Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

Today is the last day of 2022. Since I've spent most of my life on the academic calendar this means less to me than it may to other folk.  As an introvert I'm not really into partying as a rule, and much of the culture focuses on making this date into a party. As a lay person (and not a trained historian) I understand that historically there has long been an incentive to celebrate the turning point, a realization that the days have reached there shortest point in the Northern hemisphere and are starting to get longer again. With the institution of calendars that both took into account the cycle of going around the Sun and the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, there was always a mismatch, and these days at this particular time of year seemed to be off the books. I wonder how the Southern hemisphere views the holiday, historically. I'm not a farmer and the seasons of the crops have little direct influence on my life. We have a break in classes this time of year and I guess ...

One of the inspirations for my blogging is my friend Michael Covington's far-superior blog. His most recent entry as I write this is  https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2212/index.html#x221222 It articulated something that I've often thought of; that feeling I have that someone is rushing me to keep me from thinking something through clearly.  I am often rushed without malice because of the impatience of others but here I am thinking of when someone is trying to sell me something, and in particular, trying to convince me to support a political idea that goes against my values. It is fairly commonplace for me to read an opinion that contains ten whoppers in the lead paragraph. It is easy to spot when reading; Michael notes how often rhetoric is spoken rather than written in hope that folk won't think about what they are hearing. I was working in a hotel lobby last week with Fox Business News blaring on a nearby television set. It was stressful hearing a high d...

I brought some reading along for our holiday travels. I keep a different sleep/wake cycle from much of my family (apparently morning-person-genes are recessive) so I often have time to read.  I brought along a collection of noir novels from the fifties that I have read before and a small text on the mathematical properties of ordering in-and-of-itself, as applied across multiple topics in mathematics. I am rereading both because I get the same kind of pleasure from them as when I read them the first time. I don't have as much disposable time as I used to but I have watched in my youth a large number of films more than ten times. A well-made film has more to discover with each viewing. I have read Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, at least his volumes to date (please, DK, finish the series before you die, please) over ten times. It is a work so dense that each time I gain new understanding and yet acknowledge that I have barely begun to master it. Why? Because it i...

I often tell people that I love math, but math is big and I don't love all of it, certainly not in the same way. This past calendar year I taught two very different introductory courses in Abstract Algebra and Analysis. Both are foundational---they were categories on my oral comprehensive exams in graduate school---but as different as night and day in terms of the style in which the topics act. The first one focused on articulating structures that would be useful in different contexts; the latter identifying what the notion of closeness means in different contexts. Many topics in math have very different styles. I've taught a special topics course twice on Combinatorics which has such a very different way of approaching problems (articulate collections relevant to the context and count the size of the collections in different ways).  Multivariable Calculus for all of its techniques have some basic principles (run a curve through it, use the Chain Rule) that makes it easy to kee...

For at least a third of my life I have struggled with lack of sleep. I was diagnosed with sleep apnea in 2003. My wife thinks that my snoring (i.e asphyxiating and waking up) preceded that by many months.  I have been faithful with the main treatment, using a CPAP device to pump air into my lungs at night. And yet: even with the CPAP my sleep is troubled. I have back pain issues (a pinched nerve) that are exacerbated by lying down so there is a natural governor in terms of how long I sleep:  at some point the pain makes itself known. Early on I did not have coping strategies in place. For most of my life I had been able to rely upon my wits and memory to perform well without much preparation. That failed me more and more as my sleeplessness progressed. I suffered from severe depression then for my life as I had known it was coming to an end.  At some point I acknowledged the feelings and started identifying coping strategies to help me find joy in this new stage of life. ...

I wasn't very athletic in my youth, or any other part of my life actually. In any event I never collected baseball cards. This was long before there were other kinds of cards to collect, so not being into baseball cards meant I wasn't into trading cards. I had friends who were into it and that was cool. Our former president teased Wednesday that he was going to make a major announcement yesterday (Thursday). He had already announced his candidacy for the presidency, and it seemed not unreasonable to think that it might be related to that candidacy. To my knowledge he has no campaign manager or staff yet, which makes that announcement a bit weird. It turns out that the announcement was that he was selling pretty cheesy looking NFT's with his head photoshopped on tops of a child's idea of masculine figures (superhero, astronaut, etc.). They look bad and sell for $99 each. Since they are NFT's you don't actually get the image to hold in your hands, although he refe...

If the universe flipped left and right overnight, how would you know? Orientation is a matter of consistency; it is not as if one element of a mirror-image pairing of environments is ever canonical so much as everything within that element is consistent. What options do I take as canonical because they are in my environment and consistent?  How many of my moral precepts are contextual and which are absolute?

I have always enjoyed the rhythm of the academic year. Some parts of the work are repetitive, and so having the variations of monthly exams, the mania of the students and faculty trying to get work done before breaks, the meetings at the end of term where folk are trying to remember their names: I love it all. At the end of each semester though we go from highway speed to parking and it's rough on the transmission. The adrenal glands die. I and many others are tired but unable to sleep, still trying to process the rush of events. Bodies ache from academic work which is not the same as manual labor and yet we all just ache. In December, we along with many others celebrate the holiday by travels to be with family when I at least am at a nadir in terms of mental and physical energy. It is the calendar, it happens every year, I try to prepare ahead for it and then give myself a break when I make minor errors.

When I was in graduate school I noticed something about the undergraduates that I taught that caught me off-guard. The Mathematics building was across the street from the University Health Services building which had a walk-in clinic for students, etc. Before I arrived it had been know as DUH. (I'm not sure what the acronym was for, there are several possible choices.) When I asked the students what the building was, they all said DUH. When I asked them where the University Health Services building was, nobody knew. This was despite the sign being quite prominent in the front of the building. Students would see it every day on their way to class and not read it. I filed this behavior away as one of the many things I don't understand and didn't think about it much until lately. We are yet again having the wedge issue of civil rights for non-hetero couples being up for debate, turning one group of citizens against another group of citizens for political gain, as if one group ...

I have been fond of Noir as a genre for as long as I can remember.  I enjoyed watching The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep on television with my father when I was very young, so I guess it started with Humphrey Bogart and his appeal. I was always a reader so of course I turned to the novels that the movies were based on and read everything I could by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. I branched out into other movies and authors. I think Double Indemnity has been one of my favorite movies for many decades now although I'm more fond of some of James Cain's other novels. People more articulate than I have tried to describe Noir as a genre, and as much as I've been immersed in it for decades it is actually hard for me to do so. Part of the appeal is the intricacy of the plotting; no good Noir is a straight line. Part of it lies in the moral transitions in both directions---giving in to temptation and seeking atonement---and what they reveal about character. Part of it is ...

I don't have many hobbies; I usually spend all my time not committed to family on work, because I love my job. One thing I have done since I first moved off-campus as a graduate student is cook for myself. I am a fussy eater with strong distastes. The other side of being fussy is that I have strong likes, and it is through cooking that I have found many flavors that I did not know that I liked. I began with an old Good Housekeeping cookbook given to me by my mother. I pretty soon realized that the salt, butter, cream, and sugar amounts were kind of off-the chart. It was a wonderful procedural guide but I found pretty quickly that I had to revise the recipes for myself, and began to keep a recipe file on 3 x 5 cards. Throughout graduate school I made a point of asking for specific cookbooks (that I had browsed in bookstores) for birthday and Christmas presents and pretty quickly built up a library. Some were general, some were more specialized on Chinese and vegetarian cuisines. I...

It is not clear to me that public discourse was less ugly in past years. I am white and affluent and those are powerful filters. I may be more aware of the vitriol that is present now because of technology, and hope that there is a constructive use to that knowledge as a free citizen in a democracy. I am more aware than ever of politicians (elected officials, candidates, pundits) advocating that we treat each other worse. One of the gifts of the spirit that I feel I have in the face of that advocacy is inertia. As my default position I'm not going to agree to treat other people worse. Others need to convince me why I should and they need to work hard. By disposition I am pushed away from agreement with advocates who are loud in either volume or intensity of language, for to reward that kind of behavior is to invite cacophony. I am pushed away from agreement with advocates who talk very fast, stringing together extreme and improbable claims in an attempt to keep me from examining an...