I gave a Farb student seminar talk on a lovely paper, Davis, Michael W. Groups generated by reflections and aspherical manifolds not covered by Euclidean space. Ann. of Math. (2) 117 (1983), no. 2, 293—324. I also used some of the material in Davis, Michael W. Exotic aspherical manifolds. […]

While on public transportation, my mind wanders… And one might assume the following about me and my buses, The bus travels for one unit of time, I will get on the bus at a random time (uniformly distributed), I will leave the bus at a random time (independent, unformly distributed). Then the probability that I am on the bus […]

When I walk down the street, I create patterns in how I walk, often by controlling my stride length so I will step on cracks every third sidewalk square, or whatnot. If I were a true master, my stride length would be incommensurable with respect to the sidewalk length—surely this was the problem […]

I’ve been (not surprisingly) drinking quite a bit of coffee lately, and I’ve noticed that many corregated coffee cup holders include a bit of loose glue. At first, I thought this was a mistake, an oversight in the perfection of the coffee cup holder design. On the contrary, that bit of excess glue melts when […]

I’m sometimes bored while flying, and I like looking out the window (though if I can, I usually pick aisle seats so I can exit more quickly). I realized something rather amusing. I closed one eye, and held two fingers about an inch apart and a foot away from my open eye. Then, I […]