iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Finally, when students ask why I don't use Canvas, I point them to the article "EdTech" by @anniemcc.bsky.social and Louise McCune in University Keywords (ed. Andy Hines). Today's Canvas outage and resulting disruptions may offer some time to read that article. Attached are some highlights.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

For what it's worth, I've been using Google Workspace to organize my courses without leaning on Canvas. I use a combination of Google Sheets (public and private, with some data shared between them), Google Sites as a hub of information and Google Forms for submissions.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

13. Go to Gmail and paste into the "To:" field. Proceed to send your emails a rant about the failures of learning management systems.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

12. To quickly fill in the column, grab the little blue dot on the bottom right and just pull it down, highlighting the column. This will apply the function to successive rows. (Useful when you have 100+ students.) From there you can copy the entire column to get a list of emails.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

11. Then it should output the email. I have doctored the first row here for FERPA reasons. (You know... FERPA? The reason why Canvas is down because of a data breach...)

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

9. Navigate back to your Google Sheet and create a column for emails. In the first data cell, insert a call for the function we just wrote. Here A2 is the cell with the first student's name, which has a hyperlink to send that student an email.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

8. Give the Apps Script project a name and save it.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

7. Write up a script that does what we want. Here's one that Gemini helped put together. You can copy the text from here: gist.github.com/fliptanedo/d...

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Your CSV file is now in Google Sheets. We need to create a function that extracts the email addresses from the hyperlinks in the student names. To do this, we use Google Apps Script. 6. In Google Sheets, go to Extensions > Apps Ssript

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

5. Confirm that you're importing the file into Google Sheets.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

4. Click on upload a file, and upload the csv file from iGrade.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

2. Go to Google Sheets and create a new spreadsheet.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

If you want an email list, we can use Google Sheets to do that. 1. From iGrade, go to your class and download your roster. This gives a civ file that looks almost useless, except that each students' name is hyperlinked to their email address. The problem is now to extract those email addresses.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Simplest solution: go to iGrade and click on the "email class" button.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

I haven't been using Canvas (for practical and ideological reasons). But some colleagues were asking about how to email their large lecture courses now that canvas is down. Here's what works at @ucriverside.bsky.social (your mileage may vary).

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

pdsoros.org/fellows/oswa... Some of my colleagues may know Oswaldo when he was an undergrad working with Carlos Argüelles. Oswaldo who went to an LA high school that didn't offer math courses beyond algebra... so he went ahead and taught himself calculus.

pdsoros.org

Oswaldo Vazquez – Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

Special shout out to three physicists: Avi Vadali (starting at MIT this fall doing condensed matter theory), Denisse Córdova Carrizales (currently at MIT doing nuclear physics), and Oswaldo Vasquez (currently at Northeastern doing mathematical physics).

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

"It matters now more than ever" is a phase that comes to mind every year the fellowship announces their new cohort. Today I celebrate these immigrants and children of immigrants as they pursue graduate degrees and remind us that there is nothing more deeply American than being a new American.

pdsoros.org

Why Become a Fellow – Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans

Apply for a Paul & Daisy Soros fellowship and become one of the thirty New Americans— immigrants or the children of immigrants—who are pursuing graduate

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

The theme of the 2025 SLAC Summer Institute is "Pathways to New Physics." Remote and in-person registration is open for senior graduate students and postdocs. The summer school includes group projects and social events. indico.slac.stanford.edu/event/9605/

indico.slac.stanford.edu

53rd SLAC Summer Institute (SSI 2025)

The SLAC Summer Institute (SSI) is an annual two-week-long Summer School tradition since 1973. The theme of the 53rd SLAC Summer Institute is “Pathways to New Physics”. Although the Standard Model is ...

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

This thread is lightly edited from a post at the place formerly-known-as-twitter, FlipTanedo/status/1706301780290936939 I'm reposting after students in my Physics 17 course asked about the birdtrack diagram on the cover of the course notes. sites.google.com/ucr.edu/phys...

sites.google.com

Physics 017 - Agenda

Please note that all future weeks are subject to change based on student and instructor feedback. 2025 Course Notes, periodically refined. Last update: 1 Apr (correcting eq. 3.5.18; thanks Casey O.) S...

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The indices in the corresponding expressions are understood to be written with respect to abstract index notation. In this sense, they are coordinate free. Thus I do not think a more manifestly coordinate-free notation would be significantly clearer.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

For example, we applied the torsion free assumption with the following diagrammatic rule: two circles around something with no lines is zero if the lines on each circle are antisymmetrized with each other.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Τhis was my first example where birdtrack notation were significantly more clear than the analogous index expressions, even though they are in one-to-one correspondence.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The remaining term is proportional to the curvature tensor with its three lower indices antisymmetrized (blue). The entire quantity is zero (first step) and for any scalar (dot) or vector (circle), thus the blue highlighted piece must vanish. This proves the assertion.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

All but the last term vanish: the first one from torsion freedom, and the second from a combined symmetrization and anti-symmetrization of the same pair of indices.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Apply the chain rule for the inner (highlighted in blue) covariant derivative. This means the dashed blue circle is applied to each node inside it.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The first step, following a hint from Penrose's book, is to evaluate the following quantity for some arbitrary vector field (ξ) and scalar field (φ). By the torsion free condition (highlighted in yellow) this quantity is zero. Next we expand the left-hand side.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The (Riemann) curvature is analogously defined from an antisymmetric covariant derivative.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

The torsion free condition is that the antisymmetric second derivative of a scalar vanishes.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Wigglies (bars) indicate (anti-)symmetrization of indices.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Covariant derivatives are dashed circles.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Some notational background: Tensors are nodes and indices are lines. Lines that connect nodes are contracted.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Here's an application of birdtrack notation to prove a curvature tensor identity. It is identical to index notation, but I find the diagrammatic proof easier to follow once I picked up the rules. This is a solution to exercise [14.10] in Penrose's Road to Reality.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Eligible PhD students should feel empowered to bring up these awards with their advisors.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

She writes about "magic pill-ism," the hope for scientists to come up with a pill to cure cancer, and her exasperation comes through when she argues that this magic pill-ism blinds us to the human choices that we continue to make are the ultimate origin of many of our modern maladies.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

She then pieces together how a combination of American institutions were critical in forging a path forward: accountability of politicians, research institutions like universities, and local newspapers. The timeliness with contemporary challenges is hard to miss.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

I'm impressed by how prescient many of the book still is. Carson points out that the USDA had supported chemical insecticides even when they were shown to be dangerous, wasteful, and often counterproductive. It contextualizes the loss of faith in "big government" by affected populations.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

In Ch.12, Rachel Carson points out that until the 1950s, pediatric cancer was incredibly rare. From the 50s onward, more American children died of cancer than any other disease. Carson raised the alarm that many of these cancers are present before birth and are intrinsically environmental in origin.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Those in Riverside: participation in the book club comes with purchasing the book from our host, Cellar Door Books: Silent Spring: www.cellardoorbookstore.com/book/9780618... Silent Spring Revolution: www.cellardoorbookstore.com/book/9780063...

cellardoorbookstore.com

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

It is a back-to-back celebration of the environmental movement starting from the book that started it all and then going into the history of how science turned into policy for the public good.

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Flip Tanedo @fliptanedo.bsky.social · 17/03/2025

Next month we are discussing Brinkley's Silent Spring Revolution, the story of the "great environmental awakening" in the era immediately after Silent Spring's publication.

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