In short:

Find the inkscape source, and an example page (in PDF) you can print, at github.

github.com/nouyang: Dot Grid Paper

preview

example notebooks

just stapling ~15 pages together at the top. the issue I found is not being able to tell which way the notebook flipped, and it being hard to flip through pages fast. Also, at 15 pages, I started accumulating “notebooks” really fast, and it wasn’t always very obvious the chronological order. The idea was to detach them, three hole punch, and stick them into a binder. I haven’t gotten around to that yet, and probably won’t ever since the semester is almost over…

using manila folders I found lying around, and a somewhat-industrial stapler across ~25 pages. i haven’t used this enough to think about pros and cons.

the overall con, though, is that now my notes are spread across five different notebooks…

before & after comparison

in detail

i reformatted to properly use clones and the clone tile factory in inkscape; and additionally, I decided on a different formatting for the “darker” lines (before, they evenly divided the page into 4 sections vertically).

Using the clone factory I thus just have two sizes of dots: small and large. And I can change opacity, color, size, stroke, etc. for *all* dots just by choosing editing those two “source” dots. If you’re having trouble finding them, just click on any dot and “shift+d” to find the source dot.

• http://www.linuxformat.com/wiki/index.php/Inkscape_-_cloning_and_tiling
• http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Tiles.html
• http://tavmjong.free.fr/INKSCAPE/MANUAL/html/Clones.html

double-sided

pdftk tiled_clones_30.pdf tiled_clones_30.pdf output merged.pdf

printing notes

Print at high resolution (600×600 or greater), and the only b&w printers tend to have aliasing effects — and old toner cartridges tend to produce blemishes across the pages. Print with “no scale / no shrink to fit”.

example notebooks

just stapling ~15 pages together at the top. the issue I found is not being able to tell which way the notebook flipped, and it being hard to flip through pages fast. Also, at 15 pages, I started accumulating “notebooks” really fast, and it wasn’t always very obvious the chronological order. The idea was to detach them, three hole punch, and stick them into a binder. I haven’t gotten around to that yet, and probably won’t ever since the semester is almost over…

using manila folders I found lying around, and a somewhat-industrial stapler across ~25 pages. i haven’t used this enough to think about pros and cons.

the overall con, though, is that now my notes are spread across five different notebooks…

before & after comparison

29 Jan 2018 edit: I can confirm that, despite JP Licks being an ice cream store, the one in Harvard Square does indeed stock challah, and it’s the sweet and dense one that I like!

harvest co-op in central square used to (for many years) stock a type of challah i really enjoyed, up until the end of 2016.

but for a long while, they haven’t stocked it. i even went so far as to ask when it comes in (wed afternoon), but never saw it again.

it’s this very dense and sweet type of challah, and pulls apart nicely (though still produces lots of crumbs like all challah, and probably all baked goods). i don’t particularly like non-sweet challah.

i finally decided to look up what i had and where else i might find it. inspired by a recent trip to NYC (brooklyn, to visit my awesome cousins). there i found in every corner store some challah — specifically “egg challah” and “raisin challah”. I knew it was the right kind when I saw that the second ingredient, right after flour, was sugar. :]

after some digging in my google chats history… i found this

which i then cross-referenced against “best challah in boston“. although the text is illegible in my picture, the brand / logo was easily recognizable as the first name in the list:

http://cherylannsbakery.com

now, i need to find it in another store. ideally somewhere conveniently located — there’s one next to the target near union square, i guess. also, ideally, not $7 a loaf… the challah in NYC, while not as tasty, was $4. which is good considering that i can go through three loaves in three days. (it’s less dense, aka less moist. it’s probably just as sweet though).

now, challah dipped into a cup of chai… heaven.

hmm,
I almost remember a time when I thought math was fun. Probably in middle school sometime… I had a lot of high school teenager angst by the time I got to AP calculus. I went into AP statistics thinking of it as the “easier” AP math class (vs AP calculus), so that was alright, but not particularly enjoyable nor exciting. In linear algebra, I just felt lost. And in differential equations, I just felt like a failure.

That was the last time I took a math class. It was eight years ago…  1st semester freshman year. (dear lord I’m old, what have I done with my life?)

I think it’s because Harvard SEAS (School of Engineering and Applied Sciences) is so small. There are Math and Physics PhD students in my classes all the time and I know their faces from seeing them around (and sometimes showing up at their socials to eat food :] ).  In particular, I’ve been hanging out with Irina and Sharon, and we’ve been bonding over classes we’re taking together and that utmost of bonding experiences: DESPAIR.

haha well Irina is too chill for despair. But anyhow. Basically, now I know math people, and furthermore they’re my friends and seem like nice friendly normal-ish people, and they struggle and have insecurities like I do. And my friend even told me about how she decided to major in mathematics *because* she had math fear. And I’m sure its something to do with, I don’t think I’ve ever really known other math majors, so I always had this abstract idea in my head which was nowhere close to reality. (Sorry Renee, I should hang out with you more. Wait, that means I now actually call three mathematics majors my friends!). And now the math majors I know as people who struggle sometimes, not generic Mathematics People.

(Probably helps in breaking my stereotypes, that they’re women. Though I hate to admit it, because I’m so tired of the whole diversity thing, and caring about it, and anything… I just want to care more about abstract problems for now),

And my rotation advisor is a math person, he seems pretty normal (and very patient).

I think it’s when I start thinking or reading about other people and the Words and the Theorems that sound so complicated and esoteric, that I feel math fear. For instance, I read recently a bio by  Steve Mitchell (I do not know him), and my main takeaway is that, not only is he some unknowable math person who talks about “homotography groups of spheres” (??), but worse still, he was so much better at being an adventurous bum than me! Hitchhiking in cars and stowing away in trains, dropping out of college, climbing rocks and living on houseboats :'(

while I was exuding distress about failing my classes (well I dropped a class, so failing my one class…), my friend (esteemed almost-Dr. Renee Bell) was trying to cheer me up by telling me about Stephen Smale, who apparently almost got kicked out of grad school before winning a Fields Medal. The difference though, is that I don’t think I can “start working hard” to pass my classes. I *feel* like I’m working hard already, and still failing my classes (and I don’t mean in the “oh maybe I’ll get a B” sense).

For goodness’ sake my hobby went from sailing in the ocean and captaining my own boat and trying to avoid ramming rocks and dying, to taking care of a houseplant on my windowsill at work.

[ I do  really like my plant. It’s a mini rose plant that I got from Trader Joe’s, and it’s actually flourishing. It just put out a flower, another one almost flowered, and I count five more still-tiny buds. Of course, I’m supplementing it with a lot of light, and specifically 5000K light that “mimics daylight”, which I think means it emits more evenly across the spectra.  And I just started my succulent seeds, though apparently they’ll take a month just to sprout… ]

But when it’s just me and the math, independent of faraway people and geniuses; independent of all my insecurities and fears that I’ve built up over years and years, calcified into a monstrous tower looming over me. When I’m just struggling to figure out what it going on, and I have a friend to struggle through it with me (Eric actually ended up staying up all night with me before my advisor meeting ). When I have friends who tell me why math is cool and exciting, When there is no pressure and no people to compare myself to.

That’s when math seems fun.

I bet I’ll change my mind when I take two math classes next semester though. (I should probably just take one, actually). Then I’ll have to work on math with math people, and fail at math. Then I’ll stop thinking math is fun.

It’ll be a pity…