burning bright
Perspicacious readers,
I'm on the Ancillary Review of Books podcast A Meal of Thorns this week, talking to Jake Casella Brookins about Melissa Scott's novel Burning Bright. This is a book I imprinted on as a teenager--my copy still has a strip of perforated paper from a dot-matrix printer inserted as a bookmark--and it was fascinating to talk it over with someone discovering the story for the first time.
Earlier this month I posted a new math column, The Hypergeometric Flower Pot. This one involves the video game Balatro, my marker doodles of card suits, the intricacies of elementary probability, and an introduction to the infinite series that inspired a book called Hypergeometric Functions, My Love. I took photos of one of the decks of cards I have lying around the house for inspiration. For some reason, I own two decks of cards from local breweries and one with ethereal paintings of spirits. This one is an Arbor Brewing Company deck, so I had to arrange the queens strategically to avoid featuring their large mugs of beer.
Here's Gennoveus resting strategically, in what the internet would call a classic shrimp pose:
Yours,
Ursula.