by talk on Cortex, where CGP Grey has discussed what he considers to be the vital acquisition of an Oculus Quest 2. I was totally on board with getting one, but our Christmas spending had been accounted for. Also, they were out of stock everywhere.

The other week it popped back into my mind, so on a whim I got one from Best Buy to surprise Erin. It’s been a hit. However, it’s worth considering both the present and future of VR, and specifically Oculus, now that we have seen the light.

Good Night, San Diego

Mon, 22 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While last week I wrote in broad strokes about moving in general, this post is being written in a bare bedroom in San Diego on one of my last nights “living” in this city.

Moving North

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last weekend I helped my fiancee move into our new apartment in San Francisco. This most recent weekend, I drove down to San Diego to get the majority of my things.1

It’s been a hectic time, but it’s exciting to be moving in together, buying furniture and arranging our lives. I spent the last two years in a pretty minimalist state, with all forms of work and pleasure happening at my desk setup. I now have a living room with a couch, and will render my desk for its intended purposes: work.2

Wedding Planning Part 1

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Last October I asked my then-girlfriend, Erin, to marry me. As the cliche goes, I was lucky enough, and she was crazy enough, that she said “yes”. Soon thereafter the wedding planning began, and it’s been an on-and-off process as other events in our lives ebb and flow.

We are aiming to have our wedding in fall of 2022, so we’re giving ourselves a lot of wiggle room. Even then, it was clear we needed to get organized. There are a lot of moving parts, which only increased when we decided to have the wedding at her parent’s farm. Suddenly there were no preferred vendors, and everything was on us.

This part 1 is to briefly discuss some of the ways we’ve gotten our act together. I’m sure other posts, focusing on other elements, will follow.

Mechanical White Noise

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently discovered that typing on a mechanical keyboard does an excellent job of maintaining my desire to write.

Typically I use a Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard when I’m working at my desktop. I bought one only a few months after moving to San Diego to use at work. Once my hands got used to it, going back to a standard keyboard at home didn’t feel quite right. So, I now have two of these split ergonomic keyboards.1

New Writing Workflow

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Over four years ago I wrote a post about my off-the-cuff writing style. It was a flash-bang approach with only minor edits along the way. However, since writing stories for NaNoWriMo last year I’ve been rethinking my broader aims for this blog, and what processes can help me achieve them. Writing a post each week is a fine goal, but if they aren’t each in service of something larger it’s hard for them be anything but a pleasant chore. Subconsciously, that far-away target was establishing a writing routine with the hope it would improve my abilities. I think it has, but it took a concerted effort in editing a short story (and a few other projects before) for me to recognize that growth. It’s time for a change in approach and a new target.

Doctor Feelgood and the Asparagus Kid

Mon, 18 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One month ago, a good friend of mine released a feature-length movie on YouTube. I had followed along as they released the various trailers, then discovered the half-truths in their lovely making-of documentary.1 I managed to watch it the morning after the film’s premiere, on December 19, and have not gotten it out of my head since. I’ve started and stopped multiple reviews, taken copious notes on a second watch, and am finally releasing what I consider the movie’s canonical review.

If you frequent this part of the internet, you may be just the right person to watch Doctor Feelgood and the Asparagus Kid or: The Respect for the Omnipresence of Death. If the title intrigues you, give it a shot. Then come back here (regardless of whether you completed it) and enjoy a shameless, spoiler-filled plug and review for this movie co-written by my friend Timothy.2

Yearly Playlist Troubles

Mon, 11 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On an episode of the podcast No Dumb Questions, Destin and Matt discussed how they compiled a playlist for each year. This allowed them to track changing moods and tastes as the years went by, and also to link songs to specific times in their lives.

The benefit of listening to these shows hosted by people with more life experience is that I can actually learn from them sooner than how they learned themselves. I loved the idea of having anchor points in songs on an annual playlist, so I made my own for 2019 and 2020.

2021: Year of Transition

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

On the most recent episode of OHAC, Mikhail, Jack, and I talked about our yearly themes. You can head over there to get links to other resources, and listen to our takes on each of our themes. This post is to summarize my own theme, and try to have something clearer in my mind after a lot of talking through it with Jack and Mikhail.

My theme for this year is the Year of Transition. Its focus is twofold: acceptance of the changes happening in my life, and leveraging the progress I made in 2020 to capitalize on those changes.

The Best of My 2020

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Tomorrow I’ll be recording an episode of OHAC, where Mikhail, Jack, and I will be discussing yearly themes. That will serve as a nice recap of the year and a starting point for 2021.

To wrap things up on this blog though, I figured I’d go back through my posts from 2020 and select one or two favorites from each quarter, and maybe write a little bit about how I view those posts now. I don’t often revisit my expository writing, so I think it’ll be a good exercise.

Remote Christmas

Mon, 21 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ll be spending this Christmas away from family for the first time ever.

I’ve been left trying to make the best of the situation. I’m not alone: I’m spending Christmas with my fiancee, and we have been decorating her small San Francisco apartment with lights. Our parents have sent us cookies and gifts, and we have a small tree on the table. 1

I think the biggest difference is that this is the first year where I don’t have a distinct build-up towards Christmas externally pressed upon me. Until I graduated college, there was always winter break. The last two years, flying home for the holidays was a clear marker where I was now working remotely for a couple of weeks, surrounded by family and trying to see all my friends who were back as well.

Advent of Code 2020

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A coworker told me about Advent of Code last week. It’s an independently run site that provides an advent calendar of programming puzzles. Similar to sites like Project Euler, they are of varying difficulty and not designed to be completed in any particular language.

So far, the puzzles have been clever and fun. There is a central plot for the entire month of needing to get a currency of star coins to pay for your post-Christmas vacation. I take it not as tone-deafness to the pandemic, but more of wishful thinking for a better 2021. They’re cute premises.

They Come Again (NaNoWriMo 2020 Story 2)

Mon, 07 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s the second story, a little late, but I think much better because of the time I took to actually revise it. Again the basic idea came from /r/WritingPrompts, but I fleshed it out more. This has been a fun experience, and I look forward to doing a bit more in-depth editing and revising of my own work on longer pieces in the future.

Ferrite: Editing Podcasts on iPad

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve started using the wonderful app Ferrite on my iPad to edit podcasts. While I still love Ardour, and it is a powerful program for bigger edits, Ferrite is very clean and meant for podcasts, as opposed to being a tool designed for music production that podcasters try to use.

Text Adventures Part 4: The Document

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A text adventure would not be useful to me if it was not written down. Particularly when the goal is to have an unfeeling, strict parser doling out commands only when successfully prompted, it’s important to have a reference that is clear, contains maps and explanatory information, space for notes, and everything the “computer” needs to say throughout the game.

With the exception of Recurring Nightmare, I write every text adventure using LaTeX. Over time I’ve built up commands and formatting to make this process simpler. For Recurring Nightmare, I tried my hand at InDesign since I had received a license from work. That license no longer exists, and it’s easier for me to edit a .tex document than an InDesign document, so LaTeX continues to be the way forward.

In this post I’ll talk about some of the decisions I made for formatting my document, how I make maps, and other bits of trivia that come to mind.

Perfect Shot (NaNoWriMo 2020 Story 1)

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Although I’m not doing a complete take of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this year, I still wanted to put in some concerted effort writing some pieces that weren’t blog posts or text adventures. So, I’ve committed to writing at least 2 short stories this month, a medium I find beautiful and incredibly tricky to nail down.

This first one is particularly short, only about 3 pages if printed, and the idea comes from a post on /r/WritingPrompts.

Text Adventures Part 3: The Mechanics

Mon, 09 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Text adventures are, almost by necessity, designed to railroad the player into doing something without it being obvious or annoying. Any mechanics introduced should be a natural extension to the world the player discovers, provide sufficient freedom so they don’t feel like a funnel, yet guide the player in the correct direction. In the text adventures I’ve listen to played on the Cortex/Upgrade crossover episodes, I’ve noticed that mechanics often act as hints. They are like bumpers on a wall (which may kill you, but you can make a different decision the next time.)

All these realizations have come after thinking carefully through the mechanics and puzzles I wrote which were clearly bad (and the few which were actually good), and trying to figure out what precisely caused them to have the effect on the players they did. It’s often me not paying attention to my good sense and the feedback of testers. More frequently it’s me trying to subdue the text adventure genre until it allows me to try and tell a story, rather than building a story that works within a framework.

Directly, most of my text adventure failures have come from a single mechanic undermining any positive decisions I made.

2020 Election Pre-Processing

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Although this is admittedly a privileged position to be in, the 2020 election snuck up on me. I got my mail-in ballot for California, but let it sit on my desk. I knew inside would be races for positions with which I was unfamiliar, having only lived in San Diego for a couple years and not knowing what the political environment was on the local level. In addition, the California Voter Information Guide let me know there would be 11 propositions that were difficult to parse, and had at least 4 pages each of thorough explanation and official arguments for and against them.

Text Adventures Part 2: The Idea

Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I want each text adventure I write to have a unique flavor. Mechanics aside, the story behind it should be fresh, typically built from a single idea, and the more I write the more my mind recognizes these singular bits of inspiration. One thought or phrase is typically enough for me to build a world from: sitting down with a thought, then branching out from the initial point in whatever way my mind flows. I’m going to discuss how this process worked for each of the four text adventures I’ve written and released so far, and try to dissect what I learned in the process. In the next post, I’ll focus more on the thought process (or lack thereof) that went into developing some of the game mechanics around these ideas.

Text Adventures Part 1: Why I Write Them

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written several in-person text adventures modeled after Parsely games over the past couple of years. Through persistent effort, I’ve managed to improve them and recently began to notice a particular style develop. Since I’m finally pleased with where they are headed, I figured I would document my journey in writing them: Why I write them, how I find ideas, how I develop those ideas, and the actual mechanisms of making a document as reference. This whole set of posts will probably be four parts over the next month. So we start off at the beginning: Why did I start writing these, and why am I still writing these?

Dream Sequence: A Twine Story

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Twine is a wonderful editor that lets you create interactive fiction. It auto-builds a big flow chart, and has some programming paradigms that allow adding many involved paradigms that wouldn’t be possible in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, for example.

I recently took my text adventure Recurring Nightmare and rewrote it slightly as Dream Sequence, which I’m going to run as an “in person” text adventure over the computer for my company. When I did that, I decided it would also be fun to try and write it up with Twine, since it’s a fairly simple map and game.

The Umbrella Academy: What Heroes Could Have Been

Mon, 05 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After significant pestering from Netflix, I began watching The Umbrella Academy. It gripped me immediately, and I’ve enjoyed watching it. I’m nearing the end of Season 2 and so far the twists and turns have been handled deftly in my mind. I’m sure some could find some faults, but it’s been an amazing ride. Since last week I’ve known I wanted to write some brief thoughts on it, but I needed something to say. When comparing it to other superhero and supernatural shows I’ve seen, I realized it’s the show Heroes could have become.

Text Adventure: Recurring Nightmare

Mon, 28 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago I wrote my most recent text adventure, Recurring Nightmare. I think it’s my best one yet, with a clever puzzle hidden within it. It’s definitely the first I’d actually recommend other people try playing with friends.

You can listen to the play-through of it on OHAC 27.

I’ve attached the PDF of the adventure below.

Recurring Nightmare

Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

On Saturday of this past weekend, I was able to check out the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. It’s a truly beautiful place.

What struck me was a description of what the designer, Bernard Maybeck, intended to create when forming this area. First, he wanted to make sure that it was using the natural landscape. To that end, there is the large pond, trees and bushes growing all around it, and no desire to reform the landscape. Second, the intended feel was that of well-preserved Roman ruins. I think he nailed that. It’s gorgeous, and although out-of-place in the broader scope of San Francisco, walking around it really makes you feel like you’re in another world.

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

What an amazing show. Of all the nostalgic cartoons I have from elementary and middle school, I think Avatar and Spongebob are the only two I will continue to watch for years. While Spongebob is simply a feel-good show for me, which helped establish my sense of humor over the years and always puts a smile on my face, Avatar deals with issues more sincerely and deeply, in a way that is accessible to its younger audience.

Long Weekend

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’m planning on making the best use of this long weekend that I can, since it’ll likely be the last one I get until Thanksgiving. To that end:

https://xkcd.com/157/

Road Trip Test

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Erin and I embarked on yet another cross-country road trip from Minnesota to California this past weekend. It’s the third we’ve had, and each one has proven more successful than the last.

Another Change in Scenery

Mon, 24 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

After several months back in Minnesota, I’m finally preparing to head back to California. There is a lot to be said for a change in scenery. It’s become a bit difficult to focus in my current set-up in Minnesota. There are more distractions than I’ve been used to prior, and I no longer have the same desk situation from the past couple of months. I’m looking forward to getting a reset.

Reading as a Reset

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post is a little late since I was camping this past weekend. A good chunk of my time was spent sitting in a chair (or in a hammock, or on a diving platform in the water) reading some books. While camping for about 3 days, I was able to finish 3 books. Managing to read that much was an excellent starting point for my brain. I felt focused and calm while reading, and was able to ignore my phone (particularly since there’s no service where I was.)

Work from Home Future

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The word came in this week that my company will be working from home until at least the end of the year. Although we’ve already been working from home for about 5 months now, knowing that it’s another 5 months (and that I’ll be heading back to San Diego fairly soon) changes the feeling a bit.

NASA Wallpaper Changer

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I like switching up my wallpaper every once in a while. Each device I use has a different wallpaper, and I normally just get it in my head that it’s time for a change.

I decided to go a little further than before when I discovered the NASA APOD Gnome Extension. This downloads NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, and sets it as your wallpaper. It’s a neat utility. There are several others which allow you to use different sources, or which pull from Wikimedia commons, and I’ll likely play around with those. What I like about this APOD extension is that it also gives the description that accompanies the picture.

Backpack Search

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A while ago, one of the water bottle sleeves in my backpack started to tear. In addition, the nature of my traveling life began to change. I was taking weekend trips to San Francisco, and the occasional long-term trip back to Minnesota (such as I am on now.) Now that I’m armed with a little bit of birthday money, particularly a gift card to REI, I’m on the hunt for a new backpack.

Two Good Board Games

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is just to record two old games that my family very much enjoys. Both are a wonderful mix of strategy and the luck inherent to board and card games. The rules are reasonably basic, and the boards can be beautiful.

They are Cribbage and Backgammon. Cribbage is mainly a card game where you play to 121 points, but traditionally you play on a board with holes and pegs to track said points. It can be played with 2, 3, or 4 players (with two variations in the 3-player version) and is a wonderful game to teach someone starting at a young age. It teaches quick decision making, basic addition, and is just a casual, fun game to play at any point.

Geometric Series: The Basics

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was just tutoring someone in their Calculus 2 course, and we did a problem on geometric series. When I was a student, I remember memorizing several facts about geometric series without really grokking the algebraic details of why the formulas you come up with are so nice. Since it is fresh in my mind, I figured I’d go through the standard approach.

Celebrating The Fourth

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the Fourth of July. During the past couple of years, I’ve become less confident that there’s any agreement what precisely it is meant to celebrate. In theory it’s a celebration of our self-proclaimed anniversary of independence from British rule. Excellent. Yet it more closely resembles a general celebration of whatever America means to each particular celebrant.

Marble League 2020

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With no sports yet available in the United States, I’ve fallen back in love with the Marble League, a genuinely interesting, engaging, and exciting set of “athletic” events for – you guessed it – marbles.

New Coding Project: mrmp3

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve created a new project called mrmp3 that encodes MP3 chapters. The repository is here: https://github.com/rich1126/mrmp3.

The Gold Standard for Math Typesetting on the Internet

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Through a wonderful little game called TeXnique, I became aware of the online typesetting system KaTeX. Unlike MathJax, which is immensely finicky, slow, and has limited support for proper LaTeX, the KaTeX system supports scaling of rendered images, automatically detects the text color of my site and adapts as necessary, and has a fuller implementation of LaTeX commands.

Some Links RE: Protests and BLM

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t feel equipped to write more about this right now, but there have been others whose words I would be happy to share; they are not directly from those affected, but instead are from those of similar backgrounds as me. They are mainly from technology podcasts, which I think others are unlikely to share around. Just listen to the introductions of each, and they provide good viewpoints and resources in their show notes.

George Floyd, Minneapolis, and Processing

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

It’s hard to form any words that describe the thoughts swirling in my head with regards to the situation in Minneapolis. I can’t deny the selfish thoughts in my head: A week after I come back to Minnesota to be with family for the summer, this all happens. There’s also the privilege I hold that allows me to sit here and process everything from the safety of my home (or even potentially ignore it if I had a mind to.)

Update: Animal Crossing Takes Hold

Mon, 25 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a quick update, as I’ll be traveling over the weekend and don’t have much time to write a longer post.

In short, Animal Crossing has captured my mind. It’s a cleverly simple game that lets you focus on whatever grabs your attention. While my initial weeding endeavors have fizzled out, I’m very much invested in trying to obtain every fish and bug I can over time. Fashion and interior decoration don’t excite me overly much (I probably only have about 7 things in my house), but I’m playing the game to get to the point where I can have free reign over the island.

Animal Crossing: Weed Yourself to Victory

Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I was finally convinced to start playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’d been hesitant to give it a try for a few reasons. First, Nintendo games are expensive. Second, I wasn’t sure I’d actually enjoy it. And third, if I did enjoy it, I wasn’t sure I’d want to sink time into it.

Having played it for a few hours today and successfully paid off my initial expenses to Tom Nook, I totally get the appeal. No, it will never be thrilling. But it’s a simple “life simulator” that you can enjoy to whatever detail you prefer. For me, I’m not necessarily interested in the things I can get. I’m currently motivated by the Nook Miles achievements. I’ll be a big bug-catcher and fish-fisher. The first thing I did was clear my island of weeds, and I intend to do so tomorrow. I found out quickly that if I just suspend my own judgement and allow myself to appreciate the straightforward charm of the game, it’s a relaxing way to pass the time.

Tommyball Princess

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I really enjoy the Unmade Podcast with Brady Haran and Tim Hein. They generate some wonderful ideas, and the fact that it’s two old friends hanging out reminds me of the conversations (and podcasts) I have with my own friends.

One particular bit that has been ongoing in special episodes is Tommyball. It’s a fictional sport with no clear rules (it’s essentially Calvinball), and in these special episodes it’s Brady interviewing Tim, who plays the role of a conceited former player, and current commentator, of Tommyball. The most recent episode has Tim reading the audiobook of his recently released autobiography.

A Shift in Focus

Mon, 04 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve moved to a new position at work recently, going from a Curriculum Developer to a Curriculum Project Manager. My main role is no longer creating products that will directly go off to students (although I’ll still be doing a bit of that). Instead, my job is to create the processes and structures for my fellow curriculum developers to make sure they have clear goals in a project, and a set of tasks that allows them to effectively get their work done. The entire goal is to remove the planning and scheduling cruft that our team was doing (poorly) on our own, since we could each only give a little bit of time to thinking about it.

The Last Question RPG

Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I mentioned in my previous post about creativity during quarantine that I was working on writing a new game. I’ve been interested in trying to write something that moved away from text adventures and went into open-world RPGs. I’ve been inspired both by the Republic Commandos game run by Mikhail on an episode of OHAC (and in-person during college), as well as the Campaign Podcast he recently got me into.

Personal Organization Sucks

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Work has been getting crazier in the past week or two. We are now planning on being online for a while, and the curriculum work that has resulted is growing rapidly. There are many courses to rewrite as we experiment, on the fly, to figure out what tools we want to use (or avoid). I’ve been put in charge of these experiments, and it’s a much larger logistical task than I’ve ever had to deal with. It pales in comparison to what others have done, but it’s quite a doozy on my end.

A Short Tribute to John Conway

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

John Conway passed away a few days ago. He was a favorite among mathematical educators and communicators. He was involved in a large array of interesting projects and results during his career, many that can easily fascinate even the most disinterested people when it comes to mathematics.

Here are a few things he worked on, listed roughly in the order in which I came across them in my mathematical life.

iPadOS Cursor Support

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

iPadOS 13.4 was released a couple weeks ago, and with it came full support for cursor devices. You can now connect a mouse or trackpad and have a small circular cursor that acts like a mouse for your iPad. Certainly many people won’t find this useful, but it was really the missing piece that allows my iPad to go from a device mainly useful for handwritten notes and media consumption to a full-fledged computing device. I can fairly comfortably navigate 90% of what I do on a daily basis. While I still prefer my regular computers for podcasting, and also prefer the larger screen real-estate, the iPad now allows me to perform my regular work functions.

Creative Quarantine

Tue, 31 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe artists and writers of centuries past had it right, that isolation and odd situations gives a creative surge. Being cooped up at home more than usual has led me to seek out more novelty, and with that has come a desire to create that novelty myself. Over the past weekend I messed around more with Garageband on my iPad, and wrote a small RPG (which I’ll post about once I play it this weekend.)

PDF Tools for Teaching

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As we’ve been transitioning our in-person learning centers to be fully online, the question has come up about how to use slides and work with students. While Zoom offers screen-sharing and annotation, the annotation on an actual slide persists on the screen: if you scroll to a new slide, the annotation remains. There’s no way to annotate a document using Zoom. Even worse, the “whiteboard” feature in Zoom, though cool in many ways, really loses out by having no way to paste formatted text, or even images, onto it. That takes away significant functionality.

Zoom

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

My company is using Zoom, as are many universities and public school systems, to teach online. I’m hoping at some point, when the fires are put out, I can provide some of my own suggestions for using Zoom that have come up during my time dealing with the transition. For now, another short post.

The biggest thing for us is being able to still run interesting activities that are engaging. Just because this new medium assumes lecture-style classes on the surface, there’s a lot that can still be done with a bit of creativity.

On Fire

Sat, 14 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I lost track of getting a blog post written, but it has been a hectic week. This is my first true things are on fire situation at work with the Coronavirus. Since I work in education, and we have in-person academies where students take classes, it has been a massive effort by a lot of people to figure out what to do. We are switching to online classes through Zoom, and I have been declared the resident Zoom trainer and expert. I enjoy learning new technology, but doing so this quickly under this pressure has been quite a lot. It’s still not all over, but I figured I would write a post before the week was officially over to at least stay within my “updates weekly” tagline.

Caffeine (For my Computer)

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a little note about a wonderful extension for Gnome (a popular desktop environment for Linux). Out of the box, Gnome is a bit light on features and settings. Enabling Tweaks and Extensions allows for a lot of customization.

A recent discovery is the extension Caffeine. There’s very little to it. All it does is put a little coffee cup indicator in your top menu bar. When activated, you get some steam coming out of the cup, and your computer screen will never go to sleep. When it’s deactivated, it does nothing.

Seeing a Professional Musical - Fly

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A theater buff friend of mine visited this past weekend, and convinced me to go see a musical in the area called Fly. It is based on the story of Peter Pan, and focused on the serious idea of what it means to grow up. While that is always a main theme with any Peter Pan adaptation, this show took a slightly darker angle, with more adult humor present. I thoroughly enjoyed this production, but it made me think more about different types of entertainment I consume and the ways I judge them in my head.

Coffee and Donuts

Mon, 17 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I played my new text adventure, Coffee and Donuts, with Jack and Mikhail the other week. It didn’t end up going that well, but the process of having something end a bit poorly was a positive learning experience. There’s a lot to consider when trying to pace a game, create puzzles that are satisfying at the target level, and creating situations that are easy to engage with. I think I had some very good thoughts on this one (I’m particularly proud of the map I created), but the execution of pacing and some puzzles left a lot to be desired.

Playing with Android Development

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In my next adventure of programming projects, I decided to install Android Studio and play around with app development. To start, I have no particular thing in mind, I’m just getting my head wrapped around the structural complexity of an app. It’s a far more involved software situation than anything I’ve dealt with. I’m following this tutorial put together by Google Codelabs. It definitely assumes some familiarity with programming, but I’ve found it fairly easy to follow with simple explanations. Overall it’s been a fun task to play around with. The biggest shift is accepting the number of extremely high-level commands and classes that exist, compared to the (relatively) low-level projects I’ve done before. A lot is done for you in terms of graphical design right away, and the tools seem very nice to work with. It’s a fun shift in mindset that I look forward to exploring more.

Super Bowl LIV

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve watched the Super Bowl every year for as long as I can remember, and this year was no different. However, this year gave me a slightly different perspective. First, the Patriots were not playing and that was exciting; it’s nice to see an entirely different set of teams competing. Second, I had a conversation with my roommate the day prior that required to contextualize the Super Bowl and its cultural impact.

Review - 1917

Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I saw the film 1917 the other week. I had seen the trailer at least a dozen times before, as well as a two-minute feature in a theater about the cinematography. Despite all the exposure and a fairly decent amount of knowledge about the film, I still thoroughly enjoyed it and and would highly recommend it to anyone who isn’t put off by war movies in general. The movie is excellent on its own. However, what it made me think about the creative process was what stayed with me the most.

Space Force - Part 3

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This post has very little to do with the Space Force as an entity. I’m mainly interested in describing my experience reading the legislation that formed the Space Force. It was quite the trip, causing me to think about how legislation is written, who reads it, and who checks whether it’s accurately and precisely formed. For reference, this is all pulled from the National Defense Authorization Act (PDF warning).

Space Force - Part 2

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While reading through the National Defense Authorization Act for 2020, which is the act passed by Congress in December 2019 that establishes the United States Space Force, I was struck by how the legislation reads. It is surprisingly straightforward, and also incredibly amusing at times. There is a lot to be said about about legislation which I alluded to in the first post related to the Space Force. But, I will restrain myself here, focusing solely on how the pertinent information in the legislation compares to Space Policy Directive-4, which was discussed last week.

For those interested in reading along, the relevant part of the aforementioned act begins on p. 949 of the PDF linked above (which is p. 902 as labeled in the document.)

Space Force - Part 1

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

While researching documents related to the formation of the Space Force, it made the most sense to begin with Space Policy Directive-4. The Space Policy Directives have been a series of executive orders released by President Trump starting in 2017. The first three of these established the desire to return to the moon; discussed regulations of the commercial use of space; and worked through how to approach space traffic management, respectively. The fourth directive establishes the United States Space Force.

Break Without Break

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I’ve been vaguely aware of a certain dynamic when home in Minnesota for breaks, it has somehow become more acute this year. My break is not really a break due to how difficult my routine is to track, and how many people are vying for some time together. Of course I am happy to see my friends and family during the holidays, but there is something about being back home, as if it were high school, now that I am much more independent and live on my own. It is difficult to not have my own space anymore, and to have very little time to myself. In fact, I have to work today and that sounds like it’ll be the largest mental break available to me.

Exploring the Space Force

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A year and a half ago, Trump announced his intentions of forming a sixth branch of the US military: the “Space Force”. Just last week, a defense bill was passed that included appropriations and direction for the creation of said branch. This felt like an excellent opportunity to dive back into research mode and figure out what I could using primary sources. So I’ve been spending time digging up memos, executive orders, and legislation related to this process. Over the next month or so I’m planning on writing a few posts discussing how we got here, what the stated intention of the Space Force was, what it sounds like it will be immediately, and what it might become in the future.

Kindle vs. Nook

Wed, 18 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

During this year’s Black Friday, I switched teams in the (not very large) e-reader wars. Ever since I was a sophomore in high school, I’ve used some sort of Nook from Barnes and Noble. Growing up, I always loved Barnes and Noble. Sure it’s a chain, but it’s still a bookstore and I enjoyed supporting it. This extended to the Nook. It always felt like they had better features for a slightly cheaper price than the Kindles that were available. They received backlights on the base model well before the Kindle did, and they still have physical buttons.

Despite all that, the Kindle has finally eclipsed the Nook in certain key features that are useful for me: water resistance, integration with libraries, file transfer, and services.

For reference, I specifically have the Kindle Paperwhite 2018, and previously had the Nook Glowlight 3.

Season Dissonance

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Once again it’s supposed to winter, and yet it is not. In fact, we finally achieved “sweater weather” status in San Diego the other week with an uncharacteristic amount of rain and high 50’s temperatures. It’s still odd trying to adjust, and I feel a lot of dissonance between the weather and what 23 years of experience tells me should be happening.

I don’t expect I’ll ever fully adjust, and I think that’s okay. Proper winter will always have a special place in my heart. And at least I can bake cookies.

Won and Done?

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I officially “won” NaNoWriMo as of writing this post on November 23.

Fighting Through Burnout

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned last week, I’m participating in National Novel Writing Month. As of writing this blog post I’ve reached 37,000 words in my novel, which I’m quite happy about. I found the first week or so pretty easy to manage, and I consistently went above the official daily word goal.

The last week has been a bit tougher. I set a personal daily goal of 2000 words, and I have managed to hit it every day so far. But it’s been tough at times. Many nights I’ll have only written 800 words or so, and think about just calling it for the day since I’m ahead of the official mark. But part of this month is being disciplined on my own; the official goals aren’t that meaningful, they are just a guide. I want to do this with internal motivation, that’s the real challenge.

National Novel Writing Month

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

November is National Novel Writing Month, referred to as NaNoWriMo by the cool kids. The official goal of the event is to write 50,000 words of a brand new novel. More loosely, it’s to write 50,000 of some novel (perhaps you’re finishing last year’s, or revising your current one.) Or if you’re not in the novel game, maybe just write 50,000 words. Or write a graphic novel with some constraint. In reality, it’s an event designed to get people writing and to build the habit of writing every day. The word goal is just to encourage you to silence your inner editor for a while, and let your brain throw crap on paper.

Diving into Discomfort - Part 2

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You can read last week’s post to get a feel for what this very short series is about. Broadly speaking, in my quest to read more modern literature, I’m finding myself grappling with modern issues in a way that is rather different than when I’m having broad conversations with others, or reading news stories. Books are affecting to me, and always have been. I’m typically more emotionally moved by a book that just about any other stimulus. So, I take the stories they tell seriously and look for what the author wants to say with it.

Diving into Discomfort - Part 1

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned last week, I’m trying to make a concerted effort to read modern fiction books. What tends to come along with this are modern takes on old issues in society, and modern takes on modern problems. This is perhaps the strongest argument for reading difficult modern literature: it makes us confront issues in a new way, and become warier of issues facing our current society.

Reading Modern Literature

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve read very little modern fiction. I went through some of the main young-adult fiction of my generation (Harry Potter, Eragon and the likes) but have rarely read any modern literature published this century. There are a few exceptions, such as the work of Neal Stephenson. Yet throughout school, most books we read were much older. This caused me to become more interested in older literature, and believe that the ability to read it was some sign of maturity.

A Humorous Event

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was informed by a friend that someone I went to high school with made national news after getting kicked out of a Trump rally in Minneapolis. It made me consider the hundreds of people I no longer know much about since I left high school, and how many different paths they’ve gone on. The news of this particular classmate of mine was hilarious, and largely in character based on what I knew of them. However, seeing them in the context of the real world and not just talking to them adds a different, more intriguing element to it.

Playoff Time

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It’s finally the playoffs for the MLB. It’s an exciting time, particularly since the Twins are finally back in the running, albeit it once again against the Yankees, whom we’ve lost 15 straight playoff games to.

It’s a bit disappointing, and this weekend was rough, but we have another game tonight to try and keep the dream alive. I’m hoping for the best. This is my favorite time of year, and I’d like to be able to enjoy it first-person, rather than by jumping on another bandwagon.

Adjusting to Tides

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This is probably more literal than you may expect. I went to the beach this weekend, and for the first time just happened to arrive during high tide on a windy day. It was incredibly interesting seeing the beach I’m familiar with have an entirely different landscape, as waves swept in well over 50 ft further than I was used to.

This is something that I’m not used to think about. Between my infrequent trips to the beach, my background of just going to lakes, and not doing much in terms of shoreline water sports when I am at the beach, the tides never seemed to affect me. But now I’m curious as to how it changes the view and experience of other beaches. It’s something I’m interested in exploring.

A Quick Note

Mon, 23 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t have much time to write anything substantial this week; I had visitors all weekend, and have other visitors coming soon to prepare for. So, this is a sorry excuse for a post just for the sake of keeping my weekly streak alive.

To that end, on the side menu of the site I’ve finally added a feedback email address. I’ve had the email available for use for quite a while now, but only just figured out how to easily set-up my email clients to allow it to actually be usable by me. So, if you happen to read this blog and have ever wanted to voice strong opinions to me, emailing feedback@markrichard.org is the way to go. I believe there’s also a comment system (that has been used about once in total), but that seems much less likely to be utilized.

The Zoo!

Mon, 16 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I decided to get a membership to the San Diego Zoo. I’d only been once before, back when I was an intern, and had an amazing time. After talking with a few people, I discovered the a membership for the entire year is about the cost of two tickets. So, I decided to give it a whirl. I’ve already gone twice, so everything from now is a bonus.

Text Adventure: Homestead

Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In the most recent episode of OHAC, we played my newest text adventure Homestead, which broadly is about outdoor survival. We had a good time playing it, and it took twice as long as my previous adventure, Sail Away. I also learned a lot from doing it the first time to create a more reasonable set-up, and organize my document in a more logical way (at least to myself).

I’ll upload the blank PDF here (and can provide the LaTeX source file upon request); the completed version after finishing the game is also attached to the show notes of the OHAC episode.

Sniped by Math History

Mon, 02 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As with most nerds, I have a predisposition to being nerd sniped. Sometimes it’s a puzzle, but more often it’s simply an idea or the opportunity for a new project. After a conversation with a few coworkers, I’ve latched onto the idea of developing a summer course focused on the history of mathematics.

A Small Open Math Project

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The other week, a student posted on /r/math that they made a summary of multivariable calculus. As they point out, it’s an 80-page summary, but at least it’s shorter than the textbook it followed.

The student admitted they’d used Google Docs, as opposed to LaTeX, to make these notes, and the images they used were just taken from the internet. As a result, a Github project was opened up for people to turn it into LaTeX, and I’ve taken it upon myself to slowly recreate the figures using Asymptote.

Fantastical Castaway

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I recently watched the 2016 film Swiss Army Man for the first time. My base line description of it is a fantastical, psycho-dramatic take on Castaway. I loved it.

Mental Transition Costs

Mon, 12 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m pretty aware of the idea of transition costs, and I’ve experienced them first-hand quite a lot throughout college. Moving into a new apartment comes with many potential transition costs. So does getting a new computer, or changing operating systems. These are all costs that I have some practice handling, and they don’t tend to bother me. In fact, the prospect of handling them can be exciting. But recently, I’ve been dealing with mental transition costs.

Dynamical Systems

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I started working on a programming project. I recently added a little more to it, and worked out a handful of kinks. It’s been fun, but I think I’m winding down on it. I’m sure in some spurts of passion I’ll work on it some more, but I’ve moved on to another Python-related project, that also gets to the core of my interests: mathematics.

Public Document Archives

Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

One of the coolest resources available to everyone in the US is public archive and research services. While I was always tangentially aware of their existence (the Library of Congress being one of the main entities associated in my mind) it was never something that was clearly within reach, nor of any use. Most of research I did in high school found third-party research that were quick online searches away. In college I took a British History class, and then I was informed of the services that the university paid for which I could access. This allowed me to find old editions of British newspapers, which were very cool to go through.

Narrative-Driven Puzzle Games

Mon, 22 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve never used a Plug ’n Play game before, you’re missing out. They were the one piece of simple video game fun I had growing up. Beyond that, it was various Flash-based games in a browser (and since that’s my only association with Flash, I’m quite bummed it’s being killed.) And although some of my friends had consoles, and I would play occasionally, it was never something that really grabbed my attention.

Algorithmic Thinking and Metacognition

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m teaching a math camp for students entering 6th grade. It’s my first time being the teacher of record for a course, and luckily it only took a few minutes for my anxiety to subside. It’s a small group – only 9 kids – so it reminds me of my days being a camp counselor, except now it’s talking about math with very advanced kids for 3 hours a day. It’s been a blast.

Triangle Inequality for Altitudes

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve written a short post on the triangle inequality for altitudes. As usual, I put it over on the math blog I have with my company, just because the support for literally everything is much nicer.

But, in the off chance you want it, I have a PDF. I’ve played around with a wonderful program called Typora, which I’ve been using for a few months to write any blog posts when I’m not in my iPad. It has great Mathjax support (miles better than Wordpress), and so it’s easy to switch between the blog I use and this program, and I can export cleanly to PDF, as well as EPub and other formats that are really difficult to work with if I were using straight up LaTeX.

My Drink of Choice

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I never actually thought this would happen to me. Despite years not regularly going to coffee shops, and never drinking coffee, I finally came to terms with the fact that I have a drink of choice at Starbucks. It comes with the realization that I go to Starbucks enough to justify having a go-to order.

Movie Review: Toy Story 4

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

There are more direct spoilers in this review than some of my past ones. The short version is that I recommend watching this movie. I never explicitly say it anywhere else, so go watch it. It’s worth your time if you’ve seen the previous movies.

Rearranging

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to rearrange my room this past weekend. part of it was for convenience, and part of it was just to switch things up. It also gave me the opportunity to go through my things and reorganize.

Are You Ready?

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Assessments are a tricky business. Writing an exam that successfully tests a person’s knowledge or abilities, without inadvertently giving preference or advantage to certain demographics, is very difficult. The examinations I’ve written so far for my job fall into the category of testing whether a student has mastered a certain curriculum. After a couple of months of class, we give them an exam to check if they learned all that they were supposed to. Everybody is used to such tests, and everybody has experienced them.

The Movie Experience

Mon, 03 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the experience of attending a movie in a theater, and how it compares to staying in to watch a film. I often feel conflicted, with my current opinion being adjusted based on the most recent experience I’ve had in a theater.

I Promise I Like It

Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

For the last two months I’ve been reading Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I’ve legitimately enjoyed the book whenever I’ve sat down to read it, but there is something about it that doesn’t quite grab my attention. I’ve struggled to sit down for very long stretches and just finish it out, and I can’t put my finger on why.

Brief Thoughts on Commencement

Tue, 21 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Due to travel and being home in Minnesota all last week, this post is coming late today.

This past weekend, my girlfriend graduated from college. It was an exciting time, and she officially finished up this chapter of her life and began to look forward to the PhD program she begins in the fall. Going to commencement was exciting, having this official moment to mark the occasion. This is what I appreciate about commencement, is its role as the milestone.

How I Podcast - Hardware

Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I am not very much of an audiophile, nor do I do podcasting to make any money. As such, all of the hardware I use is hobbyist at best, and completely amateur otherwise. But, I’ll give a quick rundown of what I have.

How I Podcast: Editing

Mon, 06 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As promised, I’ve recorded myself editing a podcast (published at 2X speed), which you can find in the middle of this post. Beyond that, this post will just be an overview of my editing workflow.

How I Podcast: Software

Mon, 29 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After nobody asked me to, I’ve decided to write a few posts about how I podcast. There might be an additional post where I talk about some other software I use on my computer in general, but we’ll start with podcasting because it really is the heaviest use of my computer.

In this post, I’ll focus on the software I use to record. In the next post, I’ll share some of the hardware I use. And finally, I’ll explain how I edit podcasts with the aim of having a screen recording of myself editing either OHAC or Comical Start.

Some New Code

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

After playing around with Project Euler for a while, I determined I wanted to challenge my coding skills even more, but stay firmly planted in the mathematical realm in which I’m familiar. So, I’ve begun writing some code that can be used for certain mathematical objects. In particular, I’ve written a fraction class, a 2D vector class, and a complex number class. You can find the code on GitHub.

Birthday Index

Mon, 15 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

It was my older sister’s birthday yesterday, and it had me thinking about how we talk about birthdays. There’s a peculiar inconsistency in the language we use which I vaguely noticed for the first time a couple of years ago, but never really pursued the thought.

We index our birthdays from 0.

Looking Stupid

Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been sitting around, trying to determine what I wanted to write for this week. I’ve had a few underwhelming posts over the past month, due to some time constraints and missed deadlines, so I’m really aiming for ideas with a bit more substance.

I try to make note of some ideas I have, whether that is quotes from books I read, ideas from podcasts, little pictures, or just something that pops into my head that I want to save for later. I was going through those notes and determined this is the right time to get to something I heard a high school girl say at a Starbucks a few months ago.

Baseball is Back

Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Although I missed another Monday deadline (spring break has really gotten me in disarray), it was for good reason. My parents were visiting in San Diego, and it was fun getting to do some of the more “tourist” type places with people who had fresh eyes for the area.

But more importantly, my dad and I went to Petco Park to watch the Padres. Baseball season is finally back, and it makes me incredibly happy.

Project Euler

Mon, 25 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my year of focus, I’ve been trying to spend more consistent chunks of time working on programming. In particular, right now I’m focusing on doubling down on my Python knowledge, and exploring some other aspects of computer science that interest me. After checking out a few books and tutorials, I’ve made my way back to a website that I found a number of years ago, which is the most intriguing to me: Project Euler.

Spring Break

Fri, 22 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I missed my first self-imposed Monday deadline in a while. I’ve actually been on Spring Break, in a sense. My girlfriend is in town visiting, and we’ve been staying pretty busy. Tomorrow we’re on our way to Universal Studios Hollywood. We both went to the Orlando location back in high school, so we’re somewhat familiar with what it has to offer. But it will be an excellent time. I just wanted to write this brief post as a marker of my failed deadline, but to keep the number of posts per week consistent enough.

Review: Free Solo

Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to go watch Free Solo this afternoon. I had seen a snippet of Alex Honnold’s 60 Minutes special while in high school, and remember being impressed. Then I discovered this documentary about him won an Oscar. Even better, it was being shown in some local theaters.

The short version is this: No film has made me feel less competent and driven, yet I don’t envy necessarily envy Alex’s single-mindedness.

A Few Math Games and Puzzles

Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Up front, here is a link to my math blog that has the meat of this post. Also, there will be a PDF version attached.

I’ve finally gotten around to writing another math post. There’s a mix of reasons why I’ve been writing about a lot of other things. First, there have just been other topics in the front of my mind that I felt like writing about in the moment. Second, there were not any particular pieces of math I felt inspired to write about. And third, preparation of a math post is significantly more work for me, as I care a lot about being accurate, precise, and clear in my presentation.

A New Friend

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The other day, I finally finished making my room fairly clean and I tidy. I put together a bookshelf to house some odds and ends, removed the final cardboard boxes still hanging around since I moved in, and sorted my papers. I felt good. But something was still missing.

This week’s Comical Start episode featured me discussing my desire for a Roomba “just to have something that seems like it’s alive in my apartment.” However, a Roomba is not in my future. After a healthy discussion of why an actual pet is not a possibility right now, Grant and I decided I would get a plant. As a result, I went out Saturday morning and got myself a little succulent.

My new pal, Calvin (naturally named after the spiky-haired first-grader Calvin)

Large Parties

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

A few weeks ago I read The Great Gatsby for the first time. It was a pretty good book. I don’t have much experience reading Fitzgerald, and the style of his era – as well as the upper class focus – is a bit different from what I normally read. I enjoyed the story, but the only thing that really stuck with me was the quote above. It is not central to the book, but I find it particularly profound and relevant today.

Year of Focus

Mon, 11 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

During a recent recording of OHAC, we talked about yearly themes. In short, yearly themes are meant to be broader versions of resolutions. They are not necessarily defined by explicit goals, but rather a frame of mind, or a general approach to the upcoming year. We talk about it in that episode, and there are links to episodes of the podcast Cortex with more information about the idea of yearly themes.

My theme is the *Year of Focus*. Now that I have more freetime on my hands, I want to use it to help improve my attention span and make significant progress on projects I put off while in college. The first step in this, before it was even official, was the reading binge I’ve written about a few times now.

Entering the Dead Period

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The Super Bowl ended not too long ago. It was an incredibly boring game (especially when compared to last year’s shootout extravaganza.). In a way, that is fitting. I spend a good chunk of time about 7 months out of the year watching baseball. Once baseball is over in early November, I transition to college and professional football. It is less frequent than baseball, but fills the sports-shaped void in my heart well enough.

Whale Watching

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This weekend I went whale watching for the first time. It was a fantastic experience. I went with Offshore Blue Adventures, which I’d probably consider the premier experience for anybody who wants to see whales and dolphins up close. They use an inflatable boat, similar to what the Coast Guard or Navy SEALs would use. The benefits of small boats on the ocean is that they ride large swells very easily; the benefits of small boats when whale and dolphin watching is that you can get closer without scaring off the animals.

Movie Review: "Glass"

Mon, 21 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A couple years ago, I watched Split. It was a very engaging movie. I walked away quite thrilled by the psychology of the entire situation. One of the people I saw the movie with mentioned it was a spiritual successor to a movie made about fifteen years prior, Unbreakable. It wasn’t clear there was any connection, other than the main character of Unbreakable having a short cameo at the very end of Split. Beyond this brief mention, the movies largely left my mind and I don’t recall talking with anyone else who saw Split.

Some Recent Reading

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Last year, I finally began compiling a list of books I have read over the years. While I am sure it is incomplete; the approximate dates I’ve given are inaccurate as I go further back; I have not included many of the young adult (or younger) books I read; and I didn’t individually list books that are in a series, it has still been informative for me to have this list and remember how much I’ve liked getting through a book over the years.

Around this past Thanksgiving, I started on a reading rampage like I haven’t seen in myself for years. I finished three books throughout the month of December, and have finished two thus far in January. I should easily have a third finished before February rolls around.

That's a Bad Pirson

Mon, 07 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I was on one of my favorite subreddits today, /r/learnmath (of course I sort by New), and a question came up that ultimately came down to understanding order of operations. These always frustrate me because they stem from a poor understanding of how the order of operations work; furthermore, any problem involving order of operations can be fixed and cleared up with an additional set of parentheses.

Consider this math problem below – the type I see making its way around Facebook.

Sit Down and Read

Mon, 31 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

College was a reading blight for me. I had other things to do, classes pulling my attention, and a pretty damaged ability to focus due to the introduction of a smartphone in my life. I was on-and-off reading books for fun, and felt pretty bad for accumulating books that I just was not getting to.

When I was an intern the past summer, I was hoping to change that. Yet I only made it through one book. Now that I’m in my real adult life, and settled in a bit, I’ve finally boarded the reading train yet again, and it is fantastic. It kicked off with reading Neuromancer by William Gibson over the course of a couple weeks. It was touch-and-go for a while there, but I made it through and very much enjoyed it. The past few fiction books I’ve read were sci-fi or technology thrillers of some variety. But I wanted to get back to where I was in high school and early college: able and willing to read just about any book I came across, even if it wasn’t very good. So, I recalled a recommendation an acquaintance gave to me, Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. It is classified as a science fiction novel, but really is just a post-apocalyptic novel taking place in modern day, after a particularly deadly strand of swine flu wiped out most of the world. I read the book in only two days.

Holes in a Paper Towel Roll

Mon, 24 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At work the other day, we had a bit of a break to celebrated the month’s birthdays. During this time – my coworkers sitting around a large table, munching on pie and ice cream – a conversation broke out. How many holes are there in a paper towel roll: 1 or 2?

Of course, there is the joke that if you claim 1, then there is only one hole of consequence in the human body: that which leads from your mouth to the escape of your digestive system. At that point you’re just talking out of your ass.

Coffee Shop Blogger

Mon, 17 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been curious how cultural trends adjust our feelings toward various habits people have. The biggest change to me has been that of the hipster blogger, sitting in a coffee shop with their MacBook, doing some personal photo-journalism for the benefit of mankind. I think the common notion of what, and who, a writer is has changed dramatically. No longer is it necessarily someone cramped up in an attic, papers everywhere, a drink at hand; it can be anyone with just about any device. I’m sure there are people out there who write posts from their phone – I know I’ve at least edited a few posts from mine.

No Keyboard for Old Men

Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

As I come to the realization that a significant part of both my work and personal hobbies involve sitting at a computer, I have become increasingly wary of the stories I hear about things such as repetitive stress injuries (RSI), and what will likely be the impending damage to my eyes. In an effort to avoid, or at least delay, the former issue I have tentatively purchased an ergonomic keyboard. Specifically, the Surface Ergonomic Keyboard from Microsoft. I say tentatively because it’s not cheap. I may return it, but so far I’ve put a few thousand keystrokes on it and it’s feeling pretty good. This review is meant to get as in-depth as a keyboard review can be when written by someone who has never written a keyboard review. I’ll briefly explain my rough, but sufficient, testing procedure and what I found out. Then I’ll get into some details and comparisons I noted to other keyboards I’ve used.

New Wordpress Editor

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Wordpress (both the .org and .com versions) is rolling out a new native editor. It is a “block” system, and I am entirely unsure how I feel about it. I figured I would give them the benefit of the doubt and try to write a somewhat complete post using the Wordpress.org back-end, with this new block system, and see how it goes.

Traveling Takes Practice

Tue, 27 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

At this point in my life, I’ve driven from Minnesota to California twice, and done the reverse trip once. I’ve also road-tripped from Minnesota to Virginia, Kansas City (twice), and Nashville. I feel pretty confident that if I needed to, I could hop in a car and get where I needed without much effort or worry. It’s a mode of transportation I am extremely comfortable with on any scale, and am well-versed in some of its intricacies.

Why Linux? Part 1: Free As In...

Mon, 19 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

During sophomore year of college, I embarked on a project to put a Linux operating system on my laptop. I had been interested ever since using a computer in one of the engineering labs which ran Ubuntu, one of the most mainstream, user-friendly distributions out there. I was intrigued both by the visual design, and the ease with which complex programs could be run. There was also the intrigue of feeling like a cool hacker, using a terminal and typing commands to get around a file system. I was hooked, and since then I’ve had a Linux distribution running on every computer I’ve owned over the past three years. I want to spend a good chunk of time explaining my growing passion for Linux, and why I think more people should seriously consider it as an option for the computers in their lives. This first post will focus on two of the oft-repeated phrases in the Linux community, and its main inspiration: Linux is free.

New Blog

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday I switched over from using Wordpress.com to hosting my blog on Bluehost and using the official Wordpress blogging environment. The main difference here is when you are using Wordpress.com, there is some gray area about who really has control over the content. You are ultimately at the whims of their hosting structure, and also you must pay through the nose to access the various features of the actual Wordpress blogging platform it claims to deal with.

Spongebob is Back

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently discovered that Spongebob Squarepants is available on Amazon Prime Video. Since I am still a subscriber to said service, I enjoyed a fun weekend night watching the first couple of seasons. I’ve always had such positive nostalgia for the show, in large part due to how quotable it is. Little did I realize that nearly every line in the show is quotable, and how good each episode was in the early seasons. Even today, they have a certain innocent charm to them, yet the jokes still have enough depth to be legitimately funny now.

Beating the Schedule

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I’ve gotten into my full-time job, and I’m familiar with the area, a certain novelty that comes with a new situation has worn off. I am not finding brand new things all the time anymore. I know where I’m getting my groceries from, I know what I’m having for lunch each day, and generally know what I’m having for dinner. To a certain extent, I have fallen into a fairly predictable schedule on a weekly basis. Thursdays I have concert band rehearsal. Sunday or Monday I record Comical Start with Grant, and edit it that night. At some point each week, I sit down and try to write a sufficient post for this blog. Every so often a surprise phone call, or an episode of OHAC comes up, which I get to work in with everything else. But overall, I’ve developed a schedule.

Book Review: “Tribe” by Sebastian Junger

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In preparation for an upcoming (not soon) episode of Operation: Have a Conversation, I read the book Tribe by Sebastian Junger. Its description tends to focus on how it explores the way American soldiers who come back from war have trouble integrating themselves back into modern society, as being in the military provides a significant unifying bond that is not felt in today’s Western culture. While I’m not sure what exactly we’ll get into when recording our episode about this book, I’d like to give a couple of thoughts that have lingered with me since I finished reading it earlier today. First, this book is important. I think it would be good for everyone to read. It frames much of how we look at modern society very differently than I had ever perceived. It discusses how panic attacks and depression are evolutionary traits, and how society has developed in such a way to make these afflictions more prevalent. It thoroughly discusses our misunderstanding and mistreatment of PTSD, particularly among those who participated in violent conflicts. This book can be very challenging in certain ways. It opens one’s eyes to a certain hypocrisy with which we live our lives, and also points out reasons to be somewhat afraid for the future of America. It gives some specific ideas about where we tend to fail as a culture and society, and gives some implications for how we can all work toward getting better. It is hard for me to do this book any sort of justice. My thoughts are still unformed and not particularly cohesive. But after reading it, I’m very excited to discuss it with Mikhail and Jack, and hope you’ll take a chance to read it as well. The book is less than 100 pages, and the audiobook (if that’s your style) is only around 3 hours. Yet there is a lot that happens. I highly recommend it.

Notes On Future Mathematics Posts

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Updated November 23, 2022

I’m going back through my posts and recategorizing them, and noticed this one. My plan for having a secondary spot for math posts didn’t take off after I moved my blog to WordPress properly, and discovered the excellent $\KaTeX$ plugin for rendering math.

Original Post

I recently remembered my company, AoPS supports blog creation for their users. In particular, it has the full functionality I’m used to on their message board. In particular, they have native $\LaTeX$ support, in addition to support for the Asymptote vector graphics language. This makes writing math significantly easier on my end, and significantly easier to interact with on the reader’s end.

Lapse

Tue, 23 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

It is still technically Monday, so I’m counting this, but in a sense I have lapsed. It is Monday evening, and so far I’ve been good at having each post written a few days before Monday, and then scheduling it to post at the same time each week. However, I went home to Minnesota this weekend, and thinking of a post to write was not on my mind. So, after the fact, I’ll write a bit about going home.

What Do Tests Test?

Tue, 16 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past couple of weeks at work, I’ve been working on revising some of the exams for our elementary school curriculum. This has been an interesting task full of challenges. One thing I’m constantly working on is putting myself in the headspace of a bright, but still young, elementary school student. What wording can I allow in problems? How long can a problem be before we’re testing their reading comprehension instead of their math? How many problems should there be? How many problems of a certain level of difficulty? There are so many questions to discuss, but one is a bit more fundamental than all others, and can help inform the answers to each subsequent question. What do we want our test to test?

A Little More Music

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Now that I’m working full-time, I’m getting used to spending significantly more time focusing consistently than when I was in school. Back in college, I could break up my work as I saw fit, take rests and roam around, or just slack off a bit any given day. That does not go over particularly well in an actual working environment.

Mathbook: Functions as Sets

Tue, 02 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000

In this little tutorial, we’ll expand on what we’ve learned about sets and functions. Specifically, we’ll double-down on the claim that sets are vital to everything we do in mathematics. Functions are not just a way to describe interactions between sets: functions are sets!

Movie Review: BlackKklansman

Mon, 24 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I saw this movie a little over a week ago, and have been trying to work through how to write a review of it. It is the type of movie that is funny, but speaks to something much broader; as such, I want to make sure the comedic elements do not overshadow the intention of the movie, but also want to commend the way the movie inserts comedy in such a way that goes against modern comedic sensibilities.

New Story and Trevor Project Donations

Wed, 19 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently put a short story I wrote on Amazon. It’s called When You Come Back. You can find a link to it here. When I originally wrote it, mental illness was not necessarily on my mind. But, the majority of its readers have told me it resonates with them to a fairly strong degree. So, I’ve put it up for $1 and any proceeds I receive will go towards The Trevor Project, in support of mental illness assistance. If you’re not interested in the short story, or in providing Amazon with some of the overhead that comes with buying a Kindle book, you can donate to them directly. If you want the story in PDF form, you can contact me.

Mathbook: Introduction to Functions

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

(Edit, 10/29) This post has been ported to a math-focused blog here. The goal of the change is improved typesetting for me, and improved readability and interaction for you. See this post for more information.

This is the next post in the series of posts inspired by my brief work for Mathbook. Previously, we talked about sets. Once we have this basic object, we can start to create, define and communicate relationships and patterns between sets. Mathematics uses the language of a function to describe these relationships.

Mathbook: Introduction to Sets

Mon, 10 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

(Edit 6/7/2020) No more Mathbook. I finally discovered the KaTeX plugin for Wordpress, allowing beautiful typesetting once again.

Quite a while ago, an endeavoring individual tried to start an open-source repository of mathematical information called Mathbook. I contributed an article, which I’ll put down in two parts on this blog. It seems that the project has died, although the website is still available. While this is a bit of a shame, I would like to give some of my own little lessons here. The creator’s idea behind Mathbook was to focus on giving people an understanding of why we do math in a certain way. This is missing from mathematical curriculum today, but it is vital to understand that when math was developed, decisions were made for specific reasons. Moving forward, I’ll occasionally add a new post here to that effect. The people in my life don’t always understand the math I learned, so this is part of my effort in showing it.

New Chapter

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I started my first post-graduation job at Art of Problem Solving this past week. I was an intern here last summer, and I was lucky enough for that to lead to a job. My official role is “Curriculum Developer”. I work on developing their elementary school math curriculum, as that is their current focus. It’s an incredibly good job, with fantastically intelligent and caring people. While it is a great company whose mission I am deeply invested in, and San Diego is a beautiful place to be, these first few days have been very tough. It was weird driving across the country, having a good time, then suddenly getting to work. I’m living on my own, in a room I’m renting (technically an AirBnB) from a nice lady. I know the area from last summer, but I’m still getting over a mental hurdle of actually going out and doing things. Although at the time I write this I’ll have only been here a few days, I’m already feeling antsy. It’s strange. Perhaps the biggest reason for my feelings is that I spent my entire life in Minnesota. I am very rooted there, and despite many friends leaving who have also graduated, there are many people I’ve left behind. I’m leaving the comfortable world of academia to work at a place where I have no true connections. It’s a rather isolating feeling that I am working through. Yet, this is something I correctly anticipated. I have been solidifying Operation: Have a Conversation and Comical Start as ways to keep in contact with people. I’ve reached out to people (or luckily have had them reach out to me) to stay in contact via phone calls or letters. And I also committed to myself that I would write weekly on this blog, and not worry about people reading it. It’s just a good thing to have on my schedule, both for the purpose of self-reflection, and to stop myself from falling idle after I do a day of work. I already reached out to the San Diego Concert Band, a local community band that has fairly open policies for joining. I’ll be rehearsing with them regularly starting next week, which I am incredibly thrilled for. Although my percussion chops are not what they once were, they will improve and I will be better off for having the experience. I also plan on finding a group (or maybe just a person or two) to try and play tennis with. It’s an easy sport to play as long as you have another person, and I definitely enjoy playing it. Ideally I’d find a softball league as well, and I also have a long book list to get through. Despite a touch of melancholy and some misgivings on traveling so far, I am excited for what is to come. Knowing that my time here is rather indefinite, I can feel more comfortable finding my place and joining new things. I have more opportunity to be involved and help myself as I go along. It’s an interesting time.

Movie Review: "Christopher Robin"

Mon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The other day my girlfriend and I went to see the film Christopher Robin, all about the titular character outgrowing his friends in the 100 acre wood, and slowly finding his way back to childhood. After leaving the movie close to tears (my girlfriend did cry multiple times), here was my one line review:

The entire movie was super predictable, but it was so well-done and moving that I didn’t even care.

Gabriel's Horn

Mon, 20 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

(Edited 6/7/2020 for improved typesetting)

Here is one of my favorite “paradoxes” in mathematics. Many students learn it in a first year calculus course. It is called Gabriel’s Horn.

Abducted: A 24-Hour Musical

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This past weekend I had the fantastic experience of playing drumset in a musical put together in only 24 hours. My friend Tim, along with his friend Adam, wrote the entirety of the show. We showed up at Friday on 7pm, with nobody having seen the script or music except the writers. We then performed the musical – lines memorized, music rehearsed, choreography and blocking complete – at 7pm (and 9pm) Saturday evening. I had an extremely good time. The music was engaging and written with some interpretation allowable, as all the members of the pit were experienced in this musical scenario. We had a lot of fun putting things together quickly, and were quite successful in performing our parts within a few hours. The show was broadly a satirical take on the characters from Scooby-Doo. In addition to the normal gang (whose names are never explicitly stated at any point in the show), there is the scapegoat Brian, who is Daphne’s current boyfriend. He is verbally abused throughout the show, with some light slapping. In addition, Scooby-Doo is just a man in a Scooby-Doo outfit (naturally), although an old Hermit we meet at the beginning addresses this fact:

Dull Edge

Mon, 06 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

The cutting edge of technology is particularly awesome these days. Cars are doing more on their own, phones are surpassing some current computers in their performance, and VR is coming into its own finally. I listen to a lot of tech podcasts, and love messing around with technology, but due to my status as a recent college graduate, I am definitely not maintaining a collection of cutting-edge devices. And that’s okay. First, let’s talk about cars. I recently purchased a post-lease 2015 Honda Civic, LX trim (in other words, the only model more basic comes with a manual instead of a CVT.) The disparity between that car and other higher-end cars from the same year is rather shocking. Sitting in it, I feel super cool. It’s a big upgrade from the 1998 EX-L Honda Accord I had been driving. There’s a “cockpit” feeling to it, good Bluetooth connectivity, and a back-up camera. It’s relatively zippy for a cheap car, and the gas mileage gained by the CVT cannot be beat. Then, I read a Golf R Review by Casey Liss. He is one of three car enthusiasts on the Accidental Tech Podcast. Not surprisingly, the only one I can identify with is John Siracusa, who to my knowledge has mostly driven manual Civics and Accords for his entire life. Casey though, he complained about the lack of assisted driving and automatic parking. The car needs to be fast, it needs a sunroof, and of course Carplay! This was absolutely baffling to me. I just cannot get my head wrapped around why some of these things are important. These three men have attempted to address it on their podcast, but it still does not click with me. Cars can be purchased only so often to be at all reasonable, and so one cannot even stay on the cutting edge. The other issue is that he recently began working from home exclusively, yet sounded very hesitant to become a one-car family. Oh well, to each their own. Now, obviously cars are a very special case of not staying on the cutting edge. I’ve only owned my own car for a few months, and it’ll be a number of years before I can even begin to think about getting another. But phones: now that’s another matter. I’ve had my Galaxy S7 for two years now. Previously, I had a Galaxy S4 for two years, and then some random LG (I think) phone for 4 years throughout high school. In my mind, until I can afford the “every year” phone upgrade, two years is a reasonable time in these days of mostly non-replaceable phone batteries. So, with my S7 really slowing down and the battery life starting to tank, it was time to figure out what to do. Was the newest Galaxy S9 worth the incredible price tag? Did I want to save some money and get a Pixel XL or a new LG phone, each containing last year’s processors, despite them being the newest in the lineup? I ended up choosing a Galaxy S8+. Due to the release of the S9, I got a very good deal on it, and the processing difference (and battery life) between the S7 and S8+ is much larger than the S8+ to a comparable newest generation phone. Once again, I opted to stay on the duller edge of technology. And I am happy with that decision. I tried the S9 in stores, and it truly did not impress me anymore than the S8 does. The S8 was the revolutionary phone (just like the iPhone X, and whatever comes out next will not be quite as lauded). This is what is interesting about technology. So many people are excited to get the newest and best thing. The hype is always there, but the price-to-performance normally isn’t. I spent all of last year in school working on a 4-year old Ideapad and a 5-year old refurbished Thinkpad. They performed admirably for me, because like most people, I’m not doing much heavy-lifting. Being on the dull edge, and looking out at what is available and what others have, can be fun. I don’t think there is anything wrong with living life on some sort of delay with technology. Perhaps as I grow older and make a bit more money, that will change. But for now, I am happy with scouring the internet for good deals, and getting what I actually need for the best price.

Side Projects (Part 1?)

Mon, 30 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I think it is important to have a variety of projects capturing one’s attention. The breadth and depth of these will vary by individual, but they should be there nonetheless. Someone who is incredibly invested in one particular field or interest will be more aware of the branching-off points, and can thus develop projects related to the disparate branches of that field. Others may be interested in many topics, and have projects related to each. I fall into the latter category, as do a good chunk of my friends. I have become widely interested in many topics throughout college, and this was one of the main reasons I did not immediately pursue higher education. While I love mathematics, I cannot see myself devoting a majority of my life to only studying it for the next five years, and wanted the opportunity to do many things I did not do in college, or double-down on some of the projects I started then. In addition to this blog that I am trying to keep up with better, there are the podcasts Operation: Have a Conversation and Comical Start. There was the joke-blog I announced a couple of weeks ago. I’m trying to read more, and still keep up with doing some math so that I can be more effective at my new job I am starting soon. I have been playing tennis more, and joined a softball league while I’m still in Minnesota. These projects keep me busy, and keep me happy. I like to have a variety of things to work on, because I’ve always loved each subject I’ve been introduced to. My passion for them may diminish at times – I’ll always be more invested in math than in biology – but being able to have conversations or read a few articles about new ideas is exciting. Writing this blog is exciting, and talking with my friends and editing podcasts is invigorating. Playing newer and older sports to me is always a good time, because I like to stretch the muscles I’ve worked all my life, but also pick up new skills. The internal growth I want to achieve is being reflected in the growth in new activities I’m participating in. There will be more to come about that last sentence.

Card Game Simulation

Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I had another busy week, so I’m taking advantage of old stuff I can recycle. A month or two ago, I was playing a Solitaire variation my parents taught me when I was younger, and I realized that it was a completely deterministic game once the deck was shuffled. That is, unlike traditional solitaire, there was no element of choice by the player. As such, it made it very easy to write a simulation of it and analyze the details. The very brief report I wrote up is here, and the simulation code (which is also linked in the report) is here. The short version, is that it is a break-even game on average, which is pretty interesting. Furthermore, the overall result is normally distributed around breaking even. I’m trying to include a more well-rounded amount of content here, since math is still very close to my heart and I’d like to only maintain one sight for everything. It will continue to be a mix of things, so that we’re all on the same page.

Shameless Plug

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

An extension cord walks in on its son, a vacuum (three-pronged cord of course), plugging itself into an electrical outlet. Aghast at what it sees, the extension cord can only cry out: “You shameless plug, you’re grounded!” I’m going on vacation this upcoming week. This original joke is the best I could do. The actual shameless plug is my friend Brandon’s review blog, as well as my competing review of his blog, where I verbally abuse and critique his writing even if I have not experienced whatever he is reviewing. It’s all in good fun.

Purchasing Pizza

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Suppose you are at a pizza restaurant with your friends. You all agree you want to buy pizza to maximize your pizza-per-dollar. There’s an easy way to make comparisons between pizza sizes and figure out what the best deal is.

Inspirational Deadlines

Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

To begin, a fantastic Calvin and Hobbes comic that has stuck with me through the years.

Movie Review: "Incredibles 2"

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Well, spoiler alerts are due. Last night I went and saw Incredibles 2 with my girlfriend. They began with a little disclaimer from the director and the voices of key characters. Acknowledging the 14 years that had passed since The Incredibles was first released, they assured us it was worth the wait.

Changing Teams

Tue, 26 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’m moving out to San Diego, and with that move comes a very important question: How wholeheartedly do I join the Padres’ fan-base, and how much do I keep following the Twins? For any of you who don’t follow baseball, the key thing to know is that as far as future prospects go, this decision feels like a total wash. The Twins do have a bit of a larger group around them, I believe, but the Padres seem to be making a few moves to help things improve. They care about their fans, and are at ease with their current losing situation. Last year when I was in San Diego, they had deal going where you could pay a flat rate (it wasn’t too much) and guarantee at least 10 tickets, and you would get a ticket for every game after that until they won. That is a team aware of their losing, and willing to help bring in fans. I also think they might have a better stadium. Don’t get me wrong, I love Target Field. I was there on its opening day, and have been to countless games there over the past nine years. But Petco Park (while being as horrifically branded as ours) has a certain distinct charm to it. First, it allows pets in a green area outside of right field. It seems larger, and it is in San Diego. However, the location, and traveling there, is not quite as good. Public transportation in San Diego is rather sparse, and I couldn’t determine a better way to get to the stadium than driving and pre-paying for my parking. Over time, we’ll have to see how the teams develop. I am more entrenched in the history and culture of the Twins, and in my mind the Padres have none except for Tony Gwynn. Thinking about who to support, what games to go to, and the relative difficulty of going compared to my current experience in the Twin Cities, is a little stressful. Sports, especially baseball, has been a big part of my life since I could walk. Throughout college I had the freedom of disposable income (kind of) and transportation to attend them at my leisure, as long as I had the time. I am not sure if the San Diego sports scene is quite as accommodating. This gets to a bigger question I’ve had in my mind. To what extent does changing states affect my life, my “loyalties” so to speak, and the bridges I have. In an interconnected world, it seems that physical barriers are not quite as important, but they do put forward some stress testing on friendships and what you know about where you are. I am so familiar with Minnesota culture, the Twin Cities and its surrounding suburbs, everything that is available to me. This information has been obtained through years of living here, driving around, growing up in it. How do I reach that level of comfort in a new place, when I don’t know exactly how long I’ll stay? What changes do I make in my activities? I know there is so much to explore, but at what point does the awe of exploration turn into either familiarity, or complacency? When I was out there last summer, I quickly latched onto safe places where I could be safe bide my time: Starbucks, Panera, and a single hiking trail I walked about 10 times. It took friends and family visiting to go beyond those places, and even then the exploration was minimal. I spent many weekends feeling sick, watching movies in bed, or just going to a local theater in a mall. I was afraid to strike out by myself. I found a minimally comfortable zone, and wished to stay there. This is what I need to change. I don’t need to change teams, or give up on what I love about Minnesota. I can still have that part of me, while appreciating the new things San Diego has to offer. I will always have a pain in my heart when the Twins lose, even if I support the Padres bandwagon for a while. That doesn’t make things less scary. It will be a long period of adjustment for me, but it something I know I must do.

Review: "Dry Land", A Play

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

DRY LAND is a play about abortion, the harshness and sweetness of young womanhood, and the sticky ambience of a high school locker room.

I decided to go see a play last weekend, based solely on the fact that I knew one of the leads, and one of my friends who participated in theater was interested in going. The Facebook event told me the play was called Dry Land, with the promotional picture being two girls in swimsuits (presumably of a racing variety) lying down next to each other. Every so often, with the event upcoming, I would see some pictures from rehearsals. It seemed the set consisted solely of a fake pool locker room with benches. The racing swimsuits were confirmed. Upon buying my ticket, that was all the information I had. I showed up alone, to a small theater on campus, and received my program from what I later learned was one of the producers of the play. The first one in the theater, I sat on the far end of the second row of black chairs. There were only four rows in total, perhaps seating about 20 each. I was within 30 feet of the illuminated set: the same pool locker room floor I had seen online. Opening the program, I scanned the cast and read the biographies printed inside. There were a mix of recent graduates, and those still going to the University of Minnesota, involved in the theater department. Soon I made my way to the summary, where I was met with the description this review begins with. I realized I was at this play alone, mostly to see someone who I had met over a few weeks when I was a pit member for another musical, but who I had hardly seen since. I was feeling a bit uncomfortable, but I realized this was a rather immature feeling. So I settled in for what would likely be an engaging play. I was completely blown away at the end, fairly close to tears. I won’t give much of a plot summary, but let it suffice to say the how we view friendship was questioned, and there was a very long scene where an aborted fetus was being passed, complete with copious amounts of fake blood. Mixed in were fights, complete silence, lonely scenes where a character was on stage for minutes without speaking. Altogether it was a fantastically beautiful play, exploring the dynamics of relationships we have with each other and ourselves at a time period – between high school and college – where we are transitioning our lives and determining who will remain as we move forward. While the run of the play is over at this point (it was only on for a weekend) I highly recommend finding other performances online (if available) or locally. I was deeply affected, in a way I can’t quite replicate via writing a few days later. While the play was uncomfortable at times, an audience who can take it quietly will come out with a greater sense of empathy.

Book Review: "Quiet" by Susan Cain

Mon, 18 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently finished reading the book Quiet, by Susan Cain. In it, Susan Cain puts forth her concept of the “Extrovert Ideal” in western culture, and what introverts can do to help themselves in a world dominated by extroverts. In addition, she makes a case for why introverts are often exceptional leaders at all levels, although this may depend on the dynamic of the workplace itself. As a self-avowed introvert, I found much of what she said to be very appealing and helpful. Most useful to me was the idea of a restorative niche, an environment to which you naturally go whenever you’re feeling a bit down or out of place. I enjoy this part of the book in particular, as it is personality-agnostic. She makes a case for having self-awareness of your personal restorative niche, regardless of your introversion or extroversion. The reason being that we all need a place to go and revitalize ourselves. Introverts are often characterized by susceptibility to over-stimulation. As a result, it is often necessary to seek a quiet place of solitude, or perhaps one or two close friends. I know whenever I had to be in front of a large group (anything more than eight for me) I could do it, but then felt very drained. It was imperative that I find a spot to be to recover, or perhaps connect with a single person in that large group quickly so that I have something concrete to focus on. Conversely, the group situation above can often be the restorative niche of an extrovert. After a long day at work or studying, they crave a group of friends to go spend the evening with. Perhaps they work somewhere and find themselves severely under-stimulated (a common occurrence and your average campus job) and just need to unwind with a large group of friends. The key is to know where you stand, and seek out a schedule which maximizes the time spent in your restorative niche. Of course, this is not to say that every introvert should work alone from home all the time, or that extroverts should spend every waking hour at the stock exchange. There is a balance to be struck. But understanding your own mood patterns, as far as they relate to your social habits and preferences, is powerful when trying to form a schedule that suits your needs. Another point of interest is how introverts and extroverts interact with those of similar and opposing dispositions to them. There was a study in which groups of introverts talked with themselves one-on-one, as did extroverts; then the groups were mixed together so that introverts talked with extroverts. In the first part of the conversations, introverts tended to immediately delve into personal topics about each other’s lives, or about current events in the world. They often found a common topic of interest very quickly, and were able to stay focused on one or two ideas for most of the time. Extroverts required a bit of warming up, talking about the weather and more surface-level details about the other person’s lives. The dynamics were clearly quite different. Once introverts and extroverts joined together, they were able to adapt to each other. Introverts let the conversation become a bit shallower, and the extroverts reported feeling at ease, since they felt heard to a greater extent than when talking to other extroverts. Introverts reported being more at ease, since the other person would lead the conversation. They were both able to interact well, and had very good ratings of how the conversation went. What’s important here is that we can all help each other, and serve a role, whatever our social preferences are. Extroverts can often talk about many things very quickly, processing things out loud with other people, and having an introvert who will happily sit quietly just to listen, and respond when appropriate, can be very helpful for this. In addition, an average introvert may not always want to be engaged in incredibly serious discussion, or just wants a bit extra social interaction. Being carried along in a conversation (or some other situation) with an extroverted friend can help move someone out of their comfort zone. This book has some very important ideas for everybody to be aware of. While I did not touch on some of the larger ideas presented (how extroverts dominate the business world, and the ways this effects employees), even just the two things that resonated with me are worthy of significant discussion. Give it a read. It’s a very concise narrative style, easy to follow, with great ideas and advice for becoming more aware of how you operate within the wider world. I know it had a great effect on me.

My Senior Thesis

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Just to have this out for people to look at, here is my honors thesis from my degree. It is broadly about some of the mathematics behind a particular phenomenon in quantum mechanics.

Thesis

Thesis Formatted as a Book

Switching Things Up

Tue, 12 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently graduated from college, and while I may touch on that or write a longer post about my experience and what that means for me, all it means in the context of this post is I now have free time. While I objectively had less “scheduled” time during college, I always felt that I needed to be doing something towards my degree and my future. I only read a handful of books for fun during those four years, as I felt it imperative that I instead spend the time working on my programming skills or looking through math textbooks. I did not want to “waste time”, and this greatly affected how I spread myself out. I will be moving onto a full-time job fairly soon, and while this obviously eats up a chunk of every day, it is a consistent chunk. I know the time I have left, and all that time is spent on projects that I am invested in. I get to decide on what to do. This summer, I’ve finally gotten back into reading. I’m also hoping to record my podcast more frequently, especially now that I have taken over editing duties. I began playing baseball again (kind of) and playing music a bit more. There is a lot I can finally begin to do which I put off during my time in college. What that means for my writing here, is that I’m going to try and post consistently. My plan is to write a post every week. There is truth to the idea that making a schedule out of something takes the fun out of it, but I know I am the sort of person who needs deadlines to be productive. My goal is to post on Mondays (as I am doing now). I’ve also removed my Facebook link to this website, so I don’t have an effective way to share it. This was mainly to take pressure off of the writing process. If those who have read it in the past stumble on it again, that’s great. But this is just meant to be a place to put my normal “personal” writing, while allowing it to technically be accessible for those who care. If it obtains a following, that will happen organically. The posts are going to vary as widely as the current posts do. Sometimes it will just be a small piece of math that I find interesting. It may be an explanation of how I work, or what I do in my free time. I want to keep it open, and allow a slog of a week to have a shorter post like this (sub 500 words). For anyone who comes across this, you now have a bit of context for the posts that will (or will not) appear in the future.

Drafts and Completion

Sun, 11 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been struggling a lot over the past few months in starting a new post, or a new piece of writing for myself, and faltering a few paragraphs in, not sure what to do with myself. A large part of this, as was mentioned in a previous post, is due to my habit of editing as I write. I don’t often plan my writing ideas, put them in some flow chart or other organizational structure, or summarize the points I want to make before I write. This helps keep my writing natural, and keep its place as a release valve rather than work. This also puts me in the position of sitting down with what seems to be a well-formulated idea, only to have it peter out faster than anticipated. I recently had a conversation with someone who pointed out that this isn’t necessarily bad, as it still shows that I’m thinking about these topics. I start to second-guess my own thoughts. It also means that I am still writing, even if the finished product does not get produced as prolifically as I would ideally have it. All this has led me to think about the importance of completing projects in life, and to what extent my large folder of draft documents can be justified and excused.

Pushing and Pulling

Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past 6 months or so, the idea of pushing and pulling in education has been on my mind. What I mean by this is whether we should focus on pushing kids who are achieving in a particular subject as much as we can – advanced study in mathematics and reading, honors classes, extracurricular options – or focus on pulling kids up who have struggled in some subjects. I have been intrigued by this dichotomy in the education system precisely because I have seen both sides of it, and it makes me feel conflicted.

Fun Coin Flips

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I learned an interesting fact in my Stochastic Processes class the other day, and I managed to come up with an easier way to present it than using Markov chains (which are really cool, but not conducive to making a good blog post).

Qualifications

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Much of the rhetoric that has been pervasive over the past year, and especially with the election of President Trump, is related to how much value society places on qualifications when it comes to hiring and listening to people to help run the government.

The Right Tool

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

As I have progressed through college I have found it necessary to look for and invest in the right tools for the tasks I have at hand. I think it is important to be aware of how I work, and test out ways to improve my efficiency.

First Drafts

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

The way that I approach a first draft is not quite the same way that other (more experienced and successful) people approach one. The general advice is to hack through it without looking back. Particularly in writing, it is important to not focus on any grammatical errors, any misspelled words or issues with flow. One needs to get all of their ideas onto the page before they can hope to begin the process of refining those ideas. I do the opposite.

Monty Hall and Gambler's Ruin: A Third Small Step into Mathematics

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today we will be looking at two problems in probability: the Monty Hall problem and Gambler’s Ruin. These are two common probability “brain teasers”. For the Monty Hall problem, it feels paradoxical when you first learn about it, while the Gambler’s Ruin is instructive and important as you go forward in life. With that brief introduction, let us begin! There was a game show (so I have been told, though I am too young to have watched it) hosted by Monty Hall. One of the main elements of the show was a classic three-door setup, where behind two doors there were goats, and behind the third door there was a brand new car waiting to be won. The way this would go is that Monty Hall would ask you, the contestant, what door you wished to select. You picked door one, two or three. Then Monty Hall, bold and clever, would open up one of the two doors that you did not pick, only to reveal one of the goats! At this point in the game he would come back to you with a smirk, asking if you wished to stay with the door you picked at first, or if you wanted to switch to the other closed door. The problem is: in order to maximize the probability that you win the car, do you switch or stay (or does it even matter)?

"Oh, You're Studying Math?" A First Small Step into Mathematics

Sat, 12 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

“That sounds hard. I used to like math, but then I had a bad teacher and realized I just wasn’t any good at it anymore. I think it’s really cool that you like it though, and that you can teach other people about it. That’s what you want to do, right? Become a math teacher? That sounds really great. I couldn’t be a teacher, especially for math, that sounds way too difficult.

The Election and Change (Election Processing Part 3)

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

One of the main themes that has come up in the two days after the election is change.

Many people believe that much of what occurred is a result of people wanting change after having eight (or more) years of the government not listening to them. The Democratic party did not listen to this, putting up a candidate that was perceived as having no potential for anything different from what President Obama has done, while the Republicans were taken by someone who spoke of nothing but radical change, all the change against the current system that anyone could possibly want. Protecting the borders, opening up trade, reducing government expenditure and regulations, as well as social issues. As a result there was a significant part of the populace who gravitated towards Trump, wanting change and believing he was the only candidate who could make it happen.

As I thought about this, I did not want to focus too much on particular policies so I apologize if I become too critical of certain proposals. There is no proof that any policy, conservative or liberal, actually works as well as anyone wants. There are so many factors and much coincidence involved in when a certain policy is enacted during a period of time that, to me, much of what has gone on (in particular, economically) in our nation has become a wash. In my math jargon, it is an undecidable problem. Due to this, I want to focus on the dynamics of change in general and how reasonable it is to expect change, as well as how the change being called for by Trump supporters compares to the change that was hoped for by many Americans who opposed him.

Regarding the Election (Election Processing Part 1)

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

While I have no doubt that these words will likely fade into the backdrop of the political discourse that is occurring as a result of the recent election, I need to write this for my own sake, to make sense of what America will become over the next four years and beyond.

The Election and Education (Election Processing Part 2)

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Read part 1 here.
In light of the election, I have been on a bit of a thought and writing spree. While I recently processed through a fair bit of the election as a whole, there is so much that will be affected that I need to take it bit by bit. Right now I am thinking about education, particularly mathematics education, as this is something very near to me and something I have a strong passion for.