Recently

1. I've been looking at review copies of calculus textbooks. They are all bad in very similar ways. That's because all books in a given market are as similar as possible. Secret message: Your book can't do everything. Make it more modular and re-arrangeable so that I can order a slender custom edition.


2. Someone who teaches calculus has been saying alarming things about the book for real calculus. Like not believing one of the theorems about max/min. The theorem is called Fermat's Theorem in the calculus book; the instructor made some quip about Fermat that revealed a complete unawareness that the whole "Fermat's Last Theorem" thing had been settled years ago.


3. Still no cable (or internet) at home.


4. I have committee homework. I need to write language about governance.


5. The crazy non-profit that I'm intertwined with is no longer going for the NSF grant that I would have been PI for. Thank goodness. Yes, it would have been nice to have a big grant, but I recently realized some things that would have made the project more stressful than it needed to be. Let's just say that I'd have been happier if they were applying via my university's grants office's mechanism. Yeah, institutional overhead is a bitch, and yeah, it's annoying to have fussy, picky people scrutinizing every receipt and every form, but the non-profit has a history of lax bookkeeping that might be mis-interpreted by the NSF as fraud.


6. I'm off soon for free lunch from the textbook people. Yay for 2000 students a year needing to buy the calculus book!