Sunday goofing when I should be grading...
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Matthew Conroy
@matthewconroy@mathstodon.xyz
mastodon 4.7.2I'm a mathematics teaching professor in Seattle. I'll be teaching Intro to Proofs in the coming year. I spend a lot of time making sound and visual art, often using code that I write. I worry a lot. I try to cycle a lot. I like mailing things to people. Hello!
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Joined November 21, 2022
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A good 55km ride today with a fair bit of gravel. I didn't get a picture on the route, so here is my bike in the alley behind my house, with the rhododendron and white rose (I think...) that just grow like this without my doing anything. Also, there's this descent on the trail paralleling the 520 freeway that's very fun; I think it's amusing that I've hit 1:25 three times now! I was really trying to be aero today, too. I hope you are having a good weekend!
I just finished grading real analysis midterm exams. I am exhausted, not just from the focused effort (it the largest real analysis class ever taught at UW, I believe: until last year, the largest was 40, and mine is 85 students!), but from the feeling that I am hitting most of my students with a stick. I don't mean to, but I have to assess their performance (we've not successfully worked out alternative to grading here (yet?)). Many students did not do well, and I find it very difficult emotionally to have to be the bearer of bad news. It's a really problem for me (I talk to my therapist about it often). Something about how I need to understand that people can handle their own emotions, and it's not my fault that they do poorly on my exams (and homework). But I can't get over the feeling that other people (my students) are going to get some information from me that will make them feel bad (which makes me feel bad enough) and then they will have negative feelings about me. I've been struggling with this for a long time, and I imagine it will only stop when I retire, which I would love to do but it's not the easiest thing to arrange. I look forward to summer and no teaching for a bit!
So that's what's going on with me. How are you? Happy weekend!
I'm halfway through The Poetry of Survival : Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe and wanted to share this poem by Miroslav Holub with you.
Wings
We have
a map of the universe
for microbes,
we have
a map of a microbe
for the universe.
We have
a Grand Master of chess
made of electronic circuits.
But above all
we have
the ability
to sort peas,
to cup water in our hands,
to seek
the right screw
under the sofa
for hours
This gives us wings.
(trans. George Theiner)
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My earliest 1000 YTD since 2016, so I can't complain. I have a hard time believing that I hit 1000 by the end of February a number of times in the past. Oh, that feels like a long time ago.
I'm sick with a rather intense cold and I don't feel like doing much so I made another animation from a stereograph. This one is of a pool at Eldorado Springs, Colorado. The pool was built in 1905 using spring water. I remember it was there when I was in grad school in Boulder in the 1990s, and I'd go there with a friend to fill up a whole bunch of water bottles with the free spring mineral water (it just poured out of a hose, free for the taking). Never swam in the pool, though. https://www.madandmoonly.com/hhh/2026/04/eldorado-springs-stereograph
Currently listening. Do you know Ed's? At one point, I had their album More Hard Times on cassette, vinyl, and CD.
No air at all...
Ed's Redeeming Qualities - Met a Man
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@jesshewitt@genart.social Looks like my migraine auras. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aura_(symptom)
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@baillehache_pascal@hachyderm.io I made it using Processing (simplified Java, basically). I used a Runge-Kutta method to create the curves.
Yes, orthogonal is exactly as you said. Given a set of curves defined by differential equations dx/dt=f(x,y), dy/dt=g(x,y), we get orthogonal curves from dx/dt=g(x,y), dy/dt=-f(x,y).
I don't know anything about coherent noise, so maybe?
Glad the earthquake didn't cause problems. Cheers!
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@timkahn I learned about them when I was a college radio DJ in the 80s. I had chances to see them live, I'm sure, but never did. Their sound is very nostalgic for me. Cheers!
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@Coreyartus@mindly.social Congratulations!
I notice that the ART SHOP link in your profile gives a 404 error. Thought you'd like to know.
Cheers!
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@AceArsenault@fosstodon.org Perfect for playing during the seventh inning stretch on a bus!
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@lesondouble@c.im Do you know if this is a digital work, or hand-drawn, or something else?
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@baillehache_pascal@hachyderm.io It's two overlaid plots of approximate solutions to two orthogonal differential equations (so the curves that are solutions to one equation always intersect the curves that are solutions to the other equation at right angles). The curves are selected at random, but they clump up in various places and that give the images that kind of smudgy worn look, I think.
Everything okay after the earthquake?
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@ipxfong@mastodon.sdf.org I don't know what that link is. If I click on it, Firefox tells me, basically, it doesn't know what to do with it ("No apps installed that can open..."). Feel free to let me know what is going on. I see that Gemini is a project distinct from Google's Gemini (thank god), but I can't figure out what to do with your link. Cheers!
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@baillehache_pascal Thanks. I hope I recover quickly, too: at the moment, I feel like I'm still at the bottom. Cancelled class today, something I very rarely do.
I like this animation since things don't move too much. A lot of these stereographs have massive shifts from one shot to the other: different cameras/techniques must be the cause but I don't know too much about how these were made (LOC records don't even say what year these images are from, let alone information on equipment or methods!). (Oh! Just added this to my to-read list: https://archive.org/details/worldofstereogra0000darr )
That's cool that you made your own 3D effects. I've somehow never been able to appreciate 3D glasses or those "magic eye" posters. I'm not sure why, but I do have rather extreme myopia (i.e., the superpower of being able to view things up close very clearly) and I've often had different resolving powers in the lens of my glasses between my two eyes. I wonder if that is related.
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@flavigula Cool! What did you send to him? This resonates with me very much. (Do you suppose he is aware of Einsturzende Neubauten's "Strategies Against Architecture"? Probably, right?)
@shansterable@ohai.social Yeah, seems unlikely.
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@AnnieG@mementomori.social Yes, this bugs me too. The thing to do is click on the '..." thing and then choose "Expand this post". Or at least that's what I do.