You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

Here’s another linkdump—a list of links to stuff I thought was interesting but likely won’t get to properly reviewing any time soon.¹

I reserve the right to more fully review any of these article at a later date, of course. (Though at this point, it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen.)

For context, these are some things I learned in the process of putting together and delivering a guest lecture to a first-year discrete math course last summer. The talk was about the research I was doing at the time, and I was allotted about half an hour for the presentation. Again, I meant to write and post this last year, but clearly that didn’t happen.

I really meant to put this list up sometime last fall… whoops. (This is yet another incredibly overdue article.) Anyway, here are a whole bunch of things I learned while attempting to “do research” last summer, whatever that means. The big theme here is to make life easier for future you, who will have to wrangle together your several months of chaos and exploration into a rigorous and coherent narrative. Present you can help by being organized and breaking things down into smaller, documentable steps.

Everyone and their mom is on Substack now and I really don’t know how I feel about it.

Substacks aren’t really blogs; they’re part of an ecosystem that feels a little bit like the social mediaification of blogging.

Blogging is supposed to be one of the last defences against the shackles of social media expectations, but I feel like Substack centralizing so much of the long form discourse on the internet can’t be good. Every once in a while I consider getting on Substack, but it just feels wrong for some reason. I believe in people having their own space on the internet.