Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

  https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2410/index.html#x241029Z

  https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2101/index.html#x210107

I have a one-hour commute each way to work. I used to fill the time with music but for many years now I have switched to podcasts; they fill part of the need of the reading I used to have time for. Here are my current subscriptions: 99% Invisible:  about design (that when it works right you should rarely notice it). I'm a systems geek and a lot of the content scratches that itch. Not every story lands in terms of my interest but when they do they are fantastic. Spin-off of 99% Invisible:  the host Roman Mars is a fan of Robert Caro and has been doing a year-long monthly review of his examination of Robert Moses in The Power Broker, about the effect one man had on the infrastructure of New York City and Long Island. He achieved extraordinary things (both good and bad) and hurt an awful lot of people along the way. As someone who has spent many years in that part of the world this really hits home. Cautionary Tales:  Tim Harford has had a number of programs popularizing sta...

Decades ago my first yoga instructor, Gloria Pilot, saw that I was struggling with learning how to do a shoulder stand. She did the best coaching thing, which was to ask me to tell her what was wrong. I thought about it and said that I was afraid of falling and that made me shake more than I should going into the stand. She asked me what would happen if I fell. There was room around my mat, so I wouldn't strike anything. I had taken enough Judo classes by that point to know how to fall safely. Others in the class were struggling to learn the pose so I don't think my embarrassment at falling would be that great.  We discussed this, and then she urged me to practice starting the shoulder stand and intentionally falling. It felt silly at first but it made her point, both rationally and at the muscle-memory level. It would be better not to fall but in this context the cost of falling was minimal. After that she encouraged me to try to do the shoulder stand correctly. It didn't ...

I have favored the Democratic Party over the Republican Party most of my life. I was just becoming a teenager during Watergate and the corruption in the presidency affected me greatly. Afterward I always watched for the graft and the racism-as-campaign-tool in politics and found more of it in the Republican side. That's a bias from my small part of the cosmos. Things took a very strange turn as Newt Gingrich rose to power. He counseled his colleagues to treat opponents as traitors every chance they had, providing focus-group tested adjectives to smear them with. That's when I first noticed fringe Representatives who seemed disconnected from reality, describing things that weren't happening as part of their fear-mongering. Trump and Trumpism actively seeks to stop people from believing that anything is true.  There no longer is a Republican Party other than in name; their credo is loyalty to Trump, they have no other party platform. I've always had a fondness for the ide...

This mattered a great deal to me. I had been webmaster for this organization for a number of years when I found out that there were two parallel histories of the organization detailing different experiences for mathematicians of color and those who appeared white. It took a while to scan, correct, and post the documents and in the process I learned the history of the event referenced here. https://digitaleditions.walsworth.com/publication/?i=827930&article_id=4827501&view=articleBrowser I was present in March when this apology was publicly given by the organization to a person that the organization had treated as less than worthy because of their skin color, and it brought me to tears.

We are approaching our Fall Break, with midterm grades due this month, so we are in several ways approaching the end of the first quarter of the academic year. I am very used to teaching semester classes and would not want to teach on the quarter system; having said that the quarter system has always been a useful model for me, given that the amount of work I do in academia varies predictably through the year. The first quarter has a lot of start-up costs that are minimal, but can be daunting in how very many there are. The first quarter has the excitement of the new; the possibility of improving on past performance or the ability to log new experiences. Some folk mistakenly try to sprint through the first quarter, despite knowing that the pace can not be sustained until the finish. Many students withdraw, more so now in my experience than in the Spring. In the excitement of the new beginning it is easy to misassess your own limits. For those folk who see a bigger picture, now is when ...