Weeknotes 170

Happy Easter! 🐣 I hope you spent yesterday letting the liminality wash over you and today eating nondenominational chocolate products.

I’d decided to avoid hot cross buns in a weak attempt to be healthy, but then I saw Phil’s poll and I was like, well, obviously toasted hot cross buns are amazing, then I got the bread mist and one thing led to another and I’ve eaten three so far. Phil’s fault.

I shared a hot cross bun photo on Instagram and got a few objections to the idea of spreading apricot jam on them. To me this is obviously the correct way to eat hot cross buns because you need apricot jam to glaze them when baking from scratch so you might as well serve the rest for spreading, and this flimsy justification applies whether you’ve baked them yourself or not, but I get the feeling that‘s not a widely-held belief. Anyway, whatever, it’s good actually.

BREAKING BUN NEWS: since writing the above I’ve eaten a fourth.

I’m not having a very healthy April so far to be honest.

I took the week off and the weather’s actually been pretty nice so, on the one hand, I’ve had several sunny bike rides around town. But on the other I’ve also — let’s face it — done a lot of sitting and watched a lot of videos of a man doing sudokus.

I’ll get my shit together next week, probably.

I predict I will never learn to swipe up/down to enter/exit fullscreen mode in the redesigned YouTube app instead of instinctively using the old pinch gesture (which now zooms the video, uselessly).

It’s been months and it hasn’t even begun to stick in my brain. Pinch out, sigh, pinch in, swipe up; this is how I live now. I assume this gave a product manager at Google something to do for a bit which comes as some consolation for my life being slightly more annoying forever.

I did eventually pull my finger out and record a short video to wrap up my WebAssembly streams for the time being.

It’s a relief to have tied up this loose end, although I now feel a slight self-imposed pressure to actually do some work on the code. It could happen.

I got a lot out of Grant Sanderson’s JPBM Communications Award lecture about making mathematical ideas easier to understand. I think his characterisation of maths’s “pedagogical curse” — pursuing rigour at the expense of clarity — is insightful and applies equally well to the subjects I’m interested in teaching.

Selfishly, egotistically, it’s encouraging that his criteria for good pedagogy aren’t too different from mine: when I’m trying to explain UTF-8 or data structures or whatever, I’m always looking for opportunities to start with concrete (ideally interactive!) examples and use those to motivate the broader concept, and the more of the material I can visualise the better.

In the back of my mind this is always what I imagine I’d be doing with my time if I didn’t have to worry about earning a living. It’s a fun and flattering fantasy because in reality I’d probably just be watching more maths videos and scoffing jammy buns.

I enjoyed this comment on the Guardian’s review of Superman and am now looking for opportunities to work the phrase “if I would of of have of have of have have of seen her back then I would have of of have had a panic attack” into casual conversation.

I haven’t heard anything from the van rental company about a fine, which either means I’ve got away with it or I’m halfway to having the fine doubled because I didn’t pay it within 14 days. What a double fine production.

Happy new tax year! Don’t forget to max out your ISA allowance with all that spare money you’ve got lying around.

Three bank holidays next month. Love it.