Quotes for the past year

 Accumulated on various scraps of paper, which apparently is my brain's preferred mode of operation.

D: "I'm not just a talking head for delivering CS and sarcasm."

D (during a lecture): "What do we know --- he asks rhetorically --- about the properties of cosine?"

A cool note that I'd never thought of, from D: "Testing only tells you if bugs are there. It can't guarantee that bugs are not there."

"We expect furniture to migrate... quite a bit, in my experience."

Grocery checkout clerk: "What's your maximum carry weight? ... are you shopping for an army?"

Me: It took 5 weeks, but we've run out of symbols. How do you feel about the Greek alphabet? Hebrew?

Student: Hmm.

Me: I sometimes use hieroglyphics. Stork times alpha!

Student: That's awful.

(conclusion: we used Greek, plenty of letters there)

This post's theme word is besom (n), "a bundle of twigs attached to a handle and used as a broom." The marketing department recommends that flying besoms be replaced by modern flying broomsticks.

Spear

Nicola Griffith's Spear is a short, fascinating novella that retells a side quest legend in the Arthurian constellation of stories and characters.

It's lovely. The prose is gorgeous, as always from this author. The main character is a woman who gets to make her own choices and have skills and an identity as an individual, which is the kind of detail I wish I didn't have to highlight but I'm glad to see.

Just as with Hild, this book included certain details of daily life and choices that stayed with me. It's raining and two knights are escorting through the woods? One must offer to go hoodless, for the peripheral awareness. Is magic real or is it just cultural significance and placebo suggestions? I loved this, and it was a brief and delicious read.

(I was left with the impression that I missed significant plot choices and story details because I'm not familiar enough with Arthurian legends and lore. That's okay, the book was great anyway.)

This post's theme word is evanescent (adj), "fading quickly; transitory." The evanescent details of lore dimmed beneath the onslaught of accrued cultural Arthurian baggage.

Phallacy

Emily Willingham's Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis is not what I expected. Based on the cover art and the subtitle, it seemed packaged as a popular science book, so I thought it would be a little biology, some interesting research anecdotes maybe, and (of course) the mandatory discussion of bedbugs and slugs ("traumatic insemination" is an extremely clickbait-y phrase).

The book did include those things, but they were side notes --- its true focus was humans, and particularly the way that we (esp. in the west) have structured society in general and scientific research in particular to ignore things that are female-affiliated, even when that is an obvious detriment to scientific knowledge and research advancement. Plus there was an always-uncomfortable, but straightforward and unforgiving, broad consideration of toxic masculinity.

I think in retrospect that it's mostly "life lessons" and only sort of tangentially about "the animal penis", especially since the book itself contains so many descriptions of ways that various animals transfer gametes that are not a penis. The tone overall was straightforward but wry and unquestionably a woman's voice: it unflinchingly and repeatedly drew parallels to the animal kingdom and pointed out how hollow and stupid and full of preconceived notions those parallels were. It was sprinkled with absolutely fantastic footnotes and asides. Willingham has a wonderful authorial tone and a gift for introducing neologisms and puns, casually adding references to popular culture and ancient history, and overall just making me wish that I was her friend so we could cackle together.

My notes overall ended up being mostly phrases or sentences that just struck me as awesome:

• simile used when discussing evolution: "You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction." (p 14)
• "When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?* [footnote: *Men. It's men.]" (p 15)
• "In this work, they used what they called "haptics" and every one else calls "dildos"" (p 30)
• "Lest I come across as unamused and far too earnest, I do think that genitalia and fart jokes can be hilarious." (p 46)
• "Frogs collect of an evening round the pond," (p 65)
• "Given that the human penis couldn't stab through a perfectly ripe avocado," (p 77)
• "The genre of "arthropod (and invertebrate) sex films" is small but mighty." (p 77)
• "This is a very fighty kind of bird, considering that they all apparently agree to go condo together." (p 84)
• "Who hasn't needed, at some point, to reach a neighbor with a lengthy protrusible organ, even if it was just spraying them with a water hose? If you're a barnacle, ..." (p 86)
• "[footnote: *The noise that they make is called "orgling."]" (p 106)
• p 132 she discusses her previous teaching and describes herself as showing slides and "intoning" and then says "I was obviously electric in the classroom."
• some great neologisms like "intromittens" (used frequently) and "tuatararium" (a terrarium for tuatara, p 216) which often is accompanied e.g. by "[footnote: *Yes, I made this word up.]"
• on p 288 I was caught off-guard by the phrase "squad goals" used w.r.t. mites
• "got his Twitter account... suspended for violating Twitter rules, which we all know is almost impossible to do if you're a white male." (p 243)
• "Lest I attract unnecessary derision (only necessary derision, please), no, I do not really think that..." (p 257)
• "This particular, not especially long (in words, but oh, the psychic pain lingers) paper uses the word "penis" more than a hundred times and the word "phallus" sixty times." (p 268)

Overall the book was interesting and suggested new ways of considering and engaging with these issues, and I liked it. I probably wouldn't have read it if not for the squid on the cover, though, so I know my own vulnerabilities.

This post's theme word is lepodactylous (adj), "having slender fingers or toes." I will not be able to consider mittens for the lepodactylous without thinking of arachnids.

The Twisted Ones

T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones is a novel in a genre I don't like --- maybe "haunted gothic American mid-South"? --- and it is not a good book to read alone in a quarantine. It's creepy, but the narrator's voice is reasonable and well-written. So I read it for that reason, and because it was recommended to me, and because the narrator immediately disavows the entire narration and publicly disclaims that it's going to be an unreliable-narrator sort of deal. The narrator is also a professional editor, so the tangents that she wanders off into are direct comments on the text she is writing, or on the words and punctuation she encounters in the world, and that was interesting.

There was one interesting clue early on: the use of the word "voorish" (p. 92), which I had to look up, and which led me down a rabbit-hole of references to Arthur Machen's "The White People", a horror short story which included enough clues that it was obvious that The Twisted Ones is derivative/referential and exists to reply to "The White People" in the same narrative universe.  I found this discovery comforting, as reading the summary of the short story gave me a hint about what horror might be hinted at in the book.

BUT I don't like being creeped out. I didn't like this book, but I read it to the end so that I could expurgate the tension from my brain. Otherwise it would inhabit my brain and claim brain-cycles worrying about when a haunted reanimated deer-skeleton would knock on the windows of my house late at night for unspecified creepy reasons.

Not recommended! Too creepy.

This post's theme word is numen (n), "a divine presence." "I believe them to be some kind of spirits, perhaps the numen of a place, expressed in physical form." (p. 175)

Poesy the Monster Slayer

Poesy the Monster Slayer, by Cory Doctorow and Matt Rockefeller, is a charming illustrated book telling the story of Poesy, an imaginative and resourceful girl, and her battle against various fantastical nightmare creatures. It hits a delicious middle point between the kid's perspective (fight monsters that only rise up when the adults are asleep!) and the adults' (please will this kid just sleep through the night without getting up to loudly play).

I liked the illustrations, the creativity, and the double-reading: it offers a storyline for kids and a sly behind-the-scenes storyline for grown-up interpretation.

This post's theme word is picaro (n), "a rogue; an adventurer." Kids' books often cast the starring child as a picaro, when it is plain to any observant adult that they are a chaotic villain.

Thank you class of 2020

'Tis the season where graduated seniors' student email accounts are turned off, so I am receiving a lot of "thank you and here's my future email address" notes. They are, overall, quite sweet --- it's nice to hear reflections from students on what they learned and how I was able to help them achieve their goals and work on interesting projects.

And.

Every once in a while...

... one of them really tickles me. Usually I just hang on to these and post them on the wall of my office, but since (1) physical notes, and (2) being in the office are both currently infeasible, it's going to be a blog post. Of course.

Judge this for yourself (which appears amid several very laudatory paragraphs):

Unlike most Math professors, you were not generous with hints, which forced me to question and correct myself repeatedly. The experience was not instantly satisfying, but I'm happy that I learned a lot and felt a sense of ownership by the end.

This an absolute gem. Every other sentence is direct, straightforward praise, and it rolls off my sincerity-repelling feathers like water off a duck. But these sentences? These, which could quite easily change in meaning depending on tone and delivery? These strike me to the core, make me so proud and happy, reassure me that the work I do is valuable, and are a pure expression of the goal I am always subtly angling towards: student independence.

Thank you, class of 2020, for sticking with it through this completely bizarre culmination of your college experience!


This post's theme word is hyponym (noun), "a more specific term in a general class." Students are great; hyponymically, the class of 2020 are excellent!

One-person projects

It seems to be a season to do one-person projects. Naturally, I have chosen to move a fainting sofa through my house and down some stairs.

It was ... challenging. As a one-person project, it encouraged me to be creative about tool usage, problem-solving, and how not to crush myself to a paste beneath a sofa on my staircase.

This post's theme word is inquiline (adj), "an animal living in the nest, burrow, or home of another." Tired of quarantining alone in your home? Cultivate an inquiline pet!

What is the worst security account question?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the worst account security question? (Previously: 2016.)

Students came up with some bad ones, mostly classics:

• name of 1st pet
• favorite teacher's name
• what is your name
• hometown/first school
• your password
• hometown
• I hate all of them
• mother's maiden name is a classic
• first vacation
• what is you username?
• where were you born
• first job
• what street did you grow up on?
• 1st pet name?

The only outlier was the unusually-personally-invasive:

• What was the first name of the first boy or girl you kissed?

This post's theme word is elutriate (v tr), "to purify or separate, especially by washing or straining." The account security question did nothing to elutriate spurious logins from authentic ones.

Loose chickens

 These chickens were just out on the sidewalk.

Chicken run? More like chicken, lightly wander around.

This post's theme word is rutilant (adj), "glowing, shining, or glittering with a red or golden light." The chickens were drawn to the sidewalk's rutilant appeal in the late afternoon.

Empress of Forever

Empress of Forever is Max Gladstone's doorstop-sized foray into science fiction. It tells the story of Vivian Lao, a tech CEO/brilliant executive coordinator-and-person-reader, who is trying to use her wits to make things better for the people around her (and, ultimately, all people everywhere: "for the liberation of all sentient beings." p. 982 in the novel & p. 1041 in the acknowledgements). This opening of philosophy --- "wealth was the only real freedom left. Get money and you could do what you wanted, help your friends, pile cash and power as a wall against the world." (p.7) --- is one I read a lot of in certain online circles, and it seems both relevant to modern discourse and incredibly depressing. It's clear why Gladstone chose this as the starting point, not the conclusion, of the story.

This book, however, is trying not to be depressing. The first chapter reads like the climactic chapter of a William Gibson novel (action-suspense-technology gizmos); the second chapter reads like Philip K. Dick (surreal-trippy-helpless in the face of a powerful incomprehensible system). Thereafter, it goes a bit more on the rails, and sticks to an optimistic tone which alternates between joyous nonsense wordplay (describing fractalline spaceships as "whirling furious Mandelcontinents of Pride set against a regimented vast and glistening phalanx", p. 168) and serious well-adjusted grown-ups dealing with feelings and relationships; overall the theme of the book emerges as:

Viv was used to this split-heart feeling. Most of the time the calculative half bubbled out, seizing control. The interpersonal details, your own emotional well-being or your friends', could wait until after you figured out how to solve the problem at hand. (p. 916)

This resonates for me with all sorts of writing around rationalism, adulthood, science, and community-building. (See for example this post, selected arbitrarily from what I read around the same time as this book.) There is a certain philosophical, a-little-bit-cold approach to being a functioning social person, which hits a lot of familiar notes for the educated-techie-rationalist set; even some of the book's one-liner jokes are in this zone: "the human mind had assembled itself haphazard from spare parts meant for something else." (p. 750)

Overall I thought this book was fine, but a bit overlong (how many times will we cycle through "the team was split up, everyone was sad, then someone had a realization that friendship and caring and communication are the solution, then they miraculously get out of a bind!"?), and it didn't hit that magical sweet spot of Three Parts Dead, which had BOTH a protagonist I identified with (as did this book), AND a really cool mechanic/worldbuilding/storytelling aspect. This one felt more plodding, and the long-building climax felt less climactic, for all that it tried, with strenuous adjectives, to stress how incredibly important and galaxy-spanning the repercussions would be.


This post's theme word is circumvallate (v tr), "to surround by a defensive structure, such as a rampart" and fuligin (n), "dark". The hyperspace circumvallations were a bit strange. "Vantablack statues looked like this in person. Fuligin, but green. The light that came off her throbbed." (p. 54)

Incredibly retroblogging

An honest assessment indicates that I mostly want this blog as a post-dated account of things I once did, some time ago. Want up-to-date Lila information? want breaking Lila news? want to know where Lila is, what she's doing, and what she's thinking?

... well, you won't find it here.

On the other hand, you will find all that information, edited and curated as usual, for past iterations of Lila. In particular, starting with the "Repatriation Phase 1", you can now find the following new old posts:

The tiniest steamroller
Purple tree
Sky in mirrored skyscrapers
Ithaca is gorgeous
Bring Up the Bodies
License to Quill

Just so you know, my sycophantic readers, my curious future students, and my intermittently-checking-in relatives, I have made a resolution in 2019 to blog more consistently. And I've beeminded it, so if I fall off from my goal, the sharp sting of a penalty will (maybe) prompt me to post more frequently. I've successfully managed my akrasia on several other topics using beeminder. Here's to 2019, and the 11/12ths of it that remain!


This post's theme word is nuncupate (v tr), "to solemnly pronounce," or "to declare a will orally." Long-time readers considered Lila's nuncupation as tenuous and tongue-in-cheek, which it probably was.

What is the unluckiest thing that ever happened to you?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the unluckiest thing that ever happened to you?

Some people referenced the luckiest thing that ever happened or other earlier attendance questions:

• bird
• also existing
• not existing?
• I live next to [student X] -- student Y
• I live next to [student Y] -- student X
• bird?

Should I be worried about the recurring "bird"s?

Others had medical mishaps:

• chipped my front teeth when i fell down laughing 
• a week after getting surgery in preeschool, a kid kicked me in the stomach & I had to have the same surgery again
• deviated septum during a soccer game
• appendicitis is the only time my parents ever visited campus

Some cited student-specific concerns:

• fire alarm night before test
• having all midterms on same day
• exponential runtime
• snapped my oneCard 2 times in 2 days

And then a smorgasbord of miscellaneous bad luck?

• missed 2 straight connecting  flights
• :)
• I got left by my parents in Paris in a train station
• dropping my laptop
• dropping my laptop 3 times
• Hurricane Harvey hit my city on my birthday :(
• I fell over 5 times in 30 minutes wearing the best boots I've ever worn
• i once had to wait at a red light

The award for "Sounds Most Like a Cautionary Tale" goes to "brother pushed me in a well".  The "Technically Unlikely but maybe not UnLUCKy" prize goes to "lost twenty coinflips in a row." The tip-of-the-hat for luck-n-privilege awareness goes to "i once had to wait at a red light."

This post is dedicated to students who are perusing the archive in search of something to brighten a day that feels unlucky.

This post's theme word is contretemps (n), "an unforseen and unfortunate occurrence; a disagreement or dispute." Wednesday's child is full of woe; Grumbleday's child is caught in contretemps.

What is the luckiest thing that ever happened to you?

I take attendance by having students answer a question.

What is the luckiest thing that ever happened to you?

A lot of people are grateful:

• every day I get to wake up and live a pretty sweet life
• being here
• existing
• ^ that
• Already written, but existing
• unoriginal, but existing
• getting to be here today
• being born into my circumstances
• go to Swat
• My Mom
• Swat
• getting lotteried out of ML to take Algo.

Many people briefly summarized what must be a much longer story:

• meeting the same Spanish traveler twice in one city and finding out he prepared my medicinal bath from the day before.
• meeting my significant other
• One time I got a concussion and they thought I had broken my neck and was gonna die but I didn't.
• Finding a lost friend in Barcelona
• living with [two other students in the class]
• Last week I was stranded in Philly and ran into a friend.
• a star fell on me

Some people kept it brief:

• e72 pset got cancelled
• fall break
• sleep
• dogs
• Hi blog!

... yes, that last one is a real thing that an actual student wrote to mark their attendance today. They get the "You Almost Asked for This" Prize.

This post is dedicated to everyone reading it: you exist! Huzzah!

This post's theme word is uberty (n), "abundance; fruitfulness". I went through an uberty of thankfulness while contemplating the tenuous and unlikely events leading to my own existence.

What word makes you turn your head because you think it's your name?

I take attendance by having students answer a question.

What word makes you turn your head because you think it's your name?

Publishing the answers that students wrote would go against my general policy of "don't publicly identify people by name without their explicit consent." So instead of writing their actual responses, let me give you a gloss:

• [student's name, but an alternate spelling]
• [description of sneezing in another country with different typical accents]
• [commonly-uttered phrase in a computer lab]
• [student's name, verbatim]
• [word that rhymes with student's name]
• [non-grammatical sentence/series of words that, if spoken quickly enough or muffled, might rhyme with student's name]
• [list of nine one-syllable names rhyming with student's name] "and eight thousand others"
• "[student's name] but it's a different [student's name] than me"

I am glad, as always, to have an unusual-but-mostly-pronounceable name. I continue to resolve to name my child "Robert');DROP TABLE Students;--", unless that name becomes too popular among database-saboteur parents.

Today's "I don't think you got it" Award  goes to the student whose attention is grabbed by "Anyone yelling anything and staring at me". You got it, buddy, good job.

This post is dedicated to the diligent and compulsively thorough student readers of the future, who are reading every post here for a reason inscrutable to me. I know you exist. Hello!


This post's theme word is asterismos, "the use of a seemingly unnecessary word or phrase to introduce what you're about to say." Hi-ya! Good morning class, I'm Lila! (<-- be="" delivered="" must="" p="" pronounced="" rhyme="" singsong="" to="">

What is your favorite pattern?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is your favorite pattern?

Visual patterns:

• checkered
• paisley
• checkered
• geometric
• stripes
• plaid

Math patterns:

• a hexagonal lattice
• fractals but only when graphed on the TI-84
• Fibonacci #s
• fibonaci [sic] sequence 
• Mandelbrot set
• compound interest
• Minkowsky
• Pascal's Triangle
• the one that looks like this [scribbled-out drawing] NVM I messed it up but it's like a fractal with a lot of circles
• set of interesting numbers

Social patterns seemed to be mostly self-referential descriptors:

• women self-selecting out of CS (not)
• sleep, eat, soccer (repeat)
• sleep, eat, sleep, eat, sleep, eat (repeat)

The uncategorizable "randomness" gets a mention, since: is that a pattern? Ditto to "object-oriented" and the student who wrote simply "hate patterns", as if adding a subject to the verb would take too much effort. You hate so much that it suppresses your verbal skills. Apparently.

A tip of my hat to the person clever enough to say "baldness".

I looked up the symbols to transcribe this as faithfully to the handwritten original as possible: "D^♭Δ7E⁷AΔ7FΔ7".

The Award for Narrative Convenience and Irksomeness goes to the person whose favorite pattern is "deus ex machina".

The Recurringly Attempting to Get Into the Professor's Good Graces Plaque goes to the student whose favorite pattern is "one of good attendance".

This post is dedicated to the student who diligently checked this blog --- although often through a VPN, so that I wouldn't know who was reading --- and then came to my office throughout the semester to ask me why I wasn't updating it.


This post's theme word is antimetabole, "a literary and rhetorical device in which a phrase or sentence is repeated, but in reverse order." The linguistic patterns woven into the antimetabole dazzled and amazed.

Living in a postcard

It's incredibly picturesque here.

And that's true even without the filters added!

This post's theme word is revet (v. tr.), "to cover a wall, embankment, etc., with masonry or other supporting material." Backyards and sidewalks revetted to follow streams and allow for trees and landscaping!

Dear Evan Hansen

This musical will forcibly draw tears from your tear ducts. It will wrench the feelings straight out of your heart and condense them on your face as salt water.

Evan Hansen (protagonist) is a high school senior, and socially anxious to a degree that projects out to the last seat in the theater. He has usual high school senior worries --- college applications, trying to make friends, talking to his crush --- and some unusual ones; when a classmate commits suicide, he finds himself drawn into an increasingly elaborate construction of a false past friendship, because it helps him form actual current friendships. But they're based on lies, so how real are they?

End synopsis.

The titular protagonist is achingly lonely and isolated, despite being surrounded by social media (figuratively "surrounded" in the usual psychological sense; literally "surrounded" in the staging, with screens projected everywhere). This highlights the now-trite observation that we are more interconnected (in terms of data transfer) and less connected (social constructs like friendship) nowadays.

I have a lot of thoughts about why this musical is so deeply affecting, and why it has its hooks in my mind so firmly, but they're not coherent and to some extent it's just: I'm wired this way, catchy music is catchy, the story feels both timely and realistic. No flying across the stage or magic, and the least-realistic part is perhaps that people break into coordinated song mid-conversation, but... let's posit that in my mind, this often happens anyway. So perhaps "realistic" is not as accurate as "realistic to the mental reality I inhabit", which: ditto for the ideas about isolation, connectivity, the endless rehashing of previous social interactions. (Though I think I carry them off with a lot less outwards anxiety than Evan.)

On the topic of mistakes made publicly and online --- which form the core of the spiraling-out-of-control plot --- I completely agree with Scott Alexander, who wrote that it's "bizarre that we dare to talk at all when we know every word we say is logged and the future may be less forgiving than the past."

It's not clear what will happen after the plot is over, in the world of Dear Evan Hansen, and somehow the plot is so catchy, the ideas explored are so deeply captivating, that my mind has never wondered over to the area of: hey, what happens after the curtain is lowered? I don't know and can't hypothesize; everything is so utterly messed-up, and there is no hope of redemption; if there is any moral at all, it's that we should all have a short memory for bad things and a long memory for good ones, and absolutely no engagement with social media at all.

... welcome to my personal blog! Wonder of wonders, irony of ironies.

This post's theme word is pudency (n), "modesty, bashfulness." Is it a social anxiety disorder or just a profusion of pudency?

The Obelisk Gate

 N. K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, a 2017 Hugo nominee, continues where The Fifth Season left off --- instants later. This means that it continues the momentum of the first novel, and since I am inhaling these books between fever-naps, I can continue to read, with no break between installments. This momentum is no slow-building thing; like the continental plates in the book itself, it starts with a lot of powerful momentum already. The Fifth Season is dedicated "For all those who have to fight for the respect that everyone else is given without question", a theme which is reinforced by later explicit guidelines for slavery, which state "Tell them they must earn the respect which everyone else receives by default." (The Fifth Season, p. 61) These are generic enough to hook my attention: whether commenting on the explicit formation of an underclass, or the implicit ways in which gender often sidelines women, these quotes shape how I approached the book and the themes that stood out while reading.

If that was not enough, the series begins with a murder and progresses by showing that the main characters are not invincible or immortal. Jemisin does not shy away from killing characters who, in a typical fantasy context, I would have earmarked as protected-by-narrative-importance. Quite early, we have this narration:

When we say "the world has ended," it's usually a lie, because the planet is just fine.
But this is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.
This is the way the world ends.For the last time." (p. 15)

If the force of subjugated peoples were not enough, the blazing reference to T. S. Eliot is certainly a strong hook, a demand for attention and an indication of the scope and importance of the narrator's tale.

All these layers continue in The Obelisk Gate, where we finally see the culmination of the intertwined threads of The Fifth Season, and some new narrative threads begin to spread out. One would think that in a three-book series which begins with "this is the way the planet ends", there might not be very much more to say or do, but Jemisin's main characters reach to grasp their fate in full knowledge of the limits of their power and the lifetimes available to them. The novel progresses in the usual fantasy way --- people study hard, focus their attention, and are able to harness increasingly absurd amounts of mystical power --- but the a-few-months-ago apocalypse, and the characters' individual motivations, make this book enjoyable. There is, of course, some fantastic writing to carry the entire thing, a nice dollop of words atop a teetering pile of ideas.

I liked it.


This post's theme word is cabochon, "a gem polished but not faceted." The ability to control magic is a cabochon in children; a sparkling, cut jewel in trained adults.

The Fifth Season

N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, a 2016 Hugo nominee, is excellent. It alternates between several stories of women in the land of “the Stillness”, so-called ironically because its continental plates are so mobile that the inhabitants’ architecture and social structures are centered around the common occurrence of earthquakes and other geologic activity. In the face of such disruption, society demonizes the few people who have the power to control seismic activity, since they have enormous destructive potential. The magic training school --- which inevitably exists, this is fantasy --- emphasizes both that it is difficult to learn to control this ability, and that certain magical potency is innate. Geomancers (not their actual nomenclature in the novel) are denied personhood, ostracized, killed, or collected as slaves and subjected to the cruel and often lethal regimen of the magical training school, then permanently enslaved by the government in service of providing geologic stability to politically-important regions.

This book was excellent. It reminded me of many other things, which I want to emphasize does not mean that it actually shared any deep similarities with them.

In giving women agency and the freedom to exhibit a variety of motivations and character traits, it reminded me of Le Guin's Earthsea series; also, of course, it featured a variety of not-particularly-Western people, often described by the color of their skin (almost none of which were "white"), coping with an uncooperative earthquake situation. Yes, there was magic. Yes, there was racism. Yes, family and social structures were highlighted and important. But whereas Le Guin's stories usually turn inwards, focusing on small-scale solutions and interpersonal conflict, Jemisin's story grew bigger and bigger, accreting import and severity as the characters (inevitably) levelled-up in magic and in their understanding of what is really going on with the social structure. The scope ballooned in typical fantasy style, and it did it magnificently.

There's always an interesting feature of reading a novel (especially digitally): the images conjured in my mind are completely my own, not even influenced by cover art. I appreciate that Jemisin consistently reminded her readers that her characters, and everyone in her world, was a shade of brown, lest our whitewashing imaginations run away with us. The geography --- unsurprisingly an often-described feature in a book about lethal geological activity --- was often described in magical-intuitive terms, as if one could sense the pockets of magma circulating below. Vegetation gets short shrift. This was okay with me, as it meant that my brain often substituted settings from From Dust, a video game where gameplay consists of reshaping geography by dropping lava and trying to avoid too much destruction of villages.

Describing a book by its magical system, and then by similar-but-distinct things that it reminded me of, is surely a disappointing and unsatisfying type of recommendation. The book was great. You should read it for yourself. I'm not alone in liking it; it won the Hugo award!

This post's theme word is sorb, "to take up and hold by ad/absorption." The soil can only sorb so much groundwater before a disastrous flood ensues.

Theory of computation jokes

I encouraged my students to write jokes (about the course subject matter!) on the back cover of the midterm and final exams. (Writing a joke was worth 1 point of extra credit.)

I then foolishly didn't copy these jokes into my permanent lecture notes! I chalk this up to my first-year teaching experience; I'll not make such a grievous error again.

I only remember a few, usually the GROAN-inducing ones; so here, with no attribution, I share them with you below.