Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

I'll be singing (along with dozens of others in the group) in a concert tomorrow. I've been in music ensembles almost non-stop since third grade, and so I think I've been in close to 100 concerts by now.  I enjoy the preparation, starting from scratch with most music and rehearsing until it is muscle memory with the tunes running through my mind unbidden. One of the joys of aging is that I know that things go well during concerts. I had so much insecurity when I was younger. Facing it head on has been good for me. I played some JV soccer when I was younger but was never really athletically coordinated. I never thought of sports in terms of teamwork; musical ensembles were already my template for working with others on different tasks that when done well coordinated into something beautiful. How could playing a game with a ball compare with that?

When I was much younger I read Garry Wills' Lead Time , a collection of articles he had written organized around the view he had of his growth as a journalist. One of the things that he touched on was the benefit of not commenting instantly but rather waiting long enough to be able to make more sense of what you are describing. More recently the NPR show/podcast On the Media  has been putting out some good, succinct handbooks to help listeners to be good consumers of news.  One of the ones that I have shared with my students from time to time is the  Breaking News Consumers Handbook . The first guideline:  In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong. There have been other influences on me over the years, encouraging me not to invest emotion and not to encourage others to invest emotion in what may be a premature interpretation of what is going on. This applies in many ways to my blogging. At any given point in time there are a number of things going on...

As a student and now as a teacher I have used math books regularly as part of my work. They serve different purposes, aim at different readerships, are used for different types of courses, and so on.  There is a long history of using examples in math books that reflect the culture of the authors and possibly what they think the mainstream audience is. Many of the probability and statistics books that I have read over the years were very heavily gendered, using male and female as the easiest example of two related populations. In more recent years I've noticed that statistics textbooks were more willing to use as examples whether or not there was enough evidence of bias to justify a lawsuit being successful.  Such lawsuits are a more common part of our culture, and the books reflect that. I don't think I've seen any math books that I would call radical or outside the mainstream. While the profession has diversified a good deal during my time in it (thank God) it does not oft...

I regularly have students who do not meet deadlines for assessments. Sometimes there's not much I can do---if they try to turn work in after the semester has ended for example (which has happened).  Most of the time it's my decision whether or not to offer extensions. There are two main factors in that decision and a relatively minor one as well. The first is fairness---a student who has more time for an assessment can have an advantage over the rest of the class and the grade measures different things for the late student and the class. This is not that big a deal in my experience for homework and projects but for exams and presentations it can seriously change a grade in a way that is biased.  Fairness works both ways---if the student has been ill and works with me on a schedule to catch back up then fairness requires that I give her/him more time. The second factor is whether or not the extension is encouraging students not to take deadlines seriously. This happens regularl...

Aside from the spoken and written word I use a lot of body language. My face is not naturally expressive and I compensate. In my classes where I am eager to hold my students' attention I will move around the classroom to imitate any motion that we are discussing; I constantly gesture with my fingers to indicate magnitude, small or large.  I've been doing it long enough that I take it for granted. My first recollection of doing this is a crystal memory. As a graduate student I was standing on a corner waiting for the light to change before crossing. Across the way I saw a car at the front of its lane with a turn signal on that would have led against one-way traffic. There were not many cars out and probably not much would have happened but such things can turn bad quickly and unexpectedly. The car's windows were up, preventing the driver from hearing me, so I stepped next to the one-way stop sign on my corner and pointed to it rigidly while facing the car. The turn signal we...

I have a vivid memory from my teenage years. I had some good grades in high school and the local American Legion chapter was giving me an award (I think about $100) for it. My mother and I went to one of their meetings to accept the check.  I was (and still am) shy so it was not easy for me to sit through; it was worse for the person leading the meeting cracking jokes that made white males feel smarter than other kinds of people. I wonder now if the jokes were less offensive or more than I remember. I remember after the ceremony wanting to return the check. Did I? I doubt that I had that much courage in my convictions. The entertainment at the meeting was something I had heard of but not seen; a guest lip-synced to a record. The recording was one by Andy Griffith, a routine that he had done that had been popular early in his career where he acted as if he was so rural that he did not understand the football game that he was attending ("them boys in the green uniforms, they seemed ...

Honor is a hard concept. It used be thrown around a lot more casually, now not so much except perhaps in school honor codes and in military society. I don't know that I have a good definition of honor. It permits lying such as when particularly good people hid Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. It permits killing in self-defense and in the defense of others. Honor is distinct from a strict list of things not to do and is (as most things are) dependent on context. For me in my day-to-day life it comes up particularly in the context of power, namely how dangerous it is to give power to people without a sense of honor. This happens routinely; voters enjoy being lied to about easy solutions to long-term problems and we elect folk who lie not to save others but to gain power for themselves. This seems to be a clear-cut example of dishonor. In my very small part of the world, academia, I run across (rarely, thank God) administrators who have gotten their rank through some form of ...

I've been appointed to a second term as Faculty Ombudsperson.  I've had a few other roles on my campus where I've served a second term. There are some differences to approaching a responsibility that you've had before and some opportunities for reflection. When you are in the midst of doing a job it can be difficult to be active as opposed to reactive. Particularly when chairing a department or an active university committee there can be fires to put out seemingly daily. If you care about the thing you are doing then you want to put these fires out, i.e., find good solutions to emergency problems. Part of the crisis can be delegated---that is what it means to lead a group---but the leader is ultimately responsible and that has always weighed heavily on me. Approaching a second term affords the opportunity to plan for how to lead forward while still dealing with the day-to-day crises. This often involves setting up structures involving colleagues that can deal with the b...

At some point as an adult I realized that when I went to a funeral, the mourners remembered that I was there. It was of meaning to them, no matter how limited the interaction was. I am a shy person by nature, but it seemed to me at that point that showing up for the important things (graduations, weddings, baptisms, funerals) was something that was worth my doing because the meaning that it had for others was way beyond the cost to me, and so I started committing to showing up. Sometimes logistics prevented me, but almost all of the time they didn't and I chose to show up. I've been to two funerals this month. Perhaps my age leads me to have more funerals than I used to but that's not obvious to me. In neither case did I know the decedent that well, which is pretty common. My relationship is usually with someone mourning, for whom I want to be present. I do remember when I was department chair many years ago going to funerals for the death of a department member's paren...

I enjoy programming and I find that the projects that I program directly support my mathematical interests. I first programmed seriously to generate examples for conjectures that I proved in my dissertation.  It's been 35 years and I still turn to programming to surpass what I can do with paper and pencil. For most of that time I have been influenced by a methodology known as Test-Driven Development. For ill-defined or non-obvious problems, it can be difficult to articulate what parts or all of a program should do. It becomes difficult to see a path forward, and you never really know if what you are doing is correct when correct itself is ill-defined. My understanding of TDD is that for parts and wholes of programs, I start my articulating what I want to achieve and then write a clear-cut test that tells me if I succeeded. Then and only then do I try to write code that will accomplish that goal. Goal first, supporting work second. Almost all of my programming has been with Object-O...

I don't handle vacations well. I enjoy working until I am tired, and then I enjoy relaxing. It is hard for me to go straight to the latter skipping the former. So I go into my office on school breaks and work. I don't have the adrenaline-panic of my usual schedule, so I work at what I think of as a vacation-pace. I go in later, I spend more time on breaks surfing the web between tasks, etc.

I think I first was a leader when I became department chair in 1994. Other positions (squad leader in marching band, etc.) had far less serious repercussions if I made mistakes. I felt good about my skills on one level, knew that the people I led wanted me to succeed, and that there were mentors available for me to learn from. On an emotional level I struggled with insecurities and I still do from time to time in different contexts. One thing I picked up from my father is that it is easier to do hard things once you rule out the alternatives as being unacceptable. I developed a mantra:  "My insecurities are a luxury that the folk who depend on me can't afford."  Insofar as I feel a sense of duty it is tied into that sentiment.

I have been programming in support of my work (research and teaching) for over four decades now. I started in APL, then move very briefly to C and then for a while in C++. A lot of the C++ concepts have stayed with me in terms of programming style, but I then moved to interpreted languages for a number of reasons, first to Perl and now to Python for decades. Python allows me to at least try to write elegant code and appeals to me aesthetically, although as time goes by I do tend to focus more and more on C++ concepts of interface design, hiding implementations, test-driven development and programming by contract. (Java came along later to these things and I never warmed to Java.) Now that my retirement is in sight (I'm about 80% of the way through my career) I've been trying to articulate my programming style. I want programs to be correct but also demonstrably correct; clarity and programming by contract are more and more at the forefront of my mind. For the last few years an ...

 Quite a good explanation of what too many have forgotten: http://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2202/index.html#x220220

I serve as faculty ombudsperson at my university (Elon) but the title of this post refers to another ombudsperson, Jim Huegerich (for the town of Chapel Hill, NC) who passed away recently. His website gives a nicely detailed description of his work in that setting, that I wanted to share. I've been seeing testimonials since his passing to the warmth and compassion he brought to the job, definitely a role model for me. Why Ombuds? The Ombuds Office helps residents, visitors,  and Town employees navigate their experience of living and working in Chapel Hill. We do this by helping people tell their story in a way that it can be heard, and by identifying options, strategies and resources that help people thrive.  We want to hear from you if you have an idea that would be helpful to the Town, or if you have an issue or concern that you want to discuss.     Ombud’s Role The Ombuds will provide a safe place for anyone  to share their concerns and explore stra...

In political parties it is often hard to separate the politician from the message. Supporters tend to support people and not platforms. There is party identification certainly. It's flipped since the Republican party threw in with Trump. Today the House Republican members voted to censure the two of their members willing to sit on a committee investigating the riot that killed five policemen in their building. We've seen the video. It's amazing more people weren't killed or injured. They were censured for daring to question Trump's actions in directing a mob to overturn the election. No principles seem to be involved other than a thirst for power.  Will those involved look back later and wonder what led them to all this?  

In my personal and professional life I have to have difficult conversations from time to time; most people do.  Avoidance and denial often get in the way of seeing through the conversation to a good outcome, and yet in my better moments I have managed, following the example of various role models in my life. A long-since retired colleague, Jim Drummond, shared with me a checklist for such conversations many years ago. I lost it, of course, but have seen variations of it on the web. If you Google "Difficult Conversations Checklist" you can find various revisions.  Feel free to try  https://www.thefbcg.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/A-Difficult-Conversation-Checklist_Handout.pdf . One component of the checklist is a systematic approach to empathy:  what is the other person's narrative? Without some understanding of that, there is no good outcome that I can see. Sometimes it requires a series of conversations to achieve that; sometimes it's there immediately in an angry...

I have been reviewing how to do some programming in Mathematica. I use Mathematica, a mathematical computing environment, intensely in one of my Spring classes---Multivariable Calculus.  The class focuses on techniques from a more qualitative perspective---many real examples can't be done by hand and so we use the technology to extend what problems we can discuss. Very little of my knowledge of Mathematica programming is discussed explicitly in class. This is pretty common---my comfort level as well as my knowledge base in teaching relies on having a firm foundation that is rarely relevant in a direct fashion. I am reminded of working with an adjunct once who knew that (-1)(-1) = 1 but was a bit shaky on why. The why is a fact from abstract algebra that does not need to be discussed explicitly with students but can easily be used to motivate an explanation that helps them to build intuition.

Aside from two winter storms this past week I've been involved in conversations related to moving my mother from her house to an assisted-living facility near my siblings. Let's just say my attention has been elsewhere. More later.

We have had another fierce winter storm come through. There is a fatalism about it; it's the weather, what can you do?  They salt the roads before and after. People die in car crashes. Poor folk die from the cold. Was it as bad as the last one? Debate. And yet: fatalism is learned. Changing weather patterns grab more moisture and bring it across more stretches of land as the atmosphere has more energy pumped into it. This is what scientists have been talking about since the 1970's, the impact of our polluting the atmosphere. We are doing this. In theory we can stop. Any action that requires the cooperation of literally millions of people requires political leadership.  So, fatalism is learned. US politicians are too tied to the fossil fuel industry to turn our policies away in a meaningful fashion. Our politics are too corrupt for citizens to have an influence. Fatalism is learned with every media churn that tells us that there is nothing we can do.  Apathy and cynicism w...

My father passed away fifteen years ago this month. My mother's health has been declining and she will be moving out of the house that I was raised in.  My siblings, who still live nearby, are coordinating the sale (and are just in the beginning stages). I was born in 1961 and didn't get my own place (aside from a university dorm) until 1983, so this was my home for almost a third of my life. The memories are of the people I grew up with more so than the building itself. When I was small and agile it seemed big; now that I am old and clumsier it seems crowded to walk through without knocking something over. Since then I've had homes (only one of them a house) in New Haven, Brooklyn, Chapel Hill, Pittsburgh (a suburb called Turtle Creek), and Carrboro. The memories of the homes themselves fade more quickly than I expected that they would; it's always been the memories of the people who were part of my life that I have held on to. I keep expecting some twinge at the thoug...

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of losing candidate Donald Trump assembling a mob in Washington DC and directing it to attack Congress to stop the votes of his successor Joe Biden from being certified in hope that he could stay in power.  Most elected Republicans supported his actions before and/or after the fact. Insurrection Day, a new day to remember for citizens of the USA.

I am seeing retirement in the distance and want to gradually start to winnow out my office possessions.  The most obvious area to work on is my collection of math and computer science books. All of them were treasured at some point. Computer books related to specific applications and languages are easy to part with, given how quickly they become outdated. For the math books I try to maintain some diversity of content if only to have books to lend students, but that rules out books that I don't think are clear enough for undergraduates. The older I get, the more I feel that I belong to my possessions instead of the other way around. The fewer I have, the fewer masters I answer to.

At the end of the semester and during break it is difficult to establish work momentum. When having to triage it is more exciting to focus on the urgent at the expense of the long-term important tasks. It is natural not to want to miss opportunities, for that is what urgency is about---a sudden loss in value for a given task if deferred too long, but unfortunately it makes it easy to ignore the more important long-term planning and projects. So I have given myself a couple of days to try and winnow out easy tasks from my to-do list so that I can look at the things that are hard and make the difficult choices about what to focus on.

Another road trip come and gone. 425 miles to PA, 130 miles to NY, 529 miles back home to NC. Observations: 1) My wife's car handled well for its first road trip with full passengers and luggage. 2) No snow until we came home, much appreciated. 3) Light traffic on the way home on New Years Eve, again, much appreciated. Glad to see long-absent loved ones, but we are struggling to provide care for an elderly relative who has fallen several times and is refusing ongoing care. There are memory issues from head injuries from the falls, and the relative is stubborn about passively seeking death on a number of fronts. Sigh.

I would really like to change our country so that police do not regularly kill people of color, let alone mistreat them on a regular basis.  It felt as if we were on the cusp of some systemic changes with high-profile cases of police casually killing POC in front of cameras. If the movement to change this had consulted with their opponents such as the police unions and politicians that have built their careers on the rhetoric of "law and order", they could not have come up with a worse slogan than "Defund the Police". This has given their opponents such a gift in terms of rhetoric, in terms of fundraising, in terms of turning undecided voters against them. It focuses the attention on a means instead of an end, allowing dishonest people to run wild with their claims of anarchy.  It has failed miserably.

Road trips for me fall into two categories:  solo and with family.  Solo allows me to give free rein to my organizational instincts. I plan things, execute the plans, remember details, the whole thing. Whether strength or weakness depends on context; I am organized. With family it's a losing battle. I noted early on that the time it takes to exit a building with my family is proportional to the number of people. Folk tend to decide unilaterally what they're going to do. We haven't lost any kids yet but it has been a concern.

I serve as Faculty Ombudsperson at my university. The last couple of Fall semesters I had four cases each. This term I had ten cases. That's an increase; for context this past Spring I had five cases.   Much of my business has to do with interpersonal conflicts, so it is not surprising that the stress of the pandemic would exacerbate such conflicts. It's possible that during the previous two semesters the use of video software for teaching and other forms of interaction may have dampened the conflicts and/or the likelihood of folk approaching me. I am in the third year of a three-year term; it is also possible that folk are becoming more aware of my existence in this role.

A number of states, Kentucky in particular, have been devastated the past few days with tornados and other kinds of wind storms. As someone who has been spared that kind of devastation it's always been hard to understand the damage that moving air can cause. I think it was about 1976 or so that James Hansen from NASA started testifying regularly before Congress about the change in our climate caused by air pollution, specifically the byproducts of burning fossil fuels. The fossil fuel industry has been so entwined with our car culture in the US that many people, specifically politicians, were able to ignore the science and just maintain the status quo. Four decades later and we are reaping what we have sown, although that phrase isn't accurate. The world's population has reaped what the polluting nations have sown. The world I leave behind will be very different than the world I was born into.  One of the fundamental issues of climate change is that we are charging the atmo...

I upgrade software regularly. It has become easier to do so with each passing year. Early on I had to plan for it, reach out to repositories, etc. Nowadays the software will usually prompt me. Many folk don't like software updates, because the cost in convenience can be high. Even subtle changes in user interface can break many unarticulated means of working. The benefits are often hard to perceive:  new features that you didn't know that you wanted. The main reason that I regularly update is the benefit people don't like to think about:  increased security.  Everyday a large number of people spend their day trying to break into other people's computing technology. I saw this up and close when I hosted my own web server; I'd say the main reason I stopped at the end was the required vigilance as literally thousands of entities tried to break in each day. From my casual perusal of security blogs it seems as if the majority of break-ins occur because folk have not upda...

I assess others regularly. That is part of my job as a teacher.  It is an unambiguous form of communication (if done right) the summary of which (the term grade) students share on their transcript in search of further education and employment. That doesn't mean that I enjoy being assessed myself. I am fortunate that most of my supervisors in my life have been pleased with my work. Even when constructive it is hard for me to take criticism, written down in its finality. The hybrid is self-assessment. At my university I am asked to write an annual self-evaluation along with professional goals for the coming year.  Much of what I write about myself is good; I'm still going strong after decades at my job.  When things go poorly I feel more in control if I'm the one who is pointing them out.

This morning I finished grading the third and last of my final exams for the semester. This particular class was small and did well overall, so it was easy to take specific pleasure in their achievements. On some level submitting term grades brings closure to a class. An immediate exception is when a student challenges a grade; occasionally I enter a typographical error into the grade-book and have to correct it. I work hard to avoid it out of pride in my work so it doesn't happen too often. (Other challenges are unfounded and wither quickly; I offer many assessments during the term and do not suffer students to ask for changes to the grading schema after the fact.) Some classes naturally lead to other math classes. This doesn't happen much with the classes that mainly serve as general studies graduation requirements but past that I'll often have students take a second class with me. Sometimes that's a scheduling requirement (only one section, no way to avoid me) and so...

Long before he ran for president, Donald Trump was part of my media feed. He pays publicists to make this happen. I guess that's a business investment if it leads more people to give him money. I never really understood the urge to give your money to people that are wealthier than you are. One thing that was clear when we were younger is that he had ripped off a lot of folk in Atlantic City. He regularly refused to pay contractors for their casino work. With the casino bankruptcies he seems to have left his investors with all of the debts. My all public accounts (and there were many at the time) this was because he had a lot of lawyers who specialized in running out the clock. Anyone trying to sue Trump lost their shirt in legal fees without ever getting to a payoff. Now we are coming up on a year since Trump, having lost the presidential election, assembled a mob and directed it to attack Congress to stop the certification of Biden as his successor. So far, no consequences for any...

A student met with me today to go over his final exam. He had done well, one of the highest scores in the class, but wanted to see his mistakes and discuss them. At no point in the conversation did he try to get me to change his grade; rather he wished to know how his answer could have been correct if he had done it differently.  (A subtle thing---answers can be correct even if they don't follow the particular path in my solutions.)  It was a good conversation because he wanted to understand more, I guided him, and he did understand more. Sometimes I dwell on students when they are not at their best; I need to lift up those anecdotes when they are at their best.

I am so weary of our country's hypocrisy about loving its children. I am so weary of children having access to guns. I am so weary of lowering the flag to half-mast. I am so weary of active-shooter drills. The majority of Americans are weary of politicians caving to the NRA. Of putting reelection ahead of saving the lives of children. Of putting money ahead of saving the lives of children. I am so weary of citizens who think that freedom is about having a gun. And that not having a gun diminishes their freedom. I am so weary of shootings getting closer and closer to where I and my family live. I am so very very weary.

Bob Dole passed away today. During my lifetime he was Senate Majority Leader and Republican nominee for president. Before I was born he served in WW II and was permanently injured in one of his arms.  During the years he was politically active I disagreed with many of his viewpoints. Nowadays those disagreements seem mild; we have become much more accustomed to the rhetoric of violence and discrimination since his time. He was a voice of advocacy for those among us who are disabled, and I will praise him for that. He did a lot of good in many areas and we can all aspire to have that epitaph.

The math teachers that I have known over the decades have had varying models for their work. I've self-identified as a storyteller, trying to share interesting things that my listeners may not have heard about. Not surprisingly I am drawn to mathematical authors who are storytellers, in particular those who have a point of view. People outside the field tend to view mathematics as dry and inhuman, perhaps because of the commercial pressures on introductory textbooks to be as bland as possible. As a teacher I have rarely been enthralled with an introductory textbook while finding some gems among upper-level texts. My favorite mathematical authors identify an aesthetic about their niches, a way of identifying what is special and beautiful about varying constructs. The trigger for me to write this particular essay is the first sentence of Michael Spivak's A Comprehensive Introduction to Differential Geometry, Volume I, which begins "The nicest example of a metric space is Euc...

Gift giving is another one of those human activities that leaves me feeling less than human. I appreciate the thought that goes into most gifts but there's not much that I need and I feel overburdened but my possessions as it is. I put a lot of thought into gifts for others but my experiences are arcane; I tend to think of them first and give books to folk that they probably never read. Part of it is the expectation of it all. I like doing things for people spontaneously, treating them, picking up the check and I enjoy it when others do the same for me. The idea that because it is a person's birthday that we need to have a gift exchanged feels unnatural to me. Almost all of the cultural trappings of Christmas drive all thoughts of Christ out of my mind (it wasn't Christ as baby that redeemed us, so the fetishization of the Christ child at the expense of the Sermon on the Mount is a pet peeve of mine) and materialistic gifts to celebrate Christ's birth feel perverse. But...

We disengage gradually from our students. Eventually the last meeting of the class comes and goes. Some come to my office for help, then there is the final exam. Occasionally students come back to challenge their grade but fortunately that is rare. Break occurs. The next semester begins. Some students take me for more classes and we have a comfort level in the teacher/student relationship. Many others pass me in the hall, out walking on campus, etc. By and large the ones who really were students are friendly, say hi, smile. A few who were trying to calibrate how little effort to put into the course to get the minimal grade that they needed avert their eyes. There is a swath in between. Colleagues come and go, but that is a much slower process. Some move to other jobs; others retire. Sadly a few pass a way, a sudden shock to the entire community. In a decade or so I'll be the one fading away, retiring. I'll probably not get to campus much, just for opportunities to honor and res...

We have monthly department meetings during the terms.  I've led some of them over the years. We're pretty good at meeting. We have an agenda so that it is our responsibility to prepare for the items listed. People speak freely. When we start to repeat ourselves the person leading the meeting brings the topic to a close. We usually have a sense as to the resolution of each topic. This is reinforced with minutes. Department members offer corrections to the minutes regularly, so that we are accurate about what we have agreed to. I often hear folk complain about department meetings, and I often wish I had more time in my life for all I've agreed to do. I never link the two, department meetings and time to do other things. This is time well-spent.

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...

I received the Moderna booster shot Friday night (29 OCT) and was bit feverish yesterday. The fever broke overnight but left me a bit weary today. I hope to post something more meaningful tomorrow.

I've been cooking since I moved off campus my second year of graduate school. I enjoy eating and I figured out early on that the two were connected somehow. Cooking has the hallmark of many hobbies (it is after all not my day job) in terms of something involving eye-hand coordination, planning, and tangible pleasure when it works out right. Early on I started with a second-hand cookbook from my mother; over time I grew to lessen many of the recipes' quantities of salt, butter, etc.  I developed an interest in stir-fries and slow-cooker recipes and accumulated from birthday and Christmas presents a range of cookbooks to support that interest. As a graduate student (Poor Hungry and Depressed was the meme) I couldn't spend much each week, even though cooking for myself saved money over meal plans and restaurants. I was heavy into soups for a while. I do like to cook with a lot of herbs and spices, so I budgeted a new spice each week. I had a few pieces of cookware from my moth...

I teach as the main part of my job description. I have a sense of what it entails:  identifying goals for my students and pedagogy to help them achieve them. Lots of preparation, some contact in and out of class, lots of assessment. I do struggle with what it means to be a student. It's easier to focus on being a student of one teacher at a time I guess. My experience was OCD in a good way I think---near-perfect attendance, assignments submitted on time, etc. Now that we are no longer teaching virtually and students are back in the classroom, some students are struggling with being in the classroom aside from exams.  They turn in the work, receive average to poor grades, and I never interact with them aside from their assignments. It is very very strange, hoping that the structure that I have put in place is sufficient for them to learn without any person-to-person interaction with me. They are names on my roll but are they really my students?

I've benefited from mentors my entire adult life. Knowing this I've tried to be open to mentoring others as a way of "paying it forward". My best mentors were experts in communication, both in sharing operational wisdom but also hearing me, really hearing me, as I've talked through my strengths and weaknesses in different contexts. Mentors don't have to know that much more than me to help me. I've been a research advisor to undergraduates almost my entire professional career. There have been times when I have enjoyed the editing of their work so much that I have thought of applying to edit professional journals, but I know that I would have to give up many things that I currently enjoy to do so. I dearly love the "light bulb over the head" experience of a student when they've been shown the path to a new concept, and I see that more in research advising than in teaching. As I've become more senior (and in academia there aren't that ma...

I do tire of politicians calling issues that they don't want to address "divisive". There are many divisive issues in politics, as many politicians have found it useful to find issues that provide their base with opponents to be demonized. But calling an issue divisive doesn't make it so. Far better to judge the issues in and of themselves than to try and decide if they are divisive.  Again, I would look to the media to not take such responses without follow-up challenging the designations.

This is an off-year but there are still some important elections going on. I try to follow the overall coverage as best I can. There are some candidates out there who I can't describe without using the word scoundrel, and I thought I would try to articulate why. Competition involves claiming that you are the better candidate. Scoundrels try to make you think worse of the opponent and her/his supporters, because they think that putting others down is the best way to lift themselves up. Scoundrels campaign for other jobs (school board, public health director, etc.) in hopes that you won't notice that they aren't campaigning for governor or mayor or whatever job the election is actually for. Scoundrels raise unsupported accusations against their opponents at the last minute hoping that there won't be time for them to defend themselves. Scoundrels work very hard to bring race up whether or not they try to hide that fact. Scoundrels say outrageous things in hopes of being qu...

Many years before I left Facebook I joined Facebook, because of, you know, causality. I was prompted to include a political affiliation in my profile. I have almost always voted for Democrats throughout my life but vote for Republican candidates when they seem better. In recent years as liberals and moderates have been expelled from the Republican party that has happened more rarely. I do tell myself that I choose my candidates apart from their party affiliation. I know that I research each race rather than vote a straight ticket. If that is rationalization so be it. I did not want to state that I voted Democrat as a substitute for researching the candidates and I gave some thought to it before writing "Sermon on the Mount" as my political affiliation. The Sermon on the Mount is about how we treat each other as a society, and in particular, about how those with power should treat those without power. I can think of nothing more political and it always catches me off-guard whe...