I wonder if anyone knows about alphabet songs in other languages? I’d be particularly interested in knowing about Greek and Hebrew alphabet songs, and a bit about the history of such things. It seems like these songs must be used primarily to teach the lexicographic ordering of the letters; I suppose the Latin […]

Today in Geometry/Topology seminar, quasihomomorphisms were discussed, i.e., the set of maps such that is uniformly bounded, modulo the relation of being a bounded distance apart. These come up when defining rotation and translation numbers, for instance. Anyway, Uri Bader mentioned that these quasihomomorphisms form a field, isomorphic to , under pointwise […]

There are some questions about outer space that I would like to be able to answer. Some nice survey articles look to be: Bestvina, Mladen The topology of . Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians, Vol. II (Beijing, 2002), 373—384, Higher Ed. Press, Beijing, 2002. and also: […]

I’m fond of the Pineapple Sauce Pancake graph: the vertices are English words, and there is an edge from to if is also an English word (e.g., “pan” and “cake” are English words, and there is an edge from “pan” to “cake” because “pancake” is also an English word). To play around with […]

I’ve spent a lot of time constructing languages (Kisonef and Naedari being my favorites); in a similar vein, I also tried to create a language that an alien civilization would be able to understand. I had hoped to put a message written in my universal language in a conspicuous place (say, on a college […]

Last night, there was a terrible thunderstorm in Chicago; I’ve never seen so many trees on the road! I was supposed to land at Midway at 7:30pm last night, but we were diverted to Indianapolis, so I didn’t land in Chicago until 2:00am, and then I waited until 3:00am to get a taxi, so […]