Barbara and I have new masks, hand-made with love by our niece Aviva. (Unfortunately the cats think that they’re cat toys because of the dangly straps.)
Cats
Math and cats
(This is a follow-up to yesterday’s post. I suggest reading it first, if you haven’t done so already.) A quote from John Horton Conway in today’s MathBlab: You know, people think mathematics is complicated. Mathematics is the simple bit. It’s… Read More ›
Support your local restaurants! (Tavolo and more…)
Your local restaurants need your help! As you know, they operate on small profit margins, and the current prohibition on eat-in dining can destroy many a restaurant. So we’re trying to order take-out and delivery locally whenever possible. Last night… Read More ›
Quidditch in Yiddish, etc
Surely you want to read the Harry Potter books in their new Yiddish translation, don’t you? “But I don’t read Yiddish!” you exclaim. That’s admittedly a handicap. But you can make some progress by sounding out the Hebrew letters (with… Read More ›
Bella Luna update
I suspect that Bella Luna has been waiting with bated breath for me to review it once again. We end up going there for dinner about once a month, after all, since Barbara works upstairs in the same building. A… Read More ›
Irregardless
Irregardless of the price, I am buying a new computer. Well, no, not really. Not any time soon, at any rate. But that’s not the topic of this post; the word “irregardless” is. “That’s not a word!” you cry. “If… Read More ›
There’s no such thing as too many books.
More shelf space may not be an option. More shelf space requires more shelving, which in turn requires more bookcases, which in turn require more room. Sigh. I gave a few hundred away just over a year ago, but that… Read More ›
Back from New York, Part 2: The High Line
On May Day I wrote about the Tolkien exhibit and promised to discuss the rest of our NYC trip in my “next post.” Unfortunately that task turned out to be far too big for one post, so it is being split among… Read More ›
I gave the keynote address… and lived to tell the tale!
Yesterday I delivered the Keynote Address at the annual conference of the New England Mathematical Association of Two Year Colleges. Despite being an INTJ — which means that I should have been exhausted by the presence of so many other people —… Read More ›
Crime & Punctuation (and a cat)
Crime & Punctuation. No, not the novel by Dostoevsky that just happens to have a somewhat similar title — that one that only English majors and Russian lit students have actually read, although everyone else claims to. (Confession: at least… Read More ›
Welcome, Flicka!
Please welcome the newest member of the Davidson-Bean household. Flicka was an abandoned cat who has lived on our front porch for two years now, and today’s weather report was enough to convince Barbara and me that it was time… Read More ›
Three cats
Three of our cats cuddled up together: do they love each other, or are they just heat-seeking mammals?
Lethal White
As everyone knows — everyone, that is, except certain cats — Robert Galbraith is the pseudonym that J.K. Rowling adopted for her Cormoran Strike series of detective novels for adults. Lethal White is the fourth in this series. This is a long… Read More ›
The Last Place You Look
Kristen Lepionka grew up mostly in a public library and could often be found in the adult mystery section well before she was out of middle school… She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her partner and two cats. That’s what the… Read More ›
Learning in depth: high school SCOTUS blog
If you didn’t listen to the NPR report Why a High High Schooler Started Covering The Supreme Court, on this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday, you should definitely do so! Do it right now, before you forget. OK, now that you’re… Read More ›
Fireworks and You
“Hey, Larry!” shouts my neighbor as I take out the trash yesterday evening. “Where are your fireworks?” “People shouldn’t be setting off fireworks in residential neighborhoods,” I reply. “They scare cats and dogs.” “But you’re not scared,” he reasoned. “No,… Read More ›
The Vocal Fries (yet another linguistics podcast!)
Yet another linguistics podcast has come to my attention! It’s The Vocal Fries, subtitled “the podcast about linguistic discrimination.” This series, now four months old, is of course named for the phonological register commonly called “vocal fry,” but that’s only the starting point…. Read More ›
Cats and geometry
Three of the cats, doing their best to sit at the vertices of an equilateral triangle (even though William isn’t paying attention and Vincent is messing up the covers):
Curiosity and conformity
Continuing some of the themes that have been lurking just below the surface of my past three posts, I turn to an essay by Joel Wagner. Most of his essay actually springs from a blog post by a different author,… Read More ›
Addicted to distraction?
From a recent New York Times opinion piece by Tony Schwartz: Addiction is the relentless pull to a substance or an activity that becomes so compulsive it ultimately interferes with everyday life. By that definition, nearly everyone I know is… Read More ›
Learning Strategies 