There will be 2 postdoc positions to work with me in Utrecht, both for at least 2 years. One focuses on (higher-dimensional) noncommutative algebraic geometry, the other on Hilbert schemes of points on (noncommutative) surfaces. Contact me if you are interested. More info to come soon!

My best clean shirt is too similar to the one I wore the last two days— can’t risk having people in the office think I wore the same shirt three days in a row. What possessed me to buy two shirts that look the same?

Got the kids going through their drawers of trinkets and reorganizing and throwing some out. Took three bags of unloved stuffed animals to the thrift store.

Had some eggnog in the fridge that needed using up, so I put it in my coffee. Not exactly bad, but once a year is plenty.

Playing a family game with the kids and their grandparents. The game is called “Whose turn is it?”

Harvested the one reasonable beet for Xmas dinner.

Running into a lot of people I know at the grocery store the last couple of days. Like maybe more than the whole rest of the year.

So you’ve got the arithmetic mean (x_1 + … + x_n)/n, and the geometric mean (x_1 * … * x_n)^(1/n), but does anyone ever interpolate between them with the other elementary symmetric polynomials? Is there any use for taking the mean of x, y, and z as sqrt((xy + xz + yz)/3)?

Email exchange with one of our retired faculty: Dear Peter, The front office has a Christmas card that was mailed to you by [an acquaintance who for some reason sends a card to his work address even though he retired a few years ago]. /1

Next year all our troubles will be out of sight.

The joke in the Muppet Christmas Carol where there are two Marleys, Jacob and Bob Marley, and they’re Statler and Waldorf, gets better every year.

Squirrel perched on the fence holding a big mushroom that it got from somewhere and nibbling furiously.

Very impressed with the teachers I met at parent-teacher conferences this evening at North Eugene High School. Feeling optimistic about my kids getting an education there.

I could've been somebody, Charlie Brown.

Crazy mushrooms growing on the lawn in front of my office.

Came across an etymology: the verb “wax” meaning “grow,” as in “waxing moon” and “wicked men… are become great, and waxen rich” (Jer. 5:26-27), comes from the proto-Indo-European root “aug,” to increase, which also gives us “augment” and “auxiliary.” Beeswax is unrelated, from the PIE root “wokso.”

Running a spectral sequence in Excel...

I think I need to be listening to more Schumann.

Sixth grader misremembered her classmate’s Freddie Kruger costume as Eddie Bauer.

🎶 It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying people eater That she wore for the first time today 🎶

Hey @littmath.bsky.social, do you figure the diameter of the empty metric space should be be 0 or -∞? I can see it either way.

Enjoying a sudachi from @nowhyok.bsky.social’s garden, squeezed into in a glass of fizzy water.

Oh shit Guillermo del Toro and Benicio del Toro have been two different guys this whole time.

Rallyin with the family. #NoKings

After my arugula debacle in the spring and early summer I took a chance on planting green beans at the beginning of August. But now I’ve got fresh green beans in October! First harvest, more on the way.

Passion fruits still fruitin’ away.

I’d always assumed that Listerine was named after Listeria, because it was invented to kill it or something. But it turns out they’re both independently named after Joseph Lister, 1827-1912, an early proponent of the germ theory and surgical hygiene.

Got 35 emails in my inbox saying either “please remove me from this mailing list” or “please remove me too” or “stop replying to all!” Haven’t seen one of these in years, it’s like a blast from 2002.

As pumpkin spice latte season ramps up, I'm once again trying and failing to come up with a joke involving the projective special linear group PSL(n) and the projective general linear group PGL(n) and how they're the same over an algebraically closed field.

Watching Butch Cassidy on account of Robert Redford died… the Indian leading the posse that’s tracking them is called Lord Baltimore, but it sounds like they’re saying Lord Voldemort which is a surreal touch.

Why is everyone at the grocery store tonight buying flowers? Seen like for guys now.

Alice: [Describes the school’s new eHallPass system where they have to fill out a form on an iPad before they go pee.] Nick: Oh my god, that’s the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard in my life. Alice: Is it though?

Looks like the administration may have backed down on closing departments and laying off tenured faculty? We just got an email from the university president saying this:

Maybe I should take up eating cheese for dessert, as an affectation but also because it’s delicious.

And she finished off the summer by playing the national anthem with the youth orchestra at a Eugene Emeralds game.

Been listening more regularly to Gardeners’ Question Time from BBC Radio 4, lot of good tips and banter, but it’s always like “our panelists today are Matthew Pottage, Pippa Greenwood, and Bob Flowerdew” and I’m starting to wonder how many of them are stage names. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b...

This is some really deep shit, or maybe not, trying to think it through.

Passion fruits fruitin’.

I think my new favorite thing to serve with risotto is okra. Kind of a gloopy rice, kind of a gloopy vegetable…

Looking forward to this afternoon’s union meeting and figuring out what we can do to fight.

N, archiving some old emails: "Well, I almost made it to 1800 emails from that big statistics class last winter, but it only came to 1799." R, mishearing: "1800 eels?" N: "That would have been better."

Just learned that it’s “All the counselors hate the waiters,” not “ate the waiters.” 😬

Took the advice of @lukewinkie.bsky.social’s Slate article last fall to buy a frozen turkey on sale after thanksgiving and bust it out later in the year. Had it in the smoker all afternoon, can’t wait to taste it.

What’s better than a bee on a passion flower? Three bees on a passion flower.

Man I thought I was too cool to watch the new South Park, enough just to enjoy the clips on here, but it's fucking great.

Made the mistake of looking on top of the cabinets — two or three years’ worth of grease and dust that I can’t un-see, and now I’m looking at 20 minutes of going at it with windex.

I think I just heard a squirrel on a tree branch sneezing?

Honeybee on a passion flower.

Last night was Little League night at the Springfield Drifters, and Alice got to throw the ceremonial first pitch.

In the Netherlands for a conference, enjoying the hell out of this beer. Good balance of hop bitterness and malt body; even better name.