Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

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My son flew in from Denver on Saturday and it's been wonderful having him around. My family (wife, son, and daughter) went to a beach trip after a few days in Delaware with my sister-in-law and nephew. I have a lot of pre-cancerous cells on my face that get scraped off once a year (I think my dermatologist is building a mask of my face) and I do not go to sunny locales any more.  My family took beach trips once a year to the Jersey shore as I was growing up in Southeastern Pennsylvania for many years, then switched to the North Carolina beach. I enjoyed riding the waves with a raft but moderately so. I did not enjoy the heat and sun so much. I enjoyed the boardwalk stores and pizza places in both locations but the enjoyment faded with each passing year. I brought books and whenever I could holed up by myself (as an introvert) and read. My family was prim in many ways; no alcohol (we have alcoholic relatives and that pained my parents) and not much partying. Insofar as my sister enj...

I have many reasons to despise Donald Trump. As someone who lived in the Northeast for a couple of decades prior to 1988, he was regularly in my media feed in the 1980's, as a promoter who spent all of his time telling other people how great he was. I have more reasons than his being obnoxious: his refusal to pay the electricians and other workers who renovated his Atlantic City casinos unless they settled for 10 cents on the dollar (threatening to bleed them dry in court with his army of lawyers if they sued); his scam university; his sadism during his first term; his attempted coup on January 6, 2021; his treason with documents stored in Mar-a-Lago; his much more efficient sadism in his second term. It's a long list that he adds to daily. But, here is the trigger when I hear his voice: I would never want him alone in a room with my daughter. It's patronizing---she can defend herself, I know. But when he owned Miss Teen USA he bragged about going into the dressing rooms to...

Our politics are broken but I dream of a day when free speech has one more restriction beyond yelling fire in a crowded room or claiming to want to kill the president. We need to stop people (particularly in politics or the media) from using the concept of average (or as we say in the math business, mean). The mean is useful when working with various probability distributions, i.e., in restricted technical settings. In common situations it is almost always misleading. If I am teaching a class and Bill Gates walks in, our mean wealth goes up by many powers of ten. Without mentioning Gates's entrance the mean is entirely misleading. It is often used by politicians and pundits to intentionally mislead about similar situations such as tax cuts that go primarily to the ultra-rich. The median is a far better measure. If you sort the data it is the middle value. If Bill Gates walks into my classroom the median wealth would shift by a couple of bucks. The mean is the average of a set of da...

It's been a rough few weeks of news. ICE continues to act without check. Florida governor Ron DeSantis is showing off his new cages for immigrants to MAGA sadism tourists. Primarily our Republican legislators have agreed to take money from helping the needy and given it to the wealthiest at Trump's behest.  As is often the case NC Representative Virginia Foxx summarizes a lot of the MAGA hatred, throwing a fit when Representative Maxwell of Tennessee pointed out how fundamentally anti-Christian her actions are in demonizing immigrants.   To my knowledge none of those leading us into savagery are of Native American heritage and seem not to pause at all to be grateful that there ancestors were treated better. Not giving up, but it's been a rough few weeks trying to remain hopeful.