Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I received the Moderna booster shot Friday night (29 OCT) and was bit feverish yesterday. The fever broke overnight but left me a bit weary today. I hope to post something more meaningful tomorrow.

I've been cooking since I moved off campus my second year of graduate school. I enjoy eating and I figured out early on that the two were connected somehow. Cooking has the hallmark of many hobbies (it is after all not my day job) in terms of something involving eye-hand coordination, planning, and tangible pleasure when it works out right. Early on I started with a second-hand cookbook from my mother; over time I grew to lessen many of the recipes' quantities of salt, butter, etc.  I developed an interest in stir-fries and slow-cooker recipes and accumulated from birthday and Christmas presents a range of cookbooks to support that interest. As a graduate student (Poor Hungry and Depressed was the meme) I couldn't spend much each week, even though cooking for myself saved money over meal plans and restaurants. I was heavy into soups for a while. I do like to cook with a lot of herbs and spices, so I budgeted a new spice each week. I had a few pieces of cookware from my moth...

I teach as the main part of my job description. I have a sense of what it entails:  identifying goals for my students and pedagogy to help them achieve them. Lots of preparation, some contact in and out of class, lots of assessment. I do struggle with what it means to be a student. It's easier to focus on being a student of one teacher at a time I guess. My experience was OCD in a good way I think---near-perfect attendance, assignments submitted on time, etc. Now that we are no longer teaching virtually and students are back in the classroom, some students are struggling with being in the classroom aside from exams.  They turn in the work, receive average to poor grades, and I never interact with them aside from their assignments. It is very very strange, hoping that the structure that I have put in place is sufficient for them to learn without any person-to-person interaction with me. They are names on my roll but are they really my students?

I've benefited from mentors my entire adult life. Knowing this I've tried to be open to mentoring others as a way of "paying it forward". My best mentors were experts in communication, both in sharing operational wisdom but also hearing me, really hearing me, as I've talked through my strengths and weaknesses in different contexts. Mentors don't have to know that much more than me to help me. I've been a research advisor to undergraduates almost my entire professional career. There have been times when I have enjoyed the editing of their work so much that I have thought of applying to edit professional journals, but I know that I would have to give up many things that I currently enjoy to do so. I dearly love the "light bulb over the head" experience of a student when they've been shown the path to a new concept, and I see that more in research advising than in teaching. As I've become more senior (and in academia there aren't that ma...

I do tire of politicians calling issues that they don't want to address "divisive". There are many divisive issues in politics, as many politicians have found it useful to find issues that provide their base with opponents to be demonized. But calling an issue divisive doesn't make it so. Far better to judge the issues in and of themselves than to try and decide if they are divisive.  Again, I would look to the media to not take such responses without follow-up challenging the designations.

This is an off-year but there are still some important elections going on. I try to follow the overall coverage as best I can. There are some candidates out there who I can't describe without using the word scoundrel, and I thought I would try to articulate why. Competition involves claiming that you are the better candidate. Scoundrels try to make you think worse of the opponent and her/his supporters, because they think that putting others down is the best way to lift themselves up. Scoundrels campaign for other jobs (school board, public health director, etc.) in hopes that you won't notice that they aren't campaigning for governor or mayor or whatever job the election is actually for. Scoundrels raise unsupported accusations against their opponents at the last minute hoping that there won't be time for them to defend themselves. Scoundrels work very hard to bring race up whether or not they try to hide that fact. Scoundrels say outrageous things in hopes of being qu...

Many years before I left Facebook I joined Facebook, because of, you know, causality. I was prompted to include a political affiliation in my profile. I have almost always voted for Democrats throughout my life but vote for Republican candidates when they seem better. In recent years as liberals and moderates have been expelled from the Republican party that has happened more rarely. I do tell myself that I choose my candidates apart from their party affiliation. I know that I research each race rather than vote a straight ticket. If that is rationalization so be it. I did not want to state that I voted Democrat as a substitute for researching the candidates and I gave some thought to it before writing "Sermon on the Mount" as my political affiliation. The Sermon on the Mount is about how we treat each other as a society, and in particular, about how those with power should treat those without power. I can think of nothing more political and it always catches me off-guard whe...

It is heartbreaking to read of years of Facebook employee concerns about the use of the platform for inciting violence while its leader even on the day of the attempted insurrection, January 6, refused to intervene.    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/facebook-papers-democracy-election-zuckerberg/620478/

I have led and participated in a number of faculty meetings over the years as well as committee meetings. I have come to value rules of Parliamentary Procedure such as Sturgis or Roberts as a way of ensuring open discussion of issues, with all being given a chance to share their views in a way that leads to some form of closure. Nothing's perfect but when things have gone awry it is usually because parliamentary procedure has not been followed. The antithesis of this consists of one person or bloc preventing discussion or action by the majority, not because of a violation of minority rights but rather because they oppose the measure being discussed.  We call such things filibusters. The U.S. Senate did not originate the custom of the filibuster, but in my lifetime it has been used regularly in that body to oppose the granting of full citizenship rights to people of color as well as movement toward encouraging more citizens to vote.  For this reason alone I would be happy to se...

My wife took me to the North Carolina Botanical Gardens near where we live to show me some sculpture that she had seen on display and enjoyed; now I can say that we both enjoyed it. The weather was good and the plants along the way were gorgeous. It was I think my first artistic consumption outside of the house since COVID. (We were fortunate enough to watch safe at home some concerts that were streamed by the NC Symphony but that is for another post someday.) My appreciation of the sculpture overall was very good but of course I had my favorites. I was trying to understand what my criteria were because I am more familiar with enjoying painting than sculpture, and more familiar with music than painting. The themes all supported the setting, so I can't generalize to all forms of sculpture. I seemed to focus on some sense of abstraction.  Too abstract (apart from whatever the title may have indicated) and my mind grew tired of trying to pick among the many possible interpretations. T...

As someone who is not a health-care provider I count it a blessing not to have spent much time in hospitals. I've visited friends and loved ones from time to time there but that kind of interaction is pretty focused---these are the visiting hours, here's how to get to a cafeteria, etc. My wife and I have two children and I would count hospital time for their births as when I first spent substantial time in hospitals. And it was very traumatic the first time around. Our first child was born 6.5 weeks early. He is healthy and strong now but he was in the "special care nursery", i.e., the ER for preemies, for 23 long long days. Family took turns supporting us but that was a rough time.  Our second child was only two weeks premature and came home with us swiftly, happy and healthy. I've had three elective procedures; I had my nasal passage enlarged (examination had confirmed that it was unusually narrow), I had a closed tear duct reopened, and more substantially I had...

I suffer from sleep apnea. This was confirmed in my one and only sleep study on November 18, 2003. I now sleep with a CPAP breathing machine, enjoy REM sleep regularly, and no longer hallucinate from sleep deprivation or suffer from hypoxic headaches every morning. It is such an improvement over the hell my life was becoming as the lack of REM sleep degraded my ability to do my job. My wife was able to cover for my lapses with respect to family life but I feared that I would no longer be able to drive safely. As I have an hour commute my logistics were going to become more and more difficult. Far scarier was the idea of risking my kids by driving them. It is hard being so dependent on a machine to work correctly to function. When we travel I am unable to relax until the CPAP is set up near my bedside with an accessible outlet for power.  Then again, I depend on an increasing number of medications to manage my hypertension and diabetes, so it all merges into a sense of my own fragil...

On the standard menu system, there is an icon used for saving files. It is a picture of a micro-floppy disk, which according to Wikipedia became popular in the late 1980's. I know that I haven't seen one in decades, let alone a disk drive that would read it. When I was in graduate school the building I taught in was across from the University Health Services building. Its name and its abbreviation UHS were prominent on signs. Everyone I talked to, including first-year undergraduate students in my class, referred to it as DUH, its previous acronym. When asked my students professed ignorance as to where the University Health Services building was. Pictures and names of things often persist in our thinking and collectively in our culture long after what they referred to has faded away. It takes conscious thought to realize the disconnect. I am 60 now. In my childhood everyone I knew, young and old, referred to women in terms of what was perceived to be their natural limitations. I...

I let my students bring notes to their exams. I'm more interested in what they can do than in what they can write from memory. One year I tried letting my exams be open notes, but the grades went down so badly as a result of students not preparing for the exams that I backed away and settled on letting them bring one page of notes. That way I can reward good preparation, and the students have to consider the topics and what formulas they need to have. I memorize a lot of things related to my discipline. Memorization makes it easier for me to perform, as well as quicker. Ease and speed though are not what I want to assess. It took me a while to realize that.

I have gotten into the habit of giving three monthly exams in addition to a cumulative final exam in my math classes. Aside from the assessment information (collected in addition to weekly homework and sometimes monthly projects) I find that the process of preparing the students for an exam to be a wonderful time to encourage them to see the bigger picture. Part of that comes from looking at a topic again after some time has passed; part of that comes from realizing when two topics are instances of the same pattern.

As I age, fewer and fewer of the people in my life engage with greeting cards. My children really do not understand the concept, and I am starting to lose my sense of it myself. As long as greeting cards are expected by some of the people in my life I will continue to send them, but the idea of paying someone else to compose sentiments to express on my behalf does go against my sense of myself as a writer. 

I had my left knee replaced at the end of May this year. I have had pain in it off and on through most of my adult life but as of August, 2020 walking became very difficult and I started using a cane. I have also been a long-distance runner in my youth, and someone who jogged (very very slowly) in phases as part of my exercise routine as I have grown older. That part of my life is gone. I will be able to do many activities with my artificial knee but that kind of pounding will not work long-term. I have recently turned 60, so having the knee replaced is all tangled up with that. I am happy about most of the characteristics of my aging; I feel as if I understand many things so much better for having lived these years. In particular my youthful insecurities have greatly diminished and I am much more comfortable speaking to others in small or large groups.  My eyesight has stabilized, my hearing is still quite good. I have a lot to be grateful for as my strengths and weaknesses have a...

This afternoon I'll be taking part in a video job interview for a high office in my main professional association, the Mathematical Association of America. I've been on many job search committees, starting when I was an undergraduate. I've been fortunate that from the beginning I've been part of job searches that have been done well. Job descriptions were debated and articulated, advertisements based on the job descriptions were placed, questions based on the job description are discussed during the interviews, and ranking of viable candidates was done keeping the job description in mind. At all stages of the process the goal was to hire someone who would succeed in the job to the benefit of the organization. Such flaws as were in the process often lay in not working hard enough to solicit applications from a diverse pool of candidates. Almost every year I participate in a form of a job search that makes a mockery of this process. Approaching election there is hardly an...

The currently most-famous Jeffrey Clark has received a subpoena for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He may also have lost his job:  https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/jeffrey-clark-ncla-scrubbed?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20tpm-news%20%28TPMNews%29

For me, the biggest lie in politics has always been "Everybody does it". The person saying those three words or an equivalent phrase defends their questionable actions not by denying those actions but rather saying 1) that every other politician does it, implying 2) it's not fair to hold me accountable. Neither of those claims bears any scrutiny, but many in the electorate seem willing to accept them. This form of jadedness always seems very lazy to me. It is easier to accept both statements but then we have unaccountable leaders which are always a direct threat to good governance. The appropriate response, preferably by journalists who should know better, is to ask for 1) names of others to investigate and 2) valid reasons not to hold the speaker accountable for their actions. Letting this sort of thing go does no one any good.

I had a video meeting with some other officers discussing some nuts and bolts about a conference (MathFest) that we are planning for next August.  I really enjoy this type of gathering, being around enthusiastic smart people in my discipline brainstorming about how to address different problems and opportunities.

I am in my third year of a three-year term as Faculty Ombudsperson at Elon University. I remember being on Academic Council (our version of a Faculty Senate here at Elon) when the role was first proposed to help provide confidential support for faculty with problems. Always in the back of my mind I thought that I would like to be able to fill that role. I had to wait until I completed other leadership roles before doing so, but the timing worked out that I was between stand-in-front-of-large-groups gigs when it became vacant. I expected that most of the gratification would come from experience with the institution (32 years and counting) and there is some of that---knowing procedures and people, etc. I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the gratification comes from active listening. Ombudspeople are not supposed to take sides, so we call the people who use our services "visitors" and not "clients".  I'm privileged to see most of my visitors feel relie...

THE ALIEN WITH SUPER-STRENGTH WHO FLIES THROUGH THE AIR AND HAS HEAT VISION AND THERE’S DIFFERENT COLORED ROCKS THAT CAN KILL HIM OR CHANGE HIS POWERS CAN’T BE *GAY* THAT’S RIDICULOUS https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/status/1448022473794940929

 https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-to-skip-2024-campaign-and-go-straight-to-claiming-he-won

I still remember seeing my high school classmates put on a production of The Crucible. A friend of mine played one of the elders who reasoned that they must have been correct to execute accused witches because otherwise they would have done immense harm and that wasn't possible. The simple reason why I remember this so clearly is that I've heard variation on that theme every time we have withdrawn from an armed conflict after spending the lives of soldiers (on both sides) as well as civilians with nothing to show for it.  The investment of all these deaths must pay off and we can't withdraw until they do. Most recently I have read and heard this re our withdrawal from Afghanistan, negotiated by President Trump with the Taliban and executed by President Biden. There is much to learn about how the withdrawal was done so that we can do better in the future, but the focus seems to be on the issue from The Crucible. We can't have supported the deaths of so many people withou...

I've just returned to my office from a singing rehearsal in Elon University's Whitley Auditorium. The acoustics in there are quite lovely. Soft notes resonate with strength and duration. I think a good deal about resonance as I interact with other people. I find that I tend to fall into mimicry quickly and without intent, feeding back good humor to someone speaking with pleasure, pain and stress to someone speaking from a low point. I work hard against the latter; empathizing with someone in pain is important but making them feel worse is not a good thing. I've looked around at the people I've been around long-term and I've identified some as being particularly good at resonating joy. I try, fail, and try again at that. I also see many stress resonators, people who make crises more difficult by diverting time and energy away from solving time-critical problems to reiterating them over and over. I try not to do that. With the degradation of our political discourse ov...

 Dear Folk:  As Dr. Strange used to say in the comic books, Curse Me for a Novice. If you tried to post a comment and were not allowed to that is a configuration error on my part that I have remedied. Please try again.

My wife and I went to see the latest James Bond film last night at a drive-in theater that opened shortly after the pandemic hit. I've enjoyed Daniel Craig in the role but I felt a bit so-so with the movie and I've tried to analyze my feelings a bit as to why. One of the nice things about the Craig era is that the Bond films have still been silly but not felt the need to demonstrate that women are lesser beings and that foreigners are silly, evil people.  I won't say woke but having grown up with the Roger Moore Bond films there is a sizable improvement. Still, leaving the theater I felt overwhelmed by the amount of plot detail. I think that was the issue for me and it carries over to other areas of my life so I think it's worth considering. Very little of the plot detail in No Time to Die holds up to scrutiny, because, well, it is escapist entertainment. Well-designed and produced but escapist nonetheless. I've been feeling this a lot in the past years, quantity ve...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/america-is-choking-under-an-everything-shortage/620322/ It's not been as bad around me as the story leads off with but I am noticing more and more empty shelves with each grocery run.

I have used Facebook for quite a few years now. My interactions fell into three categories: Seeing and reacting to posts of friends and acquaintances Sharing stories that I thought would be of interest to others. I've made a point of trying to double-source news from reputable sources or to state explicitly that the item had not been confirmed. Posting longer essays that I have written after long periods of dwelling on a given topic. Now that I have left Facebook, the first item will need to be supplemented with other communications. I kept up with friends and loved ones before Facebook and expect to reinvigorate those atrophied muscles. I do feel as if I still have something to contribute with the other two items, if only for an audience of one, myself. Most folk keep Facebook open long-term on their devices and so finding what I had posted was just a matter of catching upon it in the fire hose of other postings. Now readers will be required to work harder if they have any interes...