ursula: bear eating salmon (Default)
I have acquired a literary agent! I'm going to be working with Lauren Bajek, of Liza Dawson Associates, who represents both science writing and science fiction.

I'm tremendously excited and a little bit boggled--I'd been keeping an eye on this agency because I'm acquainted with Hannah Bowman's husband in my mathematician guise, and Lauren's literary taste sounded a lot like mine, but I didn't expect anything to happen this fast.
ursula: bear eating salmon (Default)
My latest newsletter contains a couple of things I'd like you to know about:


  • An old friend has a story in Clarkesworld about a knitting mathematician. (Similarities to your correspondent are probably intentional! :) )
  • The audio from my KGB books reading is live!
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Earth Day call log:

[personal profile] ursula used Governor Gretchen Whitmer's contact form to ask her to deny a permit to the proposed Line 5 oil pipeline, and will further celebrate Earth Day by attending a protest in support of EPA federal employee union members this afternoon.


The Sierra Club is trying to break a record for the most origami fish, if you want a fun craft for celebration.
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My essay On Approaching Hard Problems, about a dear friend and attacks on the NSF, is reprinted in the latest edition of MAA Focus.

NYC reading

Apr. 9th, 2025 04:34 pm
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If any of you are looking for a last-minute thing to do in NYC, I'm reading at the KGB bar tonight!
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My column The Teddy-Lambkin Theorem is live today. Check out my illustrations!
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My most recent newsletter has good news about a friend and a bunch of book and story recommendations.

Also, Neon Hemlock is running a celebratory 50% off ebooks sale with the code ALLEMPIRESMUSTFALL. If you'd like a personalized rec, let me know what sort of mood you're in or what kind of representation you're looking for!
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A dear friend of mine lost her job last week. I wrote about how that happened, and our friendship.

(I used buttondown to make this one easier to share publicly--please do share the link if you are so inclined!)
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Thomas E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won its Battles, 1954-1968.

Ricks is a U.S. military historian. If you're used to thinking about nonviolence as a set of lofty ideals, this project raises immediate questions: why would a military historian be interested? And why would someone who is morally committed to nonviolence--someone like me--care what he thinks?

But there's an intensely practical case for nonviolence as well. I learned this partly from reading Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's work on nonviolent regime change, and partly by turning the counterinsurgency writing of David Kilcullen upside-down.

Here's the thing. Most people, regular people living under whatever government, just want to live their lives. To do that, they need to feel safe--not perfectly safe, but convinced that lightning or roving bands of leopards or the other generalized dangers of existence are unlikely to strike them personally. The task of a counterinsurgency operation is to convince people that their government can keep them safe. A group that wants to change government, for instance by overthrowing the incredibly repressive system of Jim Crow, needs to convince regular people that their government does not protect them.

One way to do this is to make the government's violence visible.

When you think of the civil rights movement this way, as a deliberate and ultimately successful campaign to confront a violent enemy, it's easier to see why a military historian would be interested.

Specifically, Waging a Good War is about the campaigns waged by the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King Jr.'s group) and the SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the group that organized the Freedom Summer). It describes the Movement's strategy (how people chose, or failed to choose, their overarching goals) and tactics (how they pursued them), with regular comparisons to U.S. military campaigns. Most of the comparisons reference World War II; it's clear that Ricks prefers writing about people whom he thinks are the good guys, though he doesn't try to beatify any of the leaders whose decisions he examines.

If you're looking for an overview of the civil rights movement with an emphasis on techniques that other protest groups might try to emulate, this is a very solid place to start. I found, as I hoped, lots of practical information about planning and training. I learned about many civil rights leaders whose names I had not known, and learned more about people of whom I had only heard in passing. In particular, this book is full of praise for the leadership and insight of Diane Nash. As a mathematician, I was aware of the Algebra Project founded by Bob Moses (a very different person from the city planner by the same name!), but had no idea about his foundational role in Freedom Summer. That portion of my ignorance has now been rectified.

One theme that I did not anticipate is PTSD, or, as Ricks often terms it, combat stress. He devotes a substantial portion of the book to the question of what happens after a major operation, how survivors recover or fail to recover. I've seen echoes of the struggles Ricks describes among friends who were heavily involved in the Black Lives Matter protests. The questions he raises about how an organization might try to plan for the aftermath of a huge effort are important. Even in activist circles, I've generally heard this discussed in terms of individual burnout, rather than as a problem of collective support.

Waging a Good War is clear about its own scope. Some elements of the civil rights movement fall outside that scope; in particular, this is not the right place to find a detailed account of the NAACP's legal strategy. A more serious and less intentional limitation is that this book does not contemplate the U.S. as a colonialist power. Occasionally, this flavor of patriotism impedes Ricks' efforts to find an appropriate military simile. Here he is talking about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, for example:

There are few analogies for this situation in conventional modern Western military history. Rather, Hoover operated like a medieval warlord, both an ally of the sovereign and a danger to him...


I am not a military expert, but I don't think it's difficult to find twentieth- and twenty-first century examples of the U.S. cooperating with people it termed warlords!

But this isn't the kind of book you read to stoke your cynicism; it's the kind of book you read to gear up for a long march. If you think a book like Waging a Good War could be useful to you, it almost certainly will.
ursula: second-century Roman glass die (icosahedron)
[personal profile] octahedrite suggested a post about "cool geometry topics". I waited until I stumbled on a cool geometry fact via work. This one's elementary but adorable: what's the largest small polygon? For the purposes of this riddle, "small" means that the diameter (biggest distance from one corner to another) is a fixed small number, which we might as well say is 1 unit. Then you try to find the largest area given that constraint.

It turns out that when the polygon has an odd number of sides, the largest small polygon is always a regular polygon. So the largest small triangle is an equilateral triangle, the largest small pentagon has five equal sides and angles, and so forth. But the largest small hexagon is not an equilateral hexagon! You can find a picture of it at MathWorld, see an animation of its rotations at the delightfully old-fashioned website Hall of Hexagons, or read Ron Graham's original paper, which involves an argument via the excellently named (by Conway, unsurprisingly) thrackleations.

The largest small octagons, 10-gons, and 12-gons have also been identified, but for even-sided polygons with 14 or more sides, finding the best one is still an open problem.

(You can suggest more topics here.)
ursula: bear eating salmon (Default)
Suggest a topic and I'll try to post about it this month? (Past instances of this tradition are tagged january meme, though I see I'm only running a week or so later than last year.)
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2024 was an exciting year for fiction!

short story collection

North Continent Ribbon was released by Neon Hemlock Press.

novelette

The final story in North Continent Ribbon, "A Fisher of Stars," is an original novelette. (If you're reading for awards nominations and would like a review copy, let me know!)

short story

Frivolous Comma published Flannelfeet, a Wisconsin covid-era portal fantasy.

poetry

My poem "Hexavalent" was in Analog in January 2024, and "Beyond the Standard Model" is in Analog in January 2025.

essays about writing



essays about math

Elliptic curves come to date night talks about a fun result combining economics, number theory, and algebraic geometry.
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Nghi Vo, Don't Sleep With the Dead.

Some years after the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful--or The Great Gatsby, which in this world is a semi-factual memoir by one Nick Carraway--dead men from the First World War are appearing on the streets of Paris, as early harbingers of a Second, and Nick is trying to figure out whether he's a real person. The case against it is that he is made out of paper. The case in favor has two parts: the man he was cut out to replace was an awful human being, and there are devils around who seem perfectly willing to bargain for his soul.

This novella is a game with voice, atmosphere, and untrustworthy narration that is going exactly where the title warns one shouldn't. Vo's writing always shines with details that give you a sense of other stories happening just outside the frame. Given the opportunity, I might have chosen to follow one of those stories--the Saint Paul cousin who either disappeared or transformed to someone three inches shorter, the ghosts of the trenches in Paris, the demon who appears as a wax model of a secretary--rather than pursuing Nick's particular charming brand of self-destruction. But that's always the question with Nick Carraway's stories: was the tragedy inevitable, or is he simply very good at not happening to act?

(I read this book as a Netgalley ARC. In the US, it comes out April 8.)
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I bought my eight-year-old niece copies of Bandido and Bandida for Christmas. These are card games that play like cooperative tile-laying games: the object is to prevent (Bandido) or aid (Bandida) the underground escape of a notorious criminal by constructing a maze with as many dead ends as possible.

I thought this worked really well as a game to play with both kids and adults. You can deal in a new player at essentially any time, which means it's easy to accommodate little sisters or grandparents who wander over and get curious about what you're doing, and since the cards are all segments of tunnels, the ability to read is not a prerequisite. (Bandida adds a few special cards that require a bossy eight-year-old or an adult rules reader for interpretation.)

However, these are not easy games to win! An ideal strategy would involve lots of coordination between players to block tunnels quickly. If you're pursuing a more casual "let's just figure out how to use this card" mode of play, the game turns unwinnable due to combinatorial explosion very quickly. The nieces and I got enough partial successes from blocking individual tunnels to keep ourselves entertained, but I'm curious about what an adults-only playthrough of this game would look like.
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My latest newsletter has a poem and interesting readings of North Continent Ribbon.

The poem is "Beyond the Standard Model," currently up at Analog, which I'm really proud of. And there's also a podcast with our very own [personal profile] sabotabby!
ursula: Sheep knitting, from the Alice books (sheep)
Age of Sail alert: I'm cataloguing a book for work called Beyond the learned academy—the practice of mathematics, 1600–1850, and it has multiple chapters about what sorts of mathematics members of the navy were supposed to know to pass their exams.
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North Continent Ribbon is on Esquire's list of best sci-fi of 2024!

It's a really interesting list overall--is there anything you're particularly curious about?
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We Called Them Giants is a graphic novel with text by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans, and lettering by Clayton Cowles.

Lori is a foster kid. She knows that sooner or later, everyone who says they care about her is going to disappear. When her adoptive parents vanish, along with almost every other person on the planet, she has the cold comfort of validation.

There are a few people left, including Annette, a friend from school with relentless Girl Guide spirit, and the Dogs, a group of stragglers who instantly form a postapocalyptic-style gang. There are also giants. Stephanie Hans renders them in flames of red or green, something beautiful and intense beside the grayed-out cartoonishness of the other characters.

The question, of course, is whether Lori is right. Can she trust anyone else? I can report that the answer is sometimes yes but sometimes also no, and that tension is where the story really shines. If "Can people ever be OK to each other?" is a question you've been turning over in your own mind, this might be a good fable for a dark November.

(I read this as a Netgalley ARC. The US release was November 12.)
ursula: bear eating salmon (Default)
I used to make this recipe from the 1997 Joy of Cooking all the time in grad school. I don't spend quite as much time trying to solve the problem of how to make a bag of carrots into a meal as I did back then, but they're still delicious.

carrot muffins

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Grease a muffin pan or line with paper or reusable cups.

Whisk or sift together:

1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1/4 tsp. ground allspice

Whisk together in a large bowl:

2 large eggs (flax eggs also work)
3/4 cup sugar

Stir in and let stand for 10 minutes:

1 ½ cups packed grated carrots

Stir in:

1/4 cup orange juice (sweet apple cider is a delicious substitution, or milk works in a pinch)
5 tbsp. warm melted unsalted butter or vegetable oil
1/2 cup coarsely chopped walnuts or pecans (optional)
1/2 cup raisins (regular or golden)

Add the flour mixture and fold just until the dry ingredients are moistened; there will be some lumps. Divide the batter among the muffin cups. Bake until a toothpick or wooden skewer inserted into one of the muffins comes out clean, 15 to 18 minutes (or perhaps a little longer).

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