Darryl Nester

Preview screen for the movie “Hoppers”

Our mascots awaiting the start of the movie.

Mascots and students looking forward to watching Hoppers.

The beaver character in the movie … and the reason we are getting to see this movie early!

The perks of being at a school with a beaver mascot: When Disney/Pixar makes a movie where a main character is a beaver, you might get invited to an exclusive early screening. #Hoppers

Baby goats are just insufferably adorable.

Here's the same construction, this time on a conformal square model. (Rendering constructions on the square is numerically messy, so more glitches in this animation.)

More information about the conformal square—and some pretty pictures!—available here: archive.bridgesmathart.org/2016/bridges...

Playing around with tangent circles in a hyperbolic plane. You know, typical Friday morning stuff.

(Animation is a little glitchy/jumpy, partly due to numerical inaccuracies, but probably also because I need to fix a few bugs in the routines that update the construction when moving points around.)

Two kittens — about four months old — cuddling on my chest after we got back home after being away for a week.

I guess the kittens missed me.

So much purring.

A gray and white cat lying on a jacket next to a heating vent, with front legs cross-crossed to modestly cover her chest.

Draw me like one of your French girls.

New story about the resignation of Georgia state senator John F. Kennedy

Georgia state senator, not the US Senator.

A screenshot from the video showing side-by-side images of KC, with the Sunshine Band hidden in the background.

I don’t mind KC being the focus when he’s singing, but I would love to see a version of this video with less KC and more Sunshine Band.

“This press conference could have been an email.”

My arm bleeding out my 144th donated unit

A portion of my Red Cross donor card showing that (prior to today’s donation) I was sitting at 143 units.

Topping off my 18th gallon today.

If you are someone who is a little squeamish about giving blood, know that after today’s donation, I will also be grossed out from giving blood.

#dadjokes #badpunsthattake30yearstosetup

I gave a talk about ROT13 last week, and used this post as an example of how to use it to hide spoilers. I was amused that Bluesky offered to "translate" the post, which led to "detected language" = Breton, and exactly one word—"raqvat"—being translated to "socks."

So Byron Donalds can identify a forged Trump signature on sight?

Cool. How about we take all those different signatures, remove all of the surrounding context, and present the set to Donalds. I'm sure he'll be able to say which one is the fake.

Tired of his underwater polling numbers, he asked his advisors if there was anything he could do that would be popular with a majority of Americans.

After an awkward silence, an aide cleared his throat and said, “Well, actually ….”

A very friendly brown-and-white kitten who will start purring almost immediately when you pick him up.

A shy, slightly cross-eyed gray tiger kitten who will run away if she sees you coming, but will tolerate being carried around if you manage to sneak up on her.

An adorable black-and-white kitten who plays very hard-to-get. And if you manage to pick it up, it will do everything in its power to get away and/or make you bleed.

So what I'm hearing is that you are in the market for more foster kittens ...

2026: John Scalzi publishes “Planet of the Apiaries,” hailed by critics as a humorous sci-fi dystopian masterpiece.

2050: Scalzi’s novel (except for the humorous bits) is now studied for its prescient insight into the collapse of human society.

I had the same thought.

The Streisand Effect: How to get people to talk about the thing you don't want people to talk about.

In light of the current peril facing public television and radio, it feels like it’s time to post this again.

Reckon … trifle … these are synonymous, right? /s

I assumed it meant that the rocket made it to heaven, and hit an angel playing the harp.

Happening tonight! I just rewatched the story, both to prepare for discussing this with my students, and to stir up my seething rage against industry leaders and government regulators who resist efforts to put safeguards in place.

*DANNY Smith. Shoot, I knew I should have read through that one more time before publishing it.

"Coal Mine in Kentucky" by the The Black Dragons--Appalachian College of Pharmacy students. YouTube video by Coaltown Dixie

The other song is the haunting "Coal Mine in Kentucky." One of the writers/performers is the daughter of Dave Smith, who is featured in _Coal's Deadly Dust._

"If you can turn a light on, thank a miner. If you don't have to think about your next breath, thank God."

"Vampire in Appalachia" - Acoustic Demo - Original Song by Philip Bowen YouTube video by Philip Bowen Music

The first of these is Philip Bowen's _Vampire in Appalachia_: "While the rich keep getting richer, and the sick keep getting sicker, there's a vampire in Appalachia, and we're running out of blood."

Making these stories more widely known results in pressure on the government agencies and private companies, who (too often, it seems) would rather bury the problem than solve it.

It also is a great chance for me to share two great songs related to this awful story ...

That discussion (coming up on Thursday night) is one of my favorite class sessions, because it's a great illustration for my students—who typically have not thought too much about such things—of the important role independent media organizations play in telling these stories.

Coal's Deadly Dust FRONTLINE and NPR investigate the rise of severe black lung disease among coal miners, and the failure to respond.

For the past several years, I have asked the students preparing for a trip to eastern Kentucky to watch _Coal's Deadly Dust_ from @frontlinepbs.bsky.social and Howard Berkes.

For the past two years—and again this year—Howard Berkes has generously offered to meet (via Zoom) with my class.

And I thought about that birthday girl. Wherever that now 20ish-year-old young lady is now, I hope she and her parents are still singing that song.

And I hope she has better birthdays ahead.

The banner and logo for the NCAA 2024 Woman of the Year contest.

This past week, the NCAA convention returned to Nashville. On Wednesday night, I attended the NCAA Woman of the Year celebration, and at the end of the ceremony, they played ... Rachel Platten's "Fight Song."

In the back-story I wrote in my head about this family, I imagined that these parents had made a very deliberate choice to have their daughter sing THAT song—a Clinton campaign theme song—on the day after Trump's first inauguration, while a half-million women and men marched in Washington.