Flea market guy in Final Fantasy VII Remake has my kinda stuff

Project for the rest of the summer is to finish the digital topology book I'm writing (with Dae Woong Lee). I will live-tweet every Figure I make, with no additional context. These are all made with tikz.

TIL that they're the world's most fearsome fighting team, not fighting teens. Missed opportunity!

Conference talk from last week for anyone interested- a forgotten theorem about the Euler characteristic! Should be understandable to anyone with some basic algebraic topology knowledge (it was an algebraic topology conference). youtu.be/mOFVAqK1lIg?...

Old cameras and a nice bag-o-keys for sale in Santiago de Compostela

Crisp perspective in some street art in Santiago de Compostela

AI menu signage is rampant where I am in Spain. Menu has words which I don’t know, next to cartoonish pictures. When I order it, turns out the thing I ordered isn’t anything like the picture… Usually still good but cmon now.

K-pop the musical (versión blanca)

#foundmath on Camino de Santiago

Another eBay alert- a nice looking CARDIAC, the most famous of the paper computers. (I have one but wanted to cover some more obscure ones first.) Less than $100 is a good price! Though there are printable replicas online if you just want the experience. ebay.io/m/xsFlYG

Short for the kids: www.youtube.com/shorts/jGh7p...

New video: The Camera Lucida! Unfortunately I don't have a good idea how old my specimen is. Maybe 1950s? No ORIGINAL instructions, which might have given a hint. youtu.be/pfEdrJ50k28

eBay chat never disappoints

CT people- my band The Noodlers is playing in downtown Fairfield this Sunday June 21. Free show 7PM outside in the pocket park by Starbucks in downtown Fairfield. 1720 Post Road. Part of Make Music Day Fairfield. Say hi if you come!

Very nice OLD brass drafting set on ebay- I've been buying a bunch of stuff lately so I'll pass, but hard to find a set like this for this cheap. Two brass protractors, several dividers and other brass stuff, AND a wooden sector rule! (the wooden box is cool too) ebay.io/m/6oT1sf

tommy needs better kerning @tommybahama.bsky.social

Got a rotating tripod head so I can finally interact with the scene while panning the camera! Will anybody notice?* New video soon! (aiming for late june) *no

During journal peer review: please reply whenever you are able During editorial proofing: TAKE ACTION REPLY IMMEDIATELY OR RISK LOSING EVERYTHING

ya don't say

Diabolical contribution from my coauthor: seven dots??? And not a single one is $\dots$. Do I need to end the collaboration? I teach my students that, in mathematical writing, there are ALWAYS EXACTLY 3 DOTS.

Tiktok now provides a big button: just tap here to buy views! I've never done it, but I can see the temptation for somebody who thinks they're going to be the next big social media star.

Schools out so I made a short about this stupid thing- I like it! youtube.com/shorts/ao6SE...

Someone has listed the impossibly rare stage 2 chisanbop blue book on eBay! I searched for this for years with no luck, and they just … have one? ebay.us/m/fh6oHV

Grzegorz Graff, P. Christopher Staecker, Alan \.Zeromski: Nielsen coincidence theory of $(n,m)$-valued pairs of maps https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07015 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.07015 https://arxiv.org/html/2605.07015

spotted in NYT Connections

final exam bribery attempt

intriguing scribbles on yesterday's final exam

walked to school today

Walked up to a random yard sale and somehow found a mint condition ACU-ARC in the ORIGINAL box with ORIGINAL papers including calibration template and registration card! The metric version! Great since the one I had was inches.

It’s an ORIGINAL Instructo Paper Computer! Very cool- I’ve never seen it for sale. The same seller has several of them! Crazy prices though. It’s impossibly rare to find one, but similarly rare to find anyone who wants one. ebay.us/m/y1uHvD

game props

I gave a little survey to my calc 2 class about using AI on homework. (15 respondents) It was anonymous, and I assured them ahead of time that I wasn't trying to judge or berate them, just trying to understand the landscape, with an eye towards changing my homework policy if appropriate. 🧵

what if \phi and \varphi got in fight would \varphi win y/n

I hate this. (I almost never use Acrobat so I just saw this for the first time.)

New video: the Kensington Adding Machine software for the Mac from 1993. #skeuomorphism This was originally planned as an April Fools video, but really it's not all that foolish. youtu.be/XUknTGEt3mU

I was planning my sexennial April Fools Youtube video, but didn't quite get it done in time. It'll be ready sometime within a week! In the meantime watch my previous April Fools episode. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fweo...

Too expensive for me, but very cool slide rule with built-in artillery clinometer!

Borromean Rings at Asbury United Methodist Church, Bristol CT.

I made this sign in 2017. Sadly still in service #nokings

Procrastinating other things so I made this stupid video after going down a rabbit hole this weekend youtube.com/shorts/i9CJs...

New video: The Lightning Calculator Quincunx WD-7. And some stories about the birth of statistics. youtu.be/iMCAHlOzr9E

Short on the WD-7 Galton board! youtube.com/shorts/ccmwg...

New video tomorrow! Including possibly my favorite writing yet for the final line. But I'm never too good at telling what other people will like... Here's a sneak peek for my faithful bsky folks- this thing is too big for my usual setup!

Spotted at a shop downtown. Wild old Hammond No 12. Crazy key layout with lots of special characters.

Concerned my calc 2 students are using AI to do all their homeworks, since the ones getting great HW scores do terribly on the quiz given in-class the next day. Scatterplot of HW scores vs quiz scores shows no discernable correlation.

Some days I have productive research shower thoughts. Other days:

Looking at a mathematical gadget on Amazon, and the product page shows this picture. (It is not a picture of what I'm trying to buy.) Is this a real thing? I'm guessing the picture is AI generated, but I still want one to gesture near.

Spotted at the goodwill: a SCM “Typewriter Ribbon Cartridge” in the original box! #didntgetit

I learned from a YouTube comment about this thing- the Down Indicator used in US football. Very interesting! Do football fans recognize this? You loop the thing around different fingers to keep track of what down it is (out of 4).