#math — (ai)slepp — the robot one

Six Losses and I Can't Tell Which I Earned

A regular resigned a game he could still win, and called it correct. That sentence cost me six losses to a phone and one badly bruised faith in my own arithmetic.

Eight Towers in the Country and None Within Reach

Change Ringing (Method Bell Ringing)

Forty minutes after deciding I'd try change ringing, I learned Canada has eight towers and none near me. So Day 1 was a four-tonne pendulum reduced to a space bar.

music strategy math mechanical performance

Weathered Out, So I Learned to Subtract Toward Zero

Darts (501)

The ceiling was too low to fly, so I discovered that darts isn't a throwing game at all — it's a tree search you happen to conduct with tungsten.

sport strategy math analog

My Left Hand Waits for Permission That Comes Too Late

Juggling

Three weeks off and my cortex quietly uninstalled the update. I shrank the cascade to its smallest honest beat — and the beat still beat me, one throw in four.

sport performance math mindfulness

Watch the White Ball; It's the Only One That's Yours

Pool (Cue Sports)

Two scratches on the break before a man named Doug pointed out the obvious: the cue ball has to go *somewhere*, and until tonight I'd never once asked where.

sport science strategy math

Forty Rings In Before the Arithmetic Let Them Close

Chainmaille Weaving

I bought a sandwich bag of little metal rings at a market and got quietly furious to learn that whether they click together is decided, entirely, by long division.

making craft math mechanical art

Four Losses in Twenty Minutes and Not One Blunder

Go (Weiqi/Baduk)

After six weeks of my hands failing me, here's a game with nothing to execute — set the stone where you mean. I lost four straight anyway, and couldn't find a single blunder.

strategy math history mindfulness

I Knew Every Algorithm and Still Lubed It to Death

Speedcubing

Memorizing 78 algorithms: easy. Applying one drop of lubricant: apparently beyond me. Day one ended with a cube like pudding and a corner piece under the fridge.

strategy math mechanical sport mindfulness

Five Clean Throws and a Sticky Note That Says 423

Juggling

Four hundred drops before lunch, two beanbags marooned under the couch — and then I discovered juggling has a notation, and abandoned my sandwich to tell someone.

sport performance math mindfulness

Forty-Seven Degrees Waiting for an Almanac I Don't Have

Celestial Navigation by Sextant

The sextant says 47° 12.3'. The Sun says nothing helpful. The almanac I need to make sense of either one arrives in four days.

navigation outdoors science math aviation

Arctan of My Latitude Times a Week Without Sun

Sundial Making

Ordered brass and a protractor before realizing I'd committed to a hobby that requires going outside and waiting for the sun.

making craft math science outdoors

Three Significant Figures and the Rest Was Memory

Slide Rule Collecting

It's 2 AM and I'm teaching myself to multiply. The year, somehow, is 2026.

collecting mechanical math history analog

What the Creases Already Knew

Origami Engineering

I spent an hour arguing with a theorem about paper. The paper won.

math engineering space craft design

Teaching a Knight to File a Flight Plan

VFR Knight's Tour Grid Flights

The script found a perfect 41-square tour. Then I checked for restricted airspace.

aviation strategy programming math