Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I may have picked it up from something I read, but for a while now I've been saying that The Biggest Lie in politics is that everybody does it. When a politician is caught doing something they shouldn't, the common response from them and their supporters is that a) everybody does it and b) you shouldn't single them out for punishment. But you name it: bribery, lying, forging, personal scandals, whatever, it's as with every other antisocial activity: a small proportion of folk commit these kinds of public sins and they receive a disproportionate amount of attention, making it seem to some as if everybody does it. This is the ultimate rationalization, offered without documentation to back up its thesis, preying upon the cynicism of the weak. In this instance as in so many others cynicism is a weakness often used to justify inaction ("why bother?"). So for whatever insane reason the US Supreme Court is actually having a hearing about whether the president is abov...

As long as I can remember I've had a lot of nervous energy. At some point I started applying it to tasks and it became a virtue. I started running long distance a bit in high school on my own and ended up running in the New Haven Labor Day Road Race four years. The time spent running was meditative, and I worked through a number of things that way. When I first started teaching full-time I set some goals for myself that were a bit unrealistic in terms of grading work quickly, and because of my willingness to lose sleep they were actually realized. At some point I found a better work balance and graded most of my students' work while on campus. Our children did not sleep through the night for the first couple of years, and my wife and I traded off attending to their needs. I was sleep-deprived but managed to keep going. At some point our children did sleep through the night and I was still sleep-deprived, which is when my apnea was diagnosed. Even with treatment I am sleep-depri...

I went to university four hours away from my birth family by car. I spoke to my parents regularly (twice a week) and visited for holidays and summers, and did not feel very isolated from them, even when I went to graduate school and stopped going home for summers. While in graduate school I met my wife and we became engaged very shortly before she left the state for graduate school while I continued with my studies an air-flight away. We were engaged for roughly two and a half years, visiting monthly. Money was tight and we did late-night phone calls when the costs were lower and wrote long letters as well. We married and had two children. Decades later they went off to university, one by one. By this point phone call expenses did not depend on the hour of day and we were better off financially. We stayed in touch. With the advent of COVID we all became used to video-chatting for work. When my son worked gigs in other states we stayed in touch that way and still do now that he has a fu...

I've been programming since my second year at university and I truly enjoy it. A couple of concepts have shaped my style, including that of test-driven development. With TDD, before you implement any code you write at least one test for it. If you need to check more possibilities in terms of input you add tests. The most important thing is a new definition of software working: it works when it passes its tests. TDD goes hand-in-hand with being an empiricist. The most interesting concepts are the ones that can be tested and/or verified, and that is when a concept graduates to become a fact. Software can still have bugs with TDD; tests often miss things. Still, as a core concept it has made me a good deal more productive both in coding and in being an informed citizen. When I consume media I am constantly barraged with claims that get through my filters. Claims that include no means of verification, no details, names, times and dates, etc. are essentially propaganda, designed to alte...

I'm proctoring an exam as I type this. It is my 35th year of full-time teaching so I've done a bunch of exams. The first exam turned in is rarely the best; often it is incomplete, turned in out of frustration by a student stymied by the questions. Time of completion is not the best metric in this circumstance. It is an easy metric (some instructors put the time completed on each exam as it is turned in) but it measures a quality different from the goals of the classes I have taught. I often run into metrics that people use more for their convenience than for their usefulness. Early mapping software used distance traveled to optimize routes. Nowadays knowledge of speed limits is used to make travel time the metric instead of travel distance. In politics one of the scandals of the day is the way folk associate Trump and his ilk with organized religion, given his failure to attend worship services, public breaking of most spiritual laws, and general air of contempt and anger towar...