This week I learned...

• A chipotle is a jalapeño that has been smoked.

• There are lots of ways to tile a regular dodecagon with sides of length s using only rhombi with sides of length s. My favorite so far:

  

  I speculate all such tilings use exactly this many rhombi of each shape—six skinny diamonds, six fat ones, and three squares. It would be really cool if I were wrong. Calculate the area of each shape to see why I think this.

  (Pictured: Melissa & Doug pattern blocks. Great toy.)

• Basic stuff about the Erlang programming language. If you set aside the concurrency features for a second, Erlang looks like ML without static typing or refs. In a word, yuck.

• Haskell has concurrency libraries that I should look at (while I'm learning about language-level approaches to concurrent programming).

  Incidentally, if you're a Haskell programmer, see if you can spot the unintentional self-parody in that blog post. Hint: it's in the sentence “So let's do something useful with this, how about a little program that computes primes and fibonacci numbers?”

This week I started looking for elementary school curriculum materials. My son is four years old. We will probably homeschool him, and I want a head start on this one. Not a lot of luck searching so far. There are a lot of individual lesson plans; for example, PBS has some science lessons. On the other end of the spectrum, I found the What your nth-grader needs to know books and ordered one. We'll see. I really want a variety of textbooks and workbooks.