theTangentSpace

A weekly digest? But it’s been over a month!

Happenings

• I’m broken up from school for the year.
• I’ve been working on an extra-curricular project for some of my top students for next year. A couple of years back I did something similar with a small group and it was a lot of fun and quite inspiring for them. A lot of work though. This time, I’m going to try and teach them some elementary group theory. It should be nice as you can get fairly hands-on with this one. The key will be lots of examples and scaffolding, including explictly showing how to solve similar problems. Also, group theory is the theory of symmetry, so we can actually do some cutting out of shapes to explore the abstract ideas.
• I’m on holiday in South Wales this week in my sister’s husband’s mother’s (shout out to her) caravan. Mr One (nearly Mr Two) is a little terror in the caravan as of course the main area is all open-plan and very compact, so the cooker is only about three metres from the couch, not to mention innumerable other hazards!
• So far we’ve just taken the boys out to a park, which happened to be hosting the Sausage and Cider Festival (sausage n cider? I hardly know 'er!). So while we didn’t attend the festival, we did get to hear some of the music. The headline band was Scouting For Girls, remember them?

Links

• Phoneblogging. Brennan is spot-on with all of this. Mobile support is not a frivolous add-on to enable those who are too lazy to use the web on their PC — lots of people don’t have access to a PC, or only limited access.
• What should a personal website be?. This is a cool article, but I’m mostly glad I read it because it linked me to this awesome personal website I’d not seen before.

Reading

I’ve somehow backed myself into a corner where there is some pressure to be reading three fairly challenging books over August. For one, I want to finish reading The Odyssey^[1] before I see the movie in the cinema. Then, I am doing a buddy read of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics with a friend, so we read a book of that each week before doing a call to discuss it – currently on book four of ten. Finally, I had hoped to be keeping up with Jared Henderson’s online book club, especially as August’s book has been on my TBR for a while (Mumford’s Technics and Civilization).

Honestly, there’s no way I can do this alongside Blaugust, constructing my group theory course, and actually having a holiday with my my kids, so at the very least Mumford will have to wait (that didn’t stop me packing the darn thing on my holiday just to taunt me).

Playing

It’s all been retro games over here. The last couple of weeks I had loads of fun curating and organising my own rom library. I finished Chrono Trigger and now my main focus is another SNES classic (arguably hidden gem) Terranigma. I picked up a new yellow Powkiddy RGB30 for only £26 on eBay (total bargain, it would be around £85 from a real shop) — this is because the hinge on my Miyoo Flip has started to give up (again), and I’m kind of done with repairing it over and over. The Powkiddy isn’t perfect — the D-pad, buttons, and battery are a little quirky, but there are some mods you can do to fix that, and I have the parts on order. Other than that it seems a super fun little console, and naturally I had to buy Pico-8 to fill its giant square screen.