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The hardest working font in Manhattan: Excellent long read about a near-invisible font that appears everywhere, and the investigation into where it came from and why it is ubiquitous. Ultimately its a story of the analog versus the digital. Beautiful collection of illustrative photos throughout. Ran into this interesting research from last year about reconstructing protolanguages and developing models that can move from a protolanguage to the modern variants and backwards from a modern language to its ancestor. As for gaming this month…. Hooked on Bracket City as part of my morning word-game routine. The site started up on January … Continue reading Miscellanea, March 2025

The Merchants of Venice – In Code: A nice little review of early cryptology in 1400s/1500s Venice within both trade and politics Typing Bowl is only barely a game but it’s good for a five minute break to see if you can type faster than strangers on the internet. I’m not a big discussion forum person, but this massive list of topic-specific forums probably has some great content in here. I wish there was an index of the topic areas at the top of the page to help skim for what’s available. The recent post Of trashcans and thimbles by … Continue reading Miscellanea, October 2024

Things I learned this week to keep up with change: How to use trackpad gestures to scroll (because scrolling with the arrow keys is disabled in our CMS). How to enable NFC on my phone (because we can now use our phones as access cards). How to use the new elliptical machines at the gym (because now you need to start using it to get it to turn on). The need to use my trackpad to scroll – or worse my mouse when working at my desk – is the small bit of friction I am hating the most. We … Continue reading One Thing, Two Thing, Red Thing, Blue Thing

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot, reflecting back on the Fall term, is a conversation I’ve heard both at my own institution and in a number of online settings. It boils down to the observation that in a hybrid course setting, many students who in theory should be coming to class in person (are living on campus or have indicated they will be attending in-person in some manner) have settled into attending remotely as the semester progresses. A question that arises is: does this bode ill for in-person learning in the future? My opinion is – no. Or, at … Continue reading Limitations of the Fall, Possibly by Design

I’m not thrilled with out pattern six turned out. Perhaps blocking with help, but my sinuous lines of eyelets seem uneven to me and overall the piece looks a bit messy. I’d suspect my tension needed to be tighter, but that would make the eyelets even less visible. But there is supposed to be a subtle shading difference in the way the stitches lay in the lower and upper portion of each curve, and that just isn’t coming through in my work. I am curious how this might look with a ribbon yarn. It might emphasize the lay of each … Continue reading Knit Lace Sampler: Pattern Six

I started exploring the Bauhaus: Building the New Artist online exhibit (companion to a current live exhibit at the Getty Center) out of curiosity to learn more about the design principles that the interactive modules present. From the blurb I read promoting it I didn’t realize there would also be significant content about the educational vision of the Bauhaus. There were elements of how the exhibit discusses the blending of fine arts and applied arts that resonated with conversations I’ve had with colleagues about the goals of education – including outside the domain of the arts. In fact, I’m frequently … Continue reading Education at the Bauhaus

I’ve had a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer (Hunt and Thomas) on my shelf for years but I’m finally reading through it in anticipation of teaching three programming-heavy courses this Fall. I just got to the section on Debugging and there are many tips in here that are helpful for reflecting on the mindset that novice programmers have as they start writing code and encountering bugs. A few of the tips are classics: “Don’t panic” and “Don’t say it’s impossible” – I think of student queries about whether the compiler might be broken as off-shoots of the later of these … Continue reading Reflections on Debugging Tips