#40C3

#40c3

In August, I had a big uptick (during the Austria trip), and found it hard to do very consistent calorie restriction since then. I haven't hit the lower end of my target weight range in over a year, so I'm posting here for some accountability! :)

I'm re-commiting to 1200-1600 kcal per day, until I'm at 64 kg again!

Maybe a weekly check-in would be good at first, to report how this is going! I'll do the next one on Monday.

(Graph made with https://github.com/blinry/nom)

I had a super thin chocolate chip cookie this weekend, with a chewy interior and slightly crispy edges! 🍪 It was absolutely perfect!

So I turn towards y'all: Can you recommend a #vegan chocolate chip recipe that gives results like that, so that I can make these at home forever?

Split-screen multiplayer for everyone!

https://sivecano.codeberg.page/blog/wm_enabled_multiplayer/

#river #rhinewm #wayland #multiseat

Gibt's zufälligerweise ein Wesen in #Leipzig, das Lust hätte, @_sohalt und mir heute Abend die @dezentrale zu zeigen? :) #chaosreisen

Japanese toilets! 💖 They have so many cool features!

Like... vaccuming! Or compacting! Or scraper tools! And gotta love those foot rests!

But I'm pretty happy with how far I got, after my initial fears of putting my face in the water at all! I'd estimate I put in 40 hours of total swimming time to reach this point?

Maybe next year I'll attend a not-for-total-beginners front crawl training course and get some feedback. And start timing myself again/increasing the distance, see the beginning of this thread!

But I'm really enjoying swimming as a sport now, and I'm glad that I thought of trying it! 🏊️ Thanks for reading along! :)

My rhythm isn't very stable yet, and breathing seems like the biggest challenge: I *think* the trick is to breathe out a tiny bit as your mouth leaves the water, to blow away some water, and then inhale freely. Also, turning your head the proper amount needs a lot of practice, you wanna turn it as little as possible, but still safely get your mouth into the air. Always wondered how people do that, and I'm still not good at it!

I mostly practiced front crawl in the 25-meter pool, which was often emptier and so required less awareness of what was in front of you. The 50-meter pool has dedicated lanes for "fast front crawlers", where people move around in a long-stretched rectangle. But I didn't dare to use it yet – think I'm still slower than when using breast stroke.

But by now, I *did* manage to front crawl a full 50-meter lane a couple of times, which felt great!

The Total Immersion book teaches you that you can turn on your back in the water when you wanna catch a breath, and it felt great to practice the motions in a very slow, unhurried way. It felt great when I managed to start gliding through the water like that – the most I've felt like a 🐟️ so far!

Had to get used to the motions, and sometimes my shoulders or my back hurt from the unfamiliar stretching. But I can see why people like this technique!

In case you missed it last weekend, here's a round-up blog post I did at the end of #mathober with all my zines: https://aperiodical.com/2026/11/mathober-2026-my-month-of-maths-zines/ (I've now gone almost a whole week without making a zine and I'm doing ok, if you were wondering.)

I felt awkward and uncoordinated at first, but slowly made progress.

My swimming goggles had been fine for breast stroke, but when turning sideways to breathe, they quickly leaked. So I went to a store, tried on all models, and then got the one that seemed to cling to my face best. It's a completely transparent one – not the coolest-looking, but I decided that I totally don't care about that when I'm learning. :D And the underwater view with this one is great!

I got a couple of books about swimming technique from the library. The one that clicked for me was one following Terry Laughlin's style of teaching: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Immersion

It suggests a progression of detailed exercises for learning front crawl. For example, what no other book explained is how you tilt your body to the side in the water, and how you alternate sides! Or how you can imagine two "rails" to follow with your arms.

I'll switch to outdoor sports for the winter, so swimming season is coming to an end for me. But I wanted to report how my front crawl practice continued!

I kept going to the pool three times a week (thanks to @neonmate, I could participate in her company sports program). I'm really lucky to have the Alsterschwimmhalle pretty close by. I love it there: It has a 50-meter pool under a cool-looking roof, and often gets very cozy sunlight!

(Picture: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2023-11-04_Alsterschwimmhalle.jpg, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

#mathober day 31: Existential Closure

There exists an 𝑥 so that

a) 𝑥 is the author of this toot and
b) 𝑥 had a lot of fun with #mathober!

This was a great format to peek into many different branches of mathematics, and also to experiment with digital drawing and #krita!

Thanks to everyone who participated! =)

#mathober2026 #math #logic

#mathober day 30: Spheroidal Wave Function

This is based on a plot of R_{10, n}^(1)'(10, ξ) which I found in a paper by Adelman, Gumerov and Duraiswami from 2014 – their motivation was to compute acoustic scattering!

#mathober2026 #math #appliedmath

#mathober day 29: Two Triangle Theorem

This theorem states that if you build a kite out of two triangles, you will be pretty happy!

#mathober2026 #math #geometry

#mathober day 28: Conic Double Point

This is the Barth Sextic, a sexy surface with no less than 65 conic double points!

#mathober2026 #math #geometry

#mathober day 27: Indefinite Quadratic

Here are some quadratic functions that are *definitely not* indefinite – I found it more interesting to draw many of those!

Can you guess from the drawing what being indefinite means in this case?

#mathober2026 #math #algebra