Tuesdazzzz

Last night I worked on a quilt for my BFF that I started in 2008 (oh good god smh). I'm feeling incredibly underwhelmed by it, but I did like the little strip I made with the scraps!

 I'm so excited by the new neon fabric I got but very unhappy about the other scraps. I guess my tastes have changed a bit in 6 years. 

To cheer myself up I made this guy:

And felt better. It's going with the other bright blocks I'm making (see the boring post below). Super stoked about having multiple sized blocks, this one is 20.5 inches. And I've decided I'm tots over tutorials and want to figurout patterns myself. Lvl up y'all!

February Blocks

February had two blocks, enjoy!

Baltimore MQG BOM

So I might someday become a member of the Baltimore Modern Quilt Guild.  But until then I hope they still post their block of the month tutorials.

Here is my first:

(It is weirdly out of focus, one day I will own a real non-phone camera).

I am going to use this pack I bought, plus some orange and black stuff.  

It's funny, I've been doing some improv quilting this month, and doing this block was such a CHORE to make it all square and nice (fyi it has horrible corners :P )

Bedsized

I made my bed this morning!  So I figured I should post the first bedsized quilt (and first quilt!) I ever made.  This was done with the same blocks as the lap quilt in this post.  It's fun how binding can change the entire color feel of a quilt.

This goes out to all my Open Source users

Documentation is like sex; when it's good, it's very, very good, and when it's bad, it's better than nothing.

-- Dick Brandon

Adults, their phones and mindfulness

Being the good little yuppie that I am (vomit face) I was listening to marketplace on the way home from work today, and they had an excellent segment on adults and their phones.  I perked up about this segment, not only for the climax of the girl backing up her argument with data (fantastic job!), but because this is a problem which my significant other and I have recently learned how to solve.

I am terrible at using my phone inappropriately, being sucked into it and not paying attention to others.  The solution which we found to work, with no help from google mind you, which is centered around teens and their phones.  Is in fact mindfulness.  I tell my SO what I'm about to do on my phone.  If I need to tell my roommate something, say I realize it is trash day, I verbally say "I am texting Sarah we have to take out the trash".  This way he knows what I'm doing.  What this solution seems to fix is the problem which is pointed out in the segment:

Scott Campbell is a communications professor at the University of Michigan. He studies the way mobile devices affect people. Habit, says Campbell, is not about how much a person uses their cell phone, it’s about intentionality.

“Habit means that you’re not thinking about what you’re doing. That it’s an automatic kind of reaction. I think people use mobile technology in a more reflexive way..."

Since I am being mindful on my phone useage, I don't have the reflex any more to grab it and flick through apps in a practically meaningless manner.  Although, I still find myself doing this when he is not around.  I suppose my next battle is with myself.

MAA AMS Joint Meeting

I took a day off today to go down to the MAA AMS Joint Math Meeting.  Unlike the SIAM meetings this one has a liberal arts flavor to it.

This is how Google works.

Depth-first and Breadth-first search trees from the Botanica Mathematica Project (guess which is which :D )

Most talks I went to revolved around permutations on a pattern or thoughts on teaching. By far my favorite was that by Karl Scha er Dances of Heavenly Bodies: Dance, N-body Choreographies, and Change Ringing.

And I will end with the following quote from the keynote talk on Erdös:

Six is a perfect number in itself, and not because God created all things in six day; rather the converse is true -- God created all things in six days because the number is perfect.

-- St Augustine