Matt Mack

Howdy! I'm currently a PhD student #mathbio but have an eclectic mix of interests/specialties including: 🧶knitting/crochet/cross-stitch 🦻accessibility esp. in maths 👨‍🏫maths education 🧮operations research 🎵classical music And am always groaning about how little time there is to learn everything!

There were student talks today and the app that controls my hearing aid volume wasn't working today so I couldn't turn up my volume to hear the students sufficiently today arrrrrrrrrrrgh. Thanks, enshittification of tech /shakesfist

Seems like out of my attempt at comparing Nagi's (RecipeTinEats) baked vs no-bake cheesecake recipes I definitely prefer the baked version in terms of preferred mouthfeel and resistance-when-biting-into-a-piece. Now I have too many cheesecake slices in my fridge, anyone want? 🙃

Finally drew a stupid comic I have been making in my head over the past week after seeing one too many 'bogan moth' comments on social media lol

I don't understand "respectful workplace culture" because it seems like ableds take that to mean they can't ask me about my disability or accommodations so I have to throw information at them and most of them will get it wrong anyway ARRRRRRRRRGH.

Looking for conflict resolution resource recommendations, bonus points if it's tailored towards disability advocacy, and/or has case studies and starting scripts for dumb neurodivergent anxiety-ridden people like me. (Assume I've already Googled, ChatGPT'd, etc.)

It's hilarious how after RJ Mitte's passing that people say "Please reach out to someone if you're having a tough time". People feeling suicidal just don't have the headspace to do that. Telling you right now from personal experience and years of suicidal ideation.

Earlier this year I replaced a string on my cello, had a chat with the luthier and concluded that I definitely need a better cello. If you want an idea of the instrument-trying process, worth watching/listening to this 22m video:

Today's Cool Thing: Seeing @davidkbutler.bsky.social in action helping out a student with real analysis and realising he'd already figured out the higher-order thinking/discussion behind the sandwich classification task I've been annoying other people with 😁

Too many people are calling on the community to "change how we value papers". Not enough people are posting "this is what we look for in our next hiring round".

Dear Ayam (food brand), Your laksa soup paste (serves 2) recommended recipe suggests 270mL of coconut milk (+3/4 cup veg broth +1/4 cup water), yet your coconut milk only usually comes in 400mL tins. /narrows eyes (Taste is fine, little sweet for my liking)

Watched movie Awakenings (1990), from a book by Oliver Sacks by the same name, based on a true story about a doctor (Robin Williams) figuring out a miracle drug working on otherwise "frozen" patients (Robert de Niro + co.). Worth a watch for the emotional gut punches.

If there's one thing I'm hating about my (presumably superior) pattern recognition abilities, it's spotting all the tells of AI-generation in these batch of maths assignments I'm marking, but knowing that communicating these alone is not very likely going to convince others.

I want this job but for a maths content creator. Or if I had the money I'd hire someone for this kind of job and be the face myself.

I'm trying to work through Bayesian Data Analysis (Gelman et al.) and I really hate the writing. It's so waffly because I don't understand enough to properly discern all the discussion points around the theory being explained.

I'm looking at various "deaf/hearing-loss" t-shirts and I just want one that's like "Talk to this ear, the other one's deaf", with an arrow. If the t-shirt industry wasn't so messed up now I'd probably bother with my own basic design. Maybe I should anyway...🤔

New blog post: "Some invisible work that I do to accommodate my hearing loss for academic talks/conferences" matthras.com/2026/10...

New blog post: "Some invisible work that I do to accommodate my hearing loss for academic talks/conferences" matthras.com/2026/10...

I'm checking out the Adelaide Film Festival offerings and one really stupid thing is that foreign language films will inevitably have English captions and thus will be more accessible to me than English-language films without captions 🙄

Reminder to Self: Buy tickets earlier next time. There's a Nature Festival going on, two events I wanted to go to (including one today) for some reason I didn't anticipate there'd be limited seats + popularity and thought I could buy the tickets last-minute /facepalm

This! Also, learn how to use a microphone. Don’t point it in the other direction from your mouth or stand four feet away. Talk directly into it. Handhold it if necessary. It’s your friend, it’s not gonna bite you.

Photoshopped a new maths pun: A "persistent" homology group.

Hate being hard-of-hearing: I use a small square mic (Widex Sound Assist) to help me hear others e.g. across a table. But I have to explain it to everyone because people not clued in tend to stare at it with fear and think I'm secretly recording them. So frustrating.

Interesting for me to think about and apply this to (Aussie) maths academia as I know it.

Finished Neagley S1, recommend watching if you want more Reacher. Highlight for me was the non-verbal communication, it's amazing how much can be expressed with subtle facial expressions & movement + sufficient camera time to let them sink in for the viewer.

Random thought experiment in my head over the past few months: What is the minimum amount of information you'd need to teach a layman that LLMs are not 'magic'? Bit of maths (Markov chains), cognitive psych, communication/theory-of-mind models, what else?

Today I got primary school kids to argue over the definition of a sandwich while I continued to show them increasingly bizarre examples, including a cat between two slices of bread, and a full loaf cut in half with some ham & lettuce in the middle. #HoagieHomies Today was a good day 😁

Finished watching Reacher S4. Enjoyed it, it's more of the same, but can see why some people are grumbling: Reacher got hurt a lot more, some "too convenient" happenings, spotted one inconsistency between scenes. Not offputting for me yet though, still happy to switch brain off.

Grant Sanderson's (3blue1brown) guest post on Terry Tao's blog pretty much affirms and expands on my opinion of what's missing in maths academia: more maths communication overall, and especially towards different audiences.

Finished watching The Bear S1 after someone recommended it to me in terms of realism matching that of The Pitt. Gotta say, though, those emotions are much more raw! Working through Reacher S4 now that the whole season's out. Enjoying it but noticing more "slightly off" bits 😬

Thought I was smart when I learnt I could write custom rules (via Google Apps Script) for deleting emails for my Gmail inboxes. Wrote one as a test, left it to trigger overnight. Next morning I realised I pointed it towards the wrong email inbox /facepalm

Today's Foot-In-Mouth Moment: I ran into someone I occasionally meet while walking to/from work. Me: "How was the cruise?" Her: "It was lovely! But I got sick." Me: "Isn't that the norm?" /facepalm She ended up getting pneumonia (yikes!) but is almost back to normal now.

Today I tried making banana bread in the rice cooker as I randomly saw on social media, ended up finishing it in the oven :( You basically need one of the more exxy rice cookers, your cheapo $50 Kmart one won't cut it.

Teams is so frustratingly screen-space-inefficient for tuning into presentations delivered online, especially when I turn on live-captions. So many sidebars and menus that I want to hide, grrrrrr.

This past month I've been going through my chewing gum stash. Clicked for me yesterday that it was probably an anxiety uptick where the chewing helps calm me down. I was reminded of when I was crunching through nuts while writing up my Masters thesis for exactly the same reason.