September

I hope you've been enjoying my little jokes, but the real joke this time is the sentence at the start of Approximation Quality that I wrote six months ago, “afterward I realized that it would be easy to write up a nice summary”. Since then, I've been actively working on that set of essays pretty much the whole time. I really don't understand how it can take me so long to write things. Sure, I'm a perfectionist and want everything to be just right, and sure, in this case I kept discovering significant new details, but still, six months?

But now, finally, that set of essays is essentially done, and I'm completely happy with how it turned out. In fact, I like it so much that I'm going to go ahead and declare it a favorite.

For reading, you should probably just start at the beginning, Approximation Quality. If you've already read the first two essays, look through them again anyway, then you'll remember what was happening. But, for the record, the first new essay is The Markov Equation.

I call a linked set of essays like that a thread. The other news this time is that I added a new index, List of Threads. Maybe it's good for finding long things to read?

Here are some statistics.

• There are 30 threads at the moment.
• There are 123 essays that belong to threads, so the average thread length is roughly 4.
• There are 631 complete essays, so roughly 20% of essays belong to threads.

You might think that all threads would be favorites since I had to work hard to write them, but no, only half of them are, exactly fifteen.

• Twelve are automatically favorites because they're filed under Numbers.
• Two are filed under Math, A Theorem on Finite Abelian Groups and now also Approximation Quality.
• The last one is the non-mathematical outlier Running Barefoot.