Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I'll be singing as part of a choral group tonight. We have 21 members so it's a nice moderate size. I sing bass and there are two others singing bass to blend with. I used to get pretty stressed re concerts; I still tense up a bit but I've learned to rely upon the "muscle memory" of three months of rehearsals. I don't know if I could sing my part in isolation but I can certainly pick out where it fits in with the singers around me. Last year I needed a chair for concerts; now with my new knee it is nice being able to stand for the whole thing.

As chair of a committee that reviews proposals for professional development, I often have a complex set of responsibilities in terms of communicating with my committee, summarizing their reviews of proposals, proposing draft courses of action, soliciting feedback, and articulating a consensus of how to proceed.  My day job (teaching) is much easier for me in contrast. Because I don't have the same comfort level I have to work hard to execute the will of the committee. Much of this comes down to outlining:  listing main responsibilities in outline form, subdividing each responsibility into sub-tasks that are more and more manageable as the become articulate. Tasks that involve other people have to come first so that there is time for them to proceed as well as accountability for them to do so. Then other tasks have to be prioritized. I think this has been one of the most important lessons that I've learned in my career. Insurmountable tasks must be broken down and articulated. ...

With the news of the omicron variant of COVID I've seen the now-common anger against any appearance by Dr. Anthony Fauci in the media. I don't like to waste time on subjunctives but I do wonder if Trump had not attacked him during his presidency if the reaction would be so bad against someone with years of successful experience in combating infectious diseases. Is it inevitable that folk would attack any personification of Public Health policy? I understand why many libertarians chafe at Public Health policy. The latter elevates the common good regularly at the cost of individual choices. It is not clear to me why those choices are phrased as freedoms. The people who cry most about losing their freedoms don't seem to understand what the word means. Wearing a mask is not censorship; people can still speak and write freely.

I'll resume posting regularly after the Thanksgiving holidays---time to spend with family.

Actually I've grown quite good at deflecting them, so the title is a bit weak here. I don't think that I'm insecure; I have an ego that is more overweight than I am. Rather most of the people who give me compliments do so with very limited information; I'm aware of more complexities for most of the things that I receive praise for, both the good and the bad. If I'm going to let uninformed complaints pass me by (something which has drastically improved my quality of life) it seems only fair to do the same with uninformed compliments. I do bear responsibility for my actions and inherent in that is an honest appraisal of what succeeds and what I need to do better. I am not rudderless but I do not casually pass control of the wheel over to strangers. I don't wish to appear rude; my default response is something along the lines of "You're too kind" and most folk enjoy that enough not to realize that it's a criticism.

I write a number of posts about elections involving other people. I have run for election many times in my career and I should probably write about that a little for balance. I have not run for political office, voted for by the electorate at large. Early on in my profession in academia I ran for seats on various committees in my university, and when on those committees I have run for chair.  I have also run for offices in professional societies. I haven't kept an accurate record but I'd say that my winning rate is about at one out of three. I'm not an extrovert so it takes time for folk to learn what I am capable of doing. This is one of the advantages that I have seen in staying at my university as long as I have---many people know by now what I am capable of. This has been cumulative. Once I was afforded leadership opportunities they inevitably brought greater recognition. I'd like to think that I do good work but I suspect that I am known rather for doing the work, ...

I went into academia in part because it can be a contemplative life. Many concepts in my discipline (math) require some thought, and so the luxury of staring at some formulas and letting my mind wander is very enjoyable.  There are responsibilities; my primary job description is as teacher. I am also expected to perform service in addition to scholarship but I do not fool myself that my work is any more strenuous than I let it be. It's a good gig and I'm in no rush to retire. At home I have more responsibilities, as a husband and parent. They are present during the week but more so on the weekends. Cooking is part of that and I do enjoy non-trivial recipes. There are errands to be run, church to attend, etc. Mostly though the busy-ness is not having much chance to be contemplative. At any moment I am on call for those around me to provide counsel or labor. It is not bad, but it is busy, and I often breathe a sigh of relief when I return to work on Monday. This is by choice. I h...

Just a few minutes ago I read the news that Kyle Rittenhouse had been acquitted of all charges. When hearing of rioting he took a rifle, drove to the rioting, then shot and killed rioters. His defense was self-defense.  He wasn't defending himself; he picked up the rifle and drove to the scene.  I guess there's a different meaning to the word self here. He was defending white people in general against black people in general. Because the notion that people of color would protest their treatment by police was a threat to Rittenhouse's sense of self. He shot and killed people to defend that sense of self. He should be pitied, but only after he is punished, and only that after he is disarmed to keep him from killing other people out of fear. So terribly terribly sad.

It's been a year of Republican politicians pushing boundaries. There was a coup attempt on January 6; it is very hard to find a Republican politician who thinks that assembling a mob, telling them to overturn a presidential election, and directing them at Congress was wrong mainly because it didn't work; it only led to deaths and injuries and suicides among the Capitol Police who defended scoundrels who later refused to acknowledge the coup. Wisely the congressional leaders continued the vote to certify the election in the wee hours of the morning; if you accept violent delays then more violence will recur. Recently Representative Paul Gosar tweeted an altered anime with faces pasted over an existing work. His face was pasted over on e character who killed another character, whose face had been replaced by that of  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He has been censured along a party-line vote and removed from committee assignments, wisely because if this were to stand unpunished the ne...

I am on a job search committee for my department. We have read through written applications and are following up with interesting applicants through video chats. We have at least two department members on each chat to lessen the responsibility for evaluating them. We ask a couple of questions that are probably commonplace. One is to articulate the applicant's perceptions of their own strengths and weaknesses. We are not expecting to make a judgment based on the content of the answer but are looking for self-reflection prior to the interview. Amazingly this is a substantial filter; many candidates can't articulate their strengths and weaknesses in a meaningful way in an interview. The other question that many other employers probably ask is some version of "Why do you want to work for us?"  Like most institutions my university prides itself on filling a niche, and boasts about that niche in loving detail over many pages of its website. Our department does this with mor...

I'm giving exams in my three classes this week. I prefer that the exams not be redundant assessment so I try not to duplicate the kind of assessment I give in homework and projects. For homework and projects, students have (if they start promptly) a great deal of time and access to support either through technology for computation and visualization or to guides (such as myself or tutors) to answer questions they may have. For a timed exam, students have neither.  I try to keep my exams computationally light, and rather focus on their understanding of what they compute and why they compute it. Many of my questions call for short essays of a couple of paragraphs. I've always hoped (whether or not this is successful) that my exam questions can teach, by asking the students to take a different perspective on our work in class. For practical reasons I try to make my exams easy to grade, even if they are filled with essays and formulas. There is always a main point for an exam questi...

I dearly love revising old programs. My sense of style in programming has evolved over the years as I've garnered experience, first with C++, then with Perl, and now primarily with Python for many a year. I despise revising old documents. Reading them triggers memories of my intention in writing them and the clarity of those memories makes it difficult to find better forms of exposition. It seems to me as those two impulses should be more consistent. Part of the incompatibility is the gratification of programming (when it is going well) is external whereas revising old written documents usually offers only a solitary or deferred gratification. Part of it is the sense of a clear path when improving programs; making them more modular and thus easier to follow. Renaming symbols to more clearly indicate their meaning. Improving the validation of program logic and more clearly indicating exceptions where the program is expected to fail, all of these things bring a tangible sense of impr...

It took me a long time to grow comfortable with my own voice in writing. I can be very self-critical and early on that self-criticism outweighed my ability, so I avoided writing as much as possible. I did have a facility for computation and math/science, and for a while I thought that that facility would excuse me from a need to write. I see that same mistaken thought in many of my students. If you can't communicate clearly what you are doing in STEM then your career path is one of hermitage. Part of it was needing affirmation from others. As I wrote more, people complimented it more in honest and specific ways. I try to offer my students that kind of encouragement, knowing that it changed my path for the better. Part of it was developing a bigger picture of what my writing was trying to communicate. Strangely enough I need to thank the Educational Testing Service for that. I spent two weeks in adjacent summers grading AP exams for the ETS. The money, the being with other members o...

I have suffered from sleep apnea for a while now. It was diagnosed with a sleep study in 2003 but my wife swears that my snoring was worsening for some time before that, until she thought that it was a symptom and not a transient problem, thus the sleep study. My windpipe closes off when I sleep naturally, and I treat it as thousands of others do with a medical air-pump, a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure or CPAP device. Occasionally, during power outages, I am unable to use the CPAP. When that occurs I dream of suffocating and gesturing for help to those around me. It is unpleasant. I also wake up with powerful headaches due to hypoxia or oxygen deprivation. More insidious are the effects of dreamlessness; at such times I do not get much REM sleep and my subsequent cognitive functions degrade. When it lasts too long I can hallucinate, i.e., have waking dreams, talking to someone in real life and someone else in my dream. Even with the CPAP I do not sleep well. As long as I can stay...

I try to be flexible. There are many dimensions to that word.  Physically I've been doing yoga for decades now. As I age, and when I don't do enough of it, I stiffen. I can still stand, lean back, and look face straight up to the ceiling---strong abs and a flexible back. I'll never be able to sit in half-lotus, let alone full-lotus; I've got hips of stone. A student thanked me last week for being flexible. She had been sick and I had extended a couple of deadlines for her (as I've done for others) because she communicated with me her difficulties and worked with me to adjust the deadlines to allow her to submit a better assignment. There are reasons for not being open to extensions. It is more work, but as long as the assignment submitted is in good shape there is a sense of gratification to go along with the work. Some instructors are rigid about deadlines thinking that part of what they are teaching is time management. If that is explicitly a course goal then I ca...

With each passing day I try to acknowledge my ignorance more and more. So much of what I have thought that I'd known has turned out to be based on unreliable sources. American history, norms of gender and sexuality, bigotries learned as a child, so much of it fading and replaced by more firm foundations. There is fear and pain in acknowledging that I have been misled by those I trusted, family, teachers, colleagues; learning to work harder to find the truth has led to more confidence though.   It is more than just worth the effort. It is liberating.

Over the weekend we had the ten-month anniversary of an attempt to overturn the presidential election by force. Over sixty times the lawyers for the loser in that election showed up in court asking to overturn results in various parts of the country. According to the transcripts they showed up without any evidence of fraud, and the cases were summarily dismissed.  Still, the loser in the election claimed that he couldn't possibly have lost, that he wasn't a loser, that too man people loved him for him to have lost. Sadly his pathetic childlike whimpers were amplified by various news organizations that supported him. When they crossed the line into libel about companies that supplied voting machines they quickly retracted those claims when sued. A majority of the Republican party believes the loser in the election was cheated. They're not real clear on how that could have happened, since it didn't, but they believe him nonetheless. Time has moved on. President Biden has ...

My career is built around working with undergraduates. Along the way I became a parent myself, twice, and have given a bit of thought to what it means to be an adult. One of my early summaries, that I think still holds true:  things that used to terrify me have become daily occurrences. I'm an introvert and was much shyer in my youth. I was happy to let others take responsibilities for major life decisions. My decisions did not have serious consequences for others. Now my days are spent interacting with others. I and no one else is responsible for the life-choices I've made (marriage, career, etc.) and I wouldn't have it any other way. Part of taking on leadership roles is making peace with the fact that others may suffer for my mistakes; the alternative is to let others bear that responsibility so that I can rest more easily. So adulting, for me at least, has mainly been a change in what I want out of life. Maybe the desire was there all along.

I'm not a big holiday person. I enjoy my life balance and don't count the days until I am guaranteed some vacation time. Many holidays just don't engage me I guess. The next one up is Thanksgiving. What little I know of the mythology (Native Americans helping colonists) seems to elide by what my ancestors did to the Native Americans, who no longer seem to own their own land. I am a fairly grateful person (I think). I identify readily what others have done for me and express gratitude specifically to them. I know deep in my heart that God has treated me far better than I deserve.  I don't see why we should emphasize gratitude one day a year. I don't understand the pressure that we put on ourselves for family gatherings that should be more low-key and regular. I don't understand the connections between gratitude, gluttony, and football. I do try not to be an asshole to others and support those for whom Thanksgiving comes with requirements necessary for experiencin...

I do enjoy learning new software when I can see how it will directly support what I do. Something that appeals to my creative side is constructing graphics in support of mathematics. I think my first really solid focus on mathematical graphics was Metapost. Since I've been typesetting mathematics in LaTeX for quite a while it made sense to look at Metapost, since it is bundled with most LaTeX distributions. Metapost supports a number of paradigms. You can specify points directly by giving coordinates for them, or you can focus on the relationships between them, or you can focus on the constraints they must satisfy, or you can start with a collection and apply transformations to build what you seek. The flexibility of Metapost has been appealing to me, and its manual is lucid and concise. There are some very good galleries of examples using Metapost on the internet to help someone like me see what is possible. Metapost is a programming language however, and as my job became busier I...

My mother is undergoing physical therapy after a fall and it is bringing to mind my experiences with physical therapy. I've had two kinds of PT over the years. When I was younger I had recurring back pain and went to the local hospital regularly for PT to help with it. I am grateful that it was a temporary condition; it was hard to stand let alone teach when it was bad. Most recently I had my left knee replaced. It is apparently crucial to begin PT as soon as possible after the surgery to avoid scar tissue building up. Sadly I picked up pneumonia in the hospital, and whether that delay alone was the cause I had a bunch of scar tissue that limited what the PT could do. The knee no longer hurt sitting, standing, even walking, but it was stiff to the point of preventing me from going up and down stairs. I had a good therapist that I saw in a clinic at first three times a week, than twice, then once a week, ending this past week. We ran through a number of creative ways to stretch my k...

 Applebaum is always worth reading, and she is sensitive to threats to our process as a democracy. https://www.anneapplebaum.com/2021/11/02/tucker-carlsons-sinister-new-documentary/

From what I have read it appears as if Critical Race Theory played a role in the elections in Virginia yesterday. I know that it has been the subject of a lot of anger, and demagogues have described it as a way of destroying our children's values if taught in the school. I'm not an expert, but I can tell that the argument has used language that has obfuscated the issue. As far as I can tell, Critical Race Theory is about trying to tell the truth about slavery and racism in our nation. A lot of people don't want this. They should be ashamed of themselves. A lot of people are talking about the issue as some mystical way to bewitch their children. I would prefer that we take the language back to those opponents and ask them what it is about slavery and racism that they would like to keep lying about. I see no point in being on the defensive about this.

Tenure guarantees that a faculty member can only be fired for a specific cause, allowing that faculty member to act without fear of losing their job because of interpersonal conflict. Ideally tenure should be awarded for a level of performance that will continue as a minimum; otherwise why commit to keeping the faculty member?  In that sense tenure should be awarded for behavior that is independent of the tenure decision. In practice junior faculty work very hard when in tenure-track positions, seeking good teaching track records as well as a publication arc indicating a thriving research program. When I came through service had a bigger role to play in the process but its current import at my university (Elon) is debatable. When I was tenure-track, I felt quite strongly that if I acted as if I wanted tenure then I would not be worthy of it. My strategy was to make myself indispensable (to some degree) through hard service work and to speak publicly but always constructively and co...

I understand the first part of the that phrase as well as the second one, separately. It is not clear to me why they still go together. Election deadline would make more sense. In an ideal world where both parties encourage voting we would make it convenient to vote during an extended period and then tabulate the votes. Focusing on a single day of course disadvantages those who can not take time away from work (in the office or tending family members) on a specific day when everyone else is also trying to vote. It encourages long lines (somehow that only happen in poorer areas) so that the cost of voting is higher than it need be. Given that one and only one party has been calling into doubt the security of all elections where they have lost or might lose, I understand that the security of early ballots is important but we have been handling that problem in a bipartisan fashion for many years before Trump refused to accept the fact that he lost by 7 million votes. Ideally tabulation wo...

It has always bothered me that we inscribe this phrase on our money when we do not act in a way commensurate with the words. Words not deeds is not an honorable way of life for either a person or a nation. What would be different if we lived that phrase? I'll speak from a Christian perspective not because it is the sole perspective but only out of my own ignorance of other perspectives. I will leave it to adherents of other faiths who are more qualified to so write. Quotes are from the King James Version if only because I grew up loving the language. Matthew 5:9--- Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. This would seem to be a clear injunction to invest more into diplomacy than into conflict. It is not a call for unilateral disarmament---for how would we protect the weak of this world?  On the other hand as of 2020 the ratio of military spending to international affairs was 714 billion to 60 billion dollars.  This is nothing resembling parit...