malvasia bianca

The full report of the school closure task force came out last Tuesday, so I’ve been busy writing to the school board, and I spent almost six hours at the school board meeting last night. I actually was pretty impressed by a lot of things that I saw there. Members of the public (including your […]

One thing from C++ that I miss in Java is the notion of ‘const’. As I commented earlier, I’m always worried when I return an object that I’m exposing too much of my internals. If I had const to help, it might not be so bad, because I could return const objects, but I don’t […]

Thursday, a week and a half ago, we had our monthly classroom meeting (for Miranda’s kindergarten class). And we learned that Miranda’s school is probably going to be closed next year. It was public knowledge that one school was going to be closed, but I had kind of been in denial over the issue – […]

One not very graceful aspect of Java: everything is an Object, except for things that aren’t. (A few basic types: integers of various sizes, floats, booleans, characters, maybe one or two other things that I’m forgetting.) Why is that? The reasons must have something to do with making operations on those basic types more efficient, […]

Ever since we went to see a musical version of A Little Princess, I’ve been on a Frances Hodgson Burnett reading kick. I never read any of her books when I was a kid, but now that I’m giving them a try, I really like the ones I’ve read four so far (A Little Princess, […]

This is the first of a series of Java posts, occasioned by the fact that I’m doing some Java programming for the first time in a few years. When I first started using C++, I thought that its insistence on supporting objects that aren’t held via pointers was, frankly, a little weird. The languages that […]

Some friends of mine were over for dinner the other day, and one of them (Ravi Vakil) was asking me about possible licenses for an algebraic geometry book he was thinking of writing. He’d like it to be freely available, so (for example) students could download it, though he doesn’t actually want to put it […]