The Curious Engineer

Quomodocumque

2007–2008

354 posts

2009–2026 →

2008 192

December 2008

  1. The superintendent’s writing awards, Adam Ostrow, and me
  2. Serge Lang: Rats in a Box
  3. Reader survey: which of your beliefs will your descendants vehemently reject?
  4. Just wait till I take off my shoe and reveal the lower shriek
  5. After Virgil
  6. This is apparently very funny if you’re a philosopher
  7. December linkdump
  8. Some visitors, and countable unions
  9. Fund the Montgomery County math team
  10. Erdös 2.0
  11. New Steve book, new Steve blog
  12. Chef du cuisine
  13. Thanksgiving’s over, it’s safe to come out
  14. Where by “very precisely” I mean “indistinctly at best”

November 2008

  1. I overrate expensive wine and I will not apologize
  2. Tom Leinster on entropy, diversity, and cardinality
  3. Fair Harvard holds sway
  4. CJ’s first joke
  5. RIP Out of Town News
  6. Bayes, Sober, dice, intelligent design
  7. Paragraphs: Zadie Smith and Raymond Chandler
  8. Reader survey: what is the great American nerd novel?
  9. ARE YOU PROFESSORS?
  10. If you had a brother, would he like cheese?
  11. Human(itie)s, aliens, and autism: Ian Hacking and Elliot Sober at Fluno Center tomorrow
  12. Obama’s embarrassing friends, enormity, nauseous
  13. In which CJ masters the concept of taking turns
  14. Contest: worst math-related election metaphor
  15. Turkelli on Hurwitz spaces and Malle’s conjecture
  16. No thank you, but thanks
  17. Three comments on Halloween

October 2008

  1. Early voting in Madison
  2. Cited
  3. Is there a Philly title drought?
  4. Southern California Number Theory Day, the airport Chili’s, Evan Longoria counterfactuals
  5. Avenue Q at the Overture
  6. F_1 and the braid group — a note of skepticism
  7. Reader survey: which journals are fast?
  8. In which the Red Sox keep playing
  9. Shana Wittenwyler is a really good photographer
  10. F_1, buildings, the braid group, GL_n(F_1[t,1/t])
  11. Show report: The Magnetic Fields, Overture Center
  12. You can now download “Feet”
  13. Learning from Israel
  14. Congressional math war in the WI-2
  15. Our common culture
  16. Kohlrabi kugel, Jalapeno Loco
  17. Slate piece on martingales, expected value, and the bailout

September 2008

  1. The Milwaukee Brewers: change we can believe in
  2. I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Triops forever
  3. I was walked by a zombie
  4. Back from Boston
  5. Two good lines
  6. DFW remembered at Slate, by me and others: plus, juvenilia
  7. David Foster Wallace at Harper’s
  8. A letter from David Foster Wallace, maybe
  9. David Foster Wallace is dead
  10. Is there life after Potty Power?
  11. Linkdump, September 2008
  12. _Seeing Like a State_ and _The Outlaw Sea_
  13. My friend the delegate

August 2008

  1. Public opinion, 1935-1946
  2. Engine Summer and Godel’s Theorem
  3. Blueberry ricotta crepes and the mighty Thr-Ian’s
  4. New Zealand rock named after group-theoretic entities
  5. Pink helmet
  6. Good things about the last-place Orioles
  7. One more Mexican restaurant — Taqueria Guadalajara
  8. Down with the Perfect 10
  9. The worst Mexican restaurant in Madison, and a few others
  10. Two idle questions about modular curves
  11. Bad predictions
  12. In which I am ahead of the curve on Carsick Cars
  13. How fiction doesn’t work
  14. Bilu-Parent: Serre’s uniformity in the split Cartan case
  15. “His parents think he’s fine. The school system thinks he’s fine. But he’s not fine!”

July 2008

  1. Ted Widerski
  2. But Eugene — YOU’RE not Asian…
  3. Show report: Takka Takka at the Frequency
  4. Kopi Luwak
  5. Countless thousands of destroyed lives — it’s what’s for breakfast
  6. The Grasshopper King, wordled
  7. Dokaka, “Smells like teen spirit”
  8. In which Richard Feynman annoys me less than previously
  9. In which John Tierney annoys me: women in science edition
  10. Baseball Reference Play Index free this week!
  11. Do you like Richard Feynman?
  12. One cheer for Numb3rs
  13. Prof’s skills add up to Hollywood gig!
  14. Were they hot or not?
  15. Vyew: a long-distance collaboration tool
  16. Reader survey: what makes a good popular math book good?
  17. BEST. DOUBLE BILL. EVER.
  18. “One To Nine” review in the NYTimes
  19. Independence Day in a flat place
  20. Do you have a photographic memory for math talks?

June 2008

  1. Zebrafish are very interesting
  2. Bespewed
  3. Something I learned by moving to the Midwest
  4. Update: Cabrera at the bat
  5. The Orioles’ first visit to Miller Park, and ours
  6. Connected components of John McCain’s America
  7. Wikidirections
  8. Blogiversary!
  9. Harvard reunion — the chin scratched yet again
  10. Update on 2-dimensional Kakeya sets over finite fields
  11. Link roundup, June 2008

May 2008

  1. China Forbes and Hi-Fives All Around!
  2. In which CJ makes pizza
  3. Opa
  4. Are there elliptic curves with small rank?
  5. Horrible orange
  6. Something magic happens every time you go
  7. Yeah, no, ich heisse Leon
  8. If you only read one book of academic sociology this year…
  9. Where are the Filipino restaurants?
  10. Good things I ate today
  11. Akhil Sharma explains it all for you
  12. Doglike feeding
  13. The chilling effect of Google on gag-based feature writing
  14. A better Bayesian puzzle
  15. Get Bayesian with Josh Tenenbaum, May 8
  16. Diversity Road
  17. More Harvard reunion chin-scratching
  18. Carseat/nobility quiz
  19. What does “Quomodocumque” mean?
  20. Open letter

April 2008

  1. Non-simple abelian varieties in a family
  2. The great circle of life as CJ sees it
  3. In which I shake my tiny fist at the heavens
  4. Assortative mating
  5. How many points does the average curve have?
  6. Mickie’s corned beef hash, herring with lingonberries, Elgin hot sausage
  7. Scocca blogs!
  8. Terrace season, cart season
  9. Great moments in college photojournalism
  10. What do you do when you find an unknown button?
  11. Toronto, additive combinatorics, strange food combinations
  12. Where should you go to grad school?
  13. A math department in danger
  14. Some promising Orioles debuts
  15. Good grief

March 2008

  1. Show report: Jens Lekman
  2. First day of a long season
  3. Happy Grothenday!
  4. On your radio
  5. Give the people (who like the Kakeya problem) what they want
  6. Give the people what they want
  7. Improvised miso soup
  8. Carnival of Mathematics 29
  9. Why this is not a math blog
  10. Raymond Carver’s Gordon Lish problem, and mine
  11. The bipartisan physics caucus grows by one
  12. Five Guys, Vic Chesnutt, Jonathan Richman
  13. Book review from a broad
  14. We don’t need no stinking solstice
  15. Armando Benitez, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you
  16. Saigon Noodle and Nifty ’50s
  17. Reader survey: your favorite spells
  18. The moduli space of senators and the moduli space of movies
  19. Is the Washington Post congenitally incapable of doing math?
  20. In which I continue to dominate the national media
  21. Robert Lowell would be 81

February 2008

  1. The moduli space of chords: Dmitri Tymoczko on “Geometry and Music”, Friday 7 Mar, 2:30pm
  2. My piece in Wired: The Netflix Prize
  3. Kiss this guy
  4. Orioles numerology
  5. A^4 + B^2 = C^n
  6. Oh my God, if he comes over here I’ll just die
  7. In which we hit the big (blog) time on Eating in Madison A to Z
  8. The [Viennagram:]
  9. Read my book free
  10. Obama, glitter, Wisconsin
  11. The future belongs to colds
  12. On the plus side, you rarely have to wait in line to get ice cream
  13. Punished by praise
  14. Becky McKenzie photographs at Sunroom
  15. Friends on the web
  16. Icequake!
  17. GET YOUR FINGER OFF OF ME!

January 2008

  1. Gourmet Ghetto North
  2. Hired
  3. So good to be back home again
  4. I can help you
  5. My God, it’s full of stars
  6. Adventures in male bonding
  7. Did I give a kid a used book?
  8. Two complaints about Juno
  9. Sweet dreams are made of seven nation army
  10. We could gather, throw a fist
  11. The restaurant hall of fame as far as I’m concerned
  12. The first link roundup of 2008

2007 162

December 2007

  1. Come and play, everything’s A-OK, although there are some liability issues we need to discuss
  2. There are hotdogs and there are hotdogs
  3. Tell it to Haverchuck
  4. Nope
  5. The music outside is frightful
  6. The Plot Against America
  7. See, for me this would have been a tough call
  8. In which I am pedantic about people’s Christmas cards
  9. Recipe for fun revealed!
  10. Things I don’t know, winter storm watch edition
  11. Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you
  12. My summer plans are now set
  13. Magnetic Fields, young and live
  14. A puzzling list of countries
  15. Jonathan Richman, age 16, on the Velvet Underground
  16. In which I like brutalism
  17. Superlatives
  18. Grossman on Pullman on Lewis
  19. R.I.P. Peg Bracken

November 2007

  1. Defense
  2. Madison retail, red in tooth and claw
  3. The Jesus and Merritt Chain
  4. Truck is stuck
  5. In which Jeremy Guthrie is the Rodney Dangerfield of the American League
  6. A hard day’s man
  7. B+ book report
  8. Robyn Hitchcock and Daniel Pinkwater
  9. Fine, boil the kid in its own mother’s milk, but use OSHA-approved gloves — that vat is hot!
  10. Did me some talking to the sun
  11. Memo to myself re: November in Madison
  12. Is Caffe 608 in trouble?

October 2007

  1. Fraternal memoirs
  2. Esteban Yan and Mark Williamson come up big in relief
  3. Smoked cheese and mushroom casserole
  4. The most seductive of all semisoft cheeses
  5. Orioles go to the World Series
  6. Justin Fox blogs from Madison, Lev Grossman blogs from Planet Nerd
  7. How to disagree about how to disagree
  8. At least it’s not Royals-Reds
  9. Mobay
  10. Because Garfield isn’t random enough as it is
  11. Reuben pizza
  12. The week in shows: Fiery Furnaces, Bishop Allen, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, Deerhoof
  13. Local to global blogroll
  14. Orioles in the postseason!
  15. I’m pretty sure Rudy Giuliani serves them at his press conferences
  16. Shout-Outs
  17. These aren’t the tats you’re looking for
  18. My postseason preferences
  19. It’s like indie rock, only it’s a car
  20. They had not the habit of definition
  21. Aziz Nesin, Ali Nesin, and education without permission.

September 2007

  1. Two good Orioles endings
  2. Show report: Andrew Bird at the WUT; ancient civilizations
  3. Reading bad novels
  4. Shared music naivete
  5. Stroll me like you mean it
  6. What is arithmetic geometry?
  7. Letter from Belgium
  8. My want more cheerios
  9. You cannot butt me with your horns!
  10. Signs that you’ve got a large child
  11. Panic, and a weak AL East clenched ignorant against the sky!
  12. Things I don’t know how to do, II
  13. Hebrew philology and names of sandwiches, part II
  14. Muffuletta, mufleta, sandwich etymology
  15. Simpsonized
  16. Mathematics jobs wiki
  17. Restaurant review: El Jardin, Janesville
  18. How to eat a giraffe
  19. Madison muffuletta report
  20. Parenting for primates
  21. It’s just squash curry!
  22. What I’m reading
  23. Another gross McDonald’s story

August 2007

  1. Inscribed squares: Denne speaks
  2. A good line from _On Beauty_
  3. What Wittgenstein would have said about this week in Orioles baseball
  4. When Paul Shaffer was in the Pixies
  5. The day I ate four Big Macs
  6. The last great problem
  7. Putting things on top of other things
  8. The future belongs to the Bangles
  9. Frank Lloyd Wright in bad decline
  10. Best of the Dane County Farmers’ Market
  11. Reader survey: what was your first concert?
  12. German Art Students show report
  13. Local band (playing Wednesday night): The German Art Students
  14. Do you need daycare in Madison?
  15. The mysteries of Pittsblog
  16. Doing it all yourself: Jack Harshman, 1958
  17. How to drive, by David
  18. Emily in Trouser Press, Steve in hardback
  19. Things you could do because you live in Madison, but don’t, until visitors come: slightly out of town edition
  20. Things you could do because you live in Madison, but don’t, until visitors come: Tuesday edition
  21. Orioles report: how can a team this good be this bad?
  22. What sports needs now: more steroids
  23. Mean Girls
  24. Harold Baines and the infinite ballgame
  25. Yet more inscribed squares: a word from Moscow, Idaho
  26. “If anything”
  27. More inscribed squares
  28. Double Sosa T-shirt mystery
  29. Fridgeblogging
  30. More blogrolling
  31. How Barry Bonds is like a businessman on speed
  32. Why I’m cheering for Barry Bonds
  33. Welcome back, rotter
  34. “Learn Bayes’ theorem, it won’t kill you.”
  35. Why yes, now that you mention it, my relatives do control the media
  36. Fraternity recruitment, and blog ethics
  37. The comedy stylings of Vijai Nathan
  38. The Grasshopper King: life on (or after) the midlist
  39. Throwing the baby with a math Ph.D. out with the obnoxious and plagiarizing bathwater
  40. In which I am not up to speed with modern methods of music consumption

July 2007

  1. Amanda Schaffer dot net
  2. Orioles 7, Yankees 5
  3. Orioles roundup: Ripken, scoring runs but losing.
  4. My mom or dad can’t come to the phone right now
  5. Inscribed squares
  6. Everyone poops
  7. And their aura called me a mean name!
  8. A helpful tip for giving math talks
  9. Dane County Fair
  10. Topinambur
  11. Eastward ho (with pancakes)
  12. Things I don’t know how to do, I
  13. The economy of Zimbabwe is over 7,000 times worse than the Orioles lineup but you’d never know it from reading this anti-Zimbabweist blog
  14. I am your target demographic and your Muzak must bow to my wishes: “Goodbye to You”
  15. The Child Worshipers, II
  16. Self-interested law enforcement
  17. Roasted scallions
  18. Gotham New York Bagels and Eats
  19. The White Stripes on the Bus Go “Yeah Yeah Yeah”
  20. And at the next exit there’s a carwash / aquarium
  21. Orioles / White Sox, July 2
  22. Why yellow is a good color for kitchen linoleum

June 2007

  1. More non-standard meat options in Madison
  2. Inka Heritage
  3. When the near West Side was a battlefield
  4. Local band: The Stevedores
  5. Hundreds of hours spent flipping through “Miscellaneous C”, now on my hard drive
  6. Another good way for the Orioles to beat the Yankees
  7. There are many good ways for the Orioles to beat the Yankees
  8. The Child Worshipers, I: overscheduled children
  9. Togetherness
  10. The paperless office and officeless papers
  11. Names of Bands
  12. Significant, but only statistically
  13. Yet more genius (grit edition)
  14. Introducing the blogroll according to Quomodocumque
  15. Jack Voigt!
  16. More genius (there is no math stick)
  17. Does one have to be a genius to do math(s)?
  18. A tip on playing guitar from Captain Beefheart
  19. Puter Puter
  20. Caffe 608
  21. Flat Top Grill
  22. Q:”When will a crab burger be available on the menu?”
  23. You’ve got a great ass, Massachusetts
  24. I’m implicitly projecting onto the affine plane of course
  25. Reading: Soon I Will Be Invincible

2009–2026 →