Blog Posts

Seen about town today… Passing by the community garden early this afternoon, I saw a man on his knees, digging and planting. He was being supervised and, it seems, lectured by a young girl, maybe six or seven, in a geranium-colored tutu. (for Joan Solomon Frank)

Seen about town today… Walking downtown, I saw two sparrows on the sidewalk, locked in mortal combat—beaks, claws, the works. A real tussle. I told them to knock it off and they flew away.

Seen about town today… Raindrops the size of grapes

UVM adds quantitative reasoning requirement for general education. Good move. Memo: Approval of a proposal for a University-wide General Education requirement in Quantitative Reasoning

Giving a presentation on Ramsey Theory today. Wish me luck!

March for Science, UVM / Burlington, VT. I was pleased to see so many people!

Earlier this AM I saw a chalk fairy—a real bona fide, honest-to-goodness chalk fairy. He was extremely diminutive and looked to be about 100 years old. Sighting occurred in Votey.

If you’re studying logic at UVM, and if you’re interested in creating Fitch-style proofs in LaTex, and if you want them to look like the proofs that are presented in Language, Proof, and Logic (2011; Barker-Plummer, Barwise, and Etchemendy; CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA), then this fork of Peter Selinger’s LaTeX macros for Fitch style natural deduction is for you! https://github.com/cbcafiero/fitchsty Selinger is Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie University. His website is http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~selinger I have only given his macros a tiny tweak. ... Read more …

via email Dear Mr. Derr: I usually read your email messages with great gusto. However, your most recent Announcement and Events excludes an item of such importance that it must be reported – it cannot be swept under the rug! Of course, I am referring the results of the recent poll conducted on MyUVM where students indicated, by an overwhelming majority of 95%, that you – yes, YOU – were the thing they most loved about UVM. You won by a landslide. This is new. (Poll results attached.) ... Read more …

I had the pleasure today of attending Kevin McCullen’s IEEE-sponsored presentation of… well, honestly, gadgets, doodads and the fruits of his tinkering. The presentation was hosted by Global Foundries, in Essex, VT. Kevin is an assistant professor of computer science at SUNY Plattsburgh and long-time friend and associate of David Hathaway (who taught computer architecture / CS 222 when I took it at UVM). Kevin presented a number of projects he’s worked on in his spare time using Raspberry Pi and Arduino. One of my favorites was a humidity sensor he used to tell if his kids had showered in the AM when they were supposed to! ... Read more …