Matt Mack

I feel so stupid for not knowing earlier but a couple of weeks ago I learnt of the area of harmonic analysis (tl;dr: maths on frequencies/periodic functions, can be applied to music) actually existed and that's the kinda stuff I could be motivated to learn pure maths stuff for.

Reflecting on things I've said to people and it just hit me: People don't really think about what their voices sound like to others, do they?

When I say e.g. "You have a strong voice and you enunciate every syllable clearly" they're usually genuinely surprised.

Oh god today was a day. 2 tutor observations, one really important meeting where I learnt a lot, gave one talk (which was recorded and will be publicly available on Youtube if everything goes well).

Backlog of reports + marking. Thank goodness I don't teach tomorrow 🫠

I'm wondering what kind of "story building" theory/reading I could look at for like, science/maths communication purposes.

I've got a pretty good idea of how to do it myself, but I'm searching for a higher level abstraction/way-to-think-about-it.

One of my students (shockingly low confidence in himself) asked about an email he got encouraging him to consider studying the advanced version of a subject next semester.

Said to him "I can't make that decision for you, but you definitely have the aptitude." So proud of him 😊

Feeling sorry for anyone who was within earshot of the very animated conversation @andyperfors.bsky.social and I had today 😅

Slightly regretting signing up to do 10 tutor observations for the next week or so. Silly me didn't realise "Oh hey you just signed up to do another 10 hours of work" and it only dawned on me when I was adding those events into my calendar /facepalm

I was surveying my collection of beanies and then I realised I didn't have a maths-themed one (mostly music-themed or random brand collections over the years).

Perhaps it's time to remedy that...🤔

Alright I've clocked 109 hours in Balatro but now I'm hitting a point where I'm mindlessly repeating runs at the 2nd highest difficulty just for a lucky break and that's when roguelike games no longer become fun for me. Onto the next one!

Still feeling young inside! Just now that I have to operate a flesh robot that's showing signs of wear and tear :(

Fun maths-related question asked to first years today: How do you remember which way is concave up 🙂 and which way is concave down 🙁?

Wraps up everything nicely, no filler episodes, steady progress, no significant/nasty drama, both lighthearted and meaningful in various forms, also educates on the deaf experience and portrays it right. Can't recommend enough.

Finally finished watching the anime Yubisaki to Renren (A Sign of Affection) - a romance anime with a deaf girl protagonist.

All I can say is: Bwehhhhhhhh 😭

I pulled extra hours today (Monday) for work because someone else was sick and I'm so ready for the week to be over 🙃

Might even be additional hours pulled next week because other people are lacking in human resources planning 😒

Nothing like napping an extra 4 hours today in the recliner for me to realise how tough the last couple of days have been. Minimum food prep (lunch for next week) got done at least! Tomorrow, making sausage rolls, filtering the blueberry cheong/syrup, and more life admin 🙃

One thing I do out of recognising that sometimes neurodivergent students completely blank out is ask them "Okay, let's pick something", perhaps give them a set of choices, and give them a little bit longer to process the situation.

(Having read the other replies and noting you're not in an active position): I'd be checking in with the teachers to see what they do with said neurodivergent students.

Amongst my neurodivergent students there's a bit more one-on-one back and forth.

So glad I asked for no classes to teach on Wednesday. I've pushed myself too hard the last two days so my body is complaining (of stress) and my brain is moody over minor transgressions.

Mental health day today. Planning to wander around IKEA this afternoon for ideas.

So...I'm not sure how to feel about this. Certainly, I think he's lucky for running into me, but he could've easily been another student that could've just given up on maths like so many others earlier.

And it's only from keeping tabs on various parts of Twitter that I know people are slowly realising current efforts with LLMs is hitting a point where you can't just feed it more data because errors/hallucinations (overfitting?) are happening.

I think the part that makes me queasy is knowing that most other tutors or even teachers/academics are not equipped to handle the difficult questions he's been throwing me e.g. "What's the point? AI will just take over everything."

Thinking about the first year I've had some intense conversations with because he's on the fence of "Ugh maths is so hard what's the point, takes less effort to do well in economics" and the best I said was "Well if you turn up to class I'll still be here to help ya."

I'm begging all professionals who do TikToks/Insta reels/short-form video to be more expressive with their hands when reporting on things rather than doing the same repetitive waving/clasping motions 😒

/s

Today's Win: Alleviating a real analysis student's frustration over perceived arbitrariness of the epsilon-delta proof for sequences. Really makes one think about implications of mathematical language ☺️

There's definitely an issue with discoverability of other accounts. I've somehow gotten too used to Insta/Twitter recommending randoms onto my feed that I might eventually find interesting.

Current First World Problem: I'm /severely/ itching to write something in dark purple ink.

Last week I ordered $50 worth of purple ink pens just so I'd have some in storage for future use and my brain is screaming "WHERE ARE THEY"

Randomly found and bought some borosilicate glass containers (Pyrex, but a Japanese brand) to replace the plastic ones I've been using for meal prep. Feels like a nice upgrade to reward myself 😊

Welp that's another student mentioning to me they have ADHD. I'm definitely a magnet for neurospicy students 😅

It's not my first-years' fault because they're new to writing/explaining in full sentences for conceptual maths questions, but the amount of ambiguity in their explanations is driving me insane. 😖

I feel like my brain is working harder to try and properly parse what they write.

Finally tried VR for the first time (Far Cry + Outbreak, group of 8). Thoughts:

- I finally understand how motion sickness happens.
- The VR environment really shuts off one's natural physical awareness of things around them.
- Sound localisation is impossible.

Meanwhile, me who's been an internet gremlin since my teens, has seen the original gamergate in action, and is very slowly working my way up academia, it's like, "Heh."

😚🎵🎶

Cedar Riener @criener.bsky.social

Academia had had 10 years to prepare for being gamergated and hasn't, because (like journalism) it doesn't understand how to counter bad faith

21 березня

I have explained mathematical induction too many times to students this week. I no longer want to see, feel, touch, or even think about it for a while 😣

Yes, that's a very common sentiment I've noticed in my teaching. The hard part is figuring out when to volunteer that information because very few will actually ask that kind of question out of curiosity, more out of frustration!

Two events as of late:
1. My psychologist gave me some visualisations, but the overarching concept only clicked when I modified them to fit my 'parameters'.
2. An ADHD student was stumped understanding spherical coordinates until I demo'd with my hands instead of on-screen apps.

Current Working Theory of Teaching Neurodivergent Students (Maths):

You have to find a possibly unorthodox (but still technically correct) explanation that will make it click for them BUT they may not necessarily encode it the same way.

However when I asked my student how he'd describe what I demonstrated he said he saw it more like 'clouds opening up', meaning he'd reinvented my demonstration in his head, but I'd given him the right 'hook' for him to visualise the range of phi from 0 to pi.

Did errands today. Came home. A very fancy and expensive sports car was in my parking spot.

After stepping out then I realised it was a young guy having a little nudge-nudge-wink-wink with his girlfriend. They took while a while to reverse out.

Definitely not on my bingo card!

Personal domain email that I use for job applications & contracting work being borked (and not easily recoverable due to lost login details from now non-existent reseller) was definitely not on my bingo card this week 🤬

There is a subsection of anime-enthusiasts that are against certain anime characters having "larger than necessary" breasts. Not sure if that's the (leftist) group originally referred to, but is the one I'm most familiar with.

Yep, there should be an "Other" option if you're not current staff/alumni.

Apologies for a depressing post: the department I work in is letting me ago, and has a long enough history of failing at diversity & inclusion. Your support in signing and sharing the open letter below is appreciated.

docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Open Letter to Head of School of Mathematics and Statistics, Professor Howard Bondell

***We have received over 200 signatories. Please continue to share widely.***
This letter is a response to the University’s reply to the NTEU’s previous letter regarding the non-renewal of the contrac...

docs.google.com

The emotional relief of just having a day to myself today, both days were busy last weekend so it felt like I didn't really have a day off.

Still processing a lot of emotions from the past week, but thankfully appointment with psychologist this week. Going to be a long semester.

Long week. Best moment:

Trying to put words to the nuance that...

In mathematical logic, the negation of an "if statement" does not necessarily imply the opposite.

But outside of mathematical logic, there's a tendency to think in a binary sense e.g. "if it's not this, then it's the opposite".

Practised a bit of piano this evening to take my mind off work politics. Last practice session last week I was struggling with some fingerings that felt unnatural to me. Tonight, it was like my brain had worked it out and I could just play fluently 😳

Muscle memory's fascinating

Need to stop having anxiety when it comes to certain emails, ugh 😔 While I'm grateful for my psychologist for giving me a framework for thinking about addressing individual fears/anxieties, I hate that these scenarios are popping up /everywhere/ for me.

I missed silly but funny food discourse. See replies for the fun! 🙃

Salty 🇵🇸 @handle.invalid

was the dumpling discourse that bad?

06 березня

- Previous project uses a very protected Gitlab account, had to find personal access token (thank you, password manager!).
- Didn't realise Gitlab account has main branch protected, so had to create a dev branch then push changes to make a merge request
NOW I can write code 💢