Update with enough math

Life continues to be rich and full here in Enoughsville. This past week, my life has been particularly rich with mathematics. I'm in week 3 of 4 of working on two different projects with a pair of research students, and I've been having lots of fun thinking about how to solve problems. Normally, I sleep like a rock, but this week I have had happy bouts of math insomnia, leading to delightful and useful geometric constructions.

I'm also preparing for MathFest, our annual, gleeful summer math meetings. I'll be leading a mini course there, so I've been working on gathering all sorts of materials, plus setting up lunch dates with friends, colleagues, and editors. I love these meetings!

Last week, I shared that my daughter Inkling had made a hat. This week, I made a hat myself, although with quite a different pattern. Here's the background for why I made it: I'm on a search committee for an editor of one of my favorite math journals. The head of the search committee wrote

I'll be at MathFest. . . . In any case, if you're coming to MathFest, please imagine that you're wearing a sandwich sign that says, "Ask me about editing Mathematics Magazine!" Or, I suppose you could actually wear that sign. I seem to recall that Snough specializes in making costumes out of nothing.

And with that gauntlet thrown down, let me give you my recipe for a hat made out of (nearly) nothing.

Ingredients:

• "pre-cycled" card stock, saved from the covers of manuals whose insides have been recycled.
• A cardboard lid from a printer-paper box whose bottom had gotten smooshed
• Elmer's glue from the gallon jug purchased two decades ago at a yard sale for $2.
• 

Directions:

1. Photocopy some of your favorite journal covers onto the card stock. Glue these together into a cylinder that wraps nicely around your head, saving one page for the top of the hat.
2. Cut a large oval from the cardboard lid, and from inside that, cut a smaller oval the size of your head.
3. Glue the page for the top of the hat to the small oval, and then cut tabs on the outside of the oval that you can glue to the inside of the cylinder, to attach it.
4. Cut tabs on the bottom of the cylinder, and use these tabs to glue it to the large oval.

Voila! If you are jealous, I too (like my daughter) can make you one for only $60.

It's reversible! 
(Not inside out, but front-to-back)

Meanwhile, the home next to mine (the bald-faced hornet nest) that was built just last year continues to slowly deteriorate this summer. We had some rather severe rains, and they make this structure really look like something out of a horror movie. It is fascinating to watch.

And . . . that's kind of it.  Unless you want me to tell you more about Steiner conics and force/funicular correlations.  Which, I'm guessing, you don't . . . so that's enough of my adventures, in which I am contentedly wealthy.  May you and yours be similarly prosperous.