I have always loved sci-fi. I love sci-fi more than I love actual science. Sci-fi is hardly ever about science. It is imaginative and fantastic. It is always about people. For exactly this reason, Dark is a fantastic sci-fi. In its three seasons, the lives of its handful characters get deeply and in . . . Read more

I am fascinated by Japan, the country that has produced Naruto, Bleach, Akira, Ghost in the shell, Murakami, Ishiguro, Miyazaki and so much more. An inward-looking, closed island riddled with lost youth and a dying population that has somehow managed to preserve its culture in the present and has ha . . . Read more

I was at a 5 day Project NExT workshop. I heard from a lot of interesting people and learned a lot about teaching. The thing that stood out to me the most was just how different math researchers are from math educators. Math researchers mostly share a feeling of contempt toward people, people are ju . . . Read more

A conference is a good concept in theory but entirely absurd in practice. You take a complete break from your daily life, delegate all your responsibilities to others, hope that your house and your class does not burn down in your absence and head off to some obscure place to listen to strangers giv . . . Read more

“You are right, Watson,” said he. “It does seem a most preposterous way of settling a dispute.” “Most preposterous!” I exclaimed, and then suddenly realizing how he had echoed the inmost thought of my soul, I sat up in my chair and stared at him in blank amazement . . . Read more

Here's something I have been thinking about a lot lately, thanks mostly to my being on the internet almost constantly. We live in a world where we can just google the answer to many of the questions that arise in day-to-day life. This is great in that it is harder to lie about things and this increa . . . Read more

“Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” The central question, says Camus, is that of suicide. If you are going to die one da . . . Read more

Meditation sucks at first. It sucks badly for a long long time. It is SO bad, SO sucky. The harder you try the more you suck at it. But it is hubris to assume that you would naturally be an expert at it. I have been trying it on and off unsuccessfully for many years. Only now, thanks to the lockdown . . . Read more

It was Thanksgiving Day and we had gotten lucky. There were three of us driving to the Grand Canyon and exactly three others had canceled their reservations. Our bags packed with food and water, enough to last a couple of days, overjoyed, we started descending the canyon. You walk and you walk, in t . . . Read more

Ever since the lockdown, first thing in the morning, before I can even open my groggy eyes, I check the news. But no more. There is a concept I first heard about on Joe Rogan’s podcast which was an eye-opener. We have our “circle of control” and our “circle of concern”. . . . Read more

I haven’t been able to write enough the past year. That’s because I haven’t been able to read enough the past year. Poem. The joys of teaching at a public university have been a tad too satiating for me, but they have prepared me well for this new social distancing lifestyle. This . . . Read more

I have been reading Stephen Fry’s Making History and it got me thinking about history and my hate-love relationship with it. Growing up, there was a hierarchy of subjects at school. Maths, “science 1” and “science 2” were at the very top and history at the very bottom, . . . Read more

Every day for the past few months I would excitedly look forward to my work commute across this dreary city; I was listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History. As I was fiddling around with the various podcast apps trying to find one that I could use while driving without getting mysel . . . Read more

I just finished teaching the largest class I have taught so far. It went as well as one would expect a class, that is held in the bleak Canadian fall nights for two hours straight twice a week with a student to faculty ratio of 200:1, to go. Biweekly quizzes. This was the one thing that worked reall . . . Read more

"...when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were chan . . . Read more