Birds

One of our chickens has started laying! Her eggs look exactly like the decoy eggs; fortunately, the decoy eggs are really light (because they were cheap on eBay) so we can easily tell the difference.

I like to imagine her walking into one of the laying boxes, looking at a decoy, thinking, "Oh, ok, I think I can make one like that" and then popping out an egg.

There's some critter that's been trying to dig its way into the coop, so I bought a game camera to determine whether I need traps or target practice.

Books

This summer I wrote a lab manual for the class I developed. Starting this school year, incoming CS students are required to take that class, which means that come next semester there are going to be about 200 students in the lab!

So, this semester I'm editing that lab book so we can get it printed, probably just through the university printing service. The plan is for the book to be very affordable (say, $20ish). In my opinion, charging more than $100 for a textbook is immoral, and if you want to charge more than $50 you'd better have a damn good reason to.

On that note, fuck you Pearson, there's no reason an introductory discrete math textbook should cost $300 new. It seems like almost every 'innovation' in education/'educational technology' is just some new way for a company to extract rent from college students. How you can charge students $20/semester to send radio signals inside a classroom is beyond me.

I recently bought a new copy of Category Theory in Context for $25! If you want to argue that textbooks have a small market...let me tell you, category theory textbooks have a market of about 5 people. If they can make a $25 book on category theory work, I guarantee you can figure out how to sell a discrete math textbook at an affordable price.