Back in July, my kid and I read Tove Jansson's second Moomin book (and the first really well-known one), Comet in Moominland, as bedtime reading. At the time, I noted that, despite Jansson's reputation as a queer/feminist author, the gender roles in that early book are for the most part quite conventional: there are only two major female characters ( Read more... )

Having read through the first several books in L. Frank Baum's Oz series a few years ago, I recently managed to get my daughter hooked on them, and we've been reading them in Kindle e-book form. It's fun, and it's been great watching Jorie progress from passive bedtime consumption to reading them on her own, but the Oz books only go so deep ( Read more... )

For a little while I've been poking around in some basic number theory using the Sage computer mathematics system (and a tiny bit of PARI/GP, which is another package that comes bundled inside of Sage).

I was initially inspired by a blog post of John Cook's about the Perrin numbers, a sequence sort of like the Fibonacci numbers that can be used ( Read more... )

And now I have a tooth. A fake tooth. I've been eating with it and everything ( Read more... )

On Google+: Why e^(pi * sqrt(163)) is almost, but not quite, an integer, and how it relates to a pretty function called the Klein j-invariant. With some pictures, and bonus references to Ozma of Oz and an April Fool prank by Martin Gardner.

I am a piker compared to oonh, and there's some handwaving in the math because I don't understand it all, but I ( Read more... )

Many years ago, when I was a grad student, I bought a student-discount copy of Mathematica, the symbolic computer algebra system. It was crucial to finishing my doctoral thesis: I pretty quickly got beyond the point where I could safely do the algebra involved in my research by hand without making a fatal mistake somewhere. I knew some people who ( Read more... )

We managed to get back through Boston yesterday without significant incident, though the train was a little late and the traffic on I-93 was bad. I was going to bed around the time last night's craziness in Cambridge and Watertown was starting to break, so I missed most of it. I'm still on vacation, and I actually live quite far from Boston up near ( Read more... )

We are in New York City for the week, so were nowhere near Boston during today's events. It remains to be seen how security and such will affect the rest of our trip and our return on Thursday, but I don't see a huge amount of panic here.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

So on Thursday I had the second dental impression referred to in the previous entry. This was a little more involved than I expected ( Read more... )

The closer I get to the end of my dental-implant process, the more steps appear. Now that the surgical part is over and the implant's in my jaw, the process gets handed back to my regular dentist to produce the final abutment and crown.

It turns out this is going to be four appointments, of which the first was yesterday. That was a quick visit to ( Read more... )