Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

Political advertising in my media-feed seems to be increasing in volume. I like everyone else am in a news silo, so YMMV. Much of the advertising has been anti-Biden; a lot of it is making the extraordinary claim that Biden will be taking performance-enhancing drugs going into the Presidential Debate scheduled tonight. My early education both in civics and in science stressed that the more extraordinary the claim, the more evidence you need to back it up. We seem to be long past that in smears this campaign.  I am in my silo and yet I am overwhelmed not by pro-Biden advertising but rather pro-Trump advertising, so there seems to be an awful lot of money being spent on silly accusations about Biden. Nobody seems to discuss it much at least in the circles I travel in but the money is always in preserving the status quo for the rich and the powerful.  It is almost always a progressive stance to just go in the opposite direction of the prevailing advertising and media buys. Insofa...

I've spent so much of my life tied to the academic calendar (first as a student and later as an instructor) that summer has a meaning for me that is very far removed from nature or any agricultural planning. It is and will continue to be for a little while longer a gap between the end of courses and the beginning of new courses.  It is longer than the gap that falls at the end of the calendar year, and it is less structured with holidays. As a child it was an opportunity to spend more time with friends, a chance to go on a family trip to the beach for a week or two. Later it was a chance to catch up on more reading. As an instructor there has always been the tension between more unstructured time and ways to spend that time on class preparation and scholarship. When I was department chair in the 90's and then again in the 2000's it was a time to desperately hunt for adjunct instructors willing to work for some money and few benefits before the inevitable new sections added ...

I lived in Brooklyn and worked in the financial district of Manhattan during the 1987-1988 academic year. (Are there any other kinds of years?)  I went back last week for a musical gig. Here are some random observations. I had missed the energy of Manhattan, how crowded the streets were, how everyone seemed to walk with purpose.  It is still there. I'm always humble about "knowing" NYC since it is so huge and I tend to go to the same parts of it. This visit wasn't very different. I stayed in Newark to save on expenses but otherwise mainly went to parts of the city I had seen before. I am still awed by travel time. NYC is big and it takes time to get from point A to point B.  Travel does not occur in a vacuum; the subways and streets are filled with people. When I took a Lyft the average speed was below 10 mph. Distance is not a meaningful metric; travel time is. The city transportation works, at least for the parts that I go to. (Probably cause and effect mixed up the...

I (along with over 100 ensemble members) will be singing at Carnegie Hall on Saturday. We had our first rehearsal today as a group; we are made of members from other groups who have already rehearsed the piece, Faure's Requiem. While I have sometimes driven to Greensboro to sing in an ensemble, it has been quite a while since I traveled for a gig, staying in a hotel. I believe that only other times were when my university Concert Band toured twice (once through Texas, once through Puerto Rico). I have very good memories of my stand partner (Steve McKenna) and I exploring on our free times, seeing Billy Joel in San Antonio and getting tickets the same day of the concert even though he was at the top of the charts that year. To be cost-effective I am staying across the river in Newark. The NJ Transit train is about 25 minutes, and subway and walking take another 30 minutes (at least today) to get to where we sang.  Being decades older since I last lived in NYC I look around at all th...

I serve as faculty ombudsperson. In that capacity people do not stop by just to chat with me; the filter is set to admit folk having conflicts. As someone who has worked at the same place for 35 years oft times I know the parties in the conflict and being an amiable person consider the folk in conflict to be friends of mine. I have the training and experience not to let the friendships affect the way I discuss options with folk along with their costs and benefits; it does mean I can't separate folk in my professional life easily into binary categories of right and wrong. I know that I have never been absolutely right or wrong so it makes sense that others haven't either. I used to be more judgmental, more simplistic, more absolute. Maybe it's learning to live with (all of) my shortcomings that's helped me to be more tolerant of others. Maybe it's leading a sheltered life and not having to be in contact with folk who have committed truly heinous acts. In any event I ...

Once when I was young I lost a library book. It was rough at first, living on the run, building a new identity. Now, years later, I'm grateful for the lessons it taught me and how it toughened me.

In both my classes this term (Multivariable Calculus and Abstract Algebra) I've had to pick and choose what to cover in the last few class meetings. There are many related topics to choose from; when I took these classes we had two semesters and the greater amount of time really broadened my understanding of the material. Ideally this is how every class should end; we should just run out of the allotted time but never out of things to talk about. One of the things that I value most about having studied math more than my students is the sense that things are simpler in a fundamental sense when you have more examples to play with. There are more commonalities than we can talk about with our undergraduates; for me Category Theory unites all of algebra, etc. I also have more confidence than my students. Sometimes that appears as confidence in myself but I think it is more confidence in the math, that the things work out if you're careful.

I and my kids have at different times been involved in protests on university campuses. I tend to work within systems; I and other faculty have in the past stood in faculty meetings and explained our disagreements in a courteous fashion with the administration. This is relatively safe protest, at least if you have tenure. Both of my kids have protested outside, holding signs. One of them used a bullhorn to lead marches. They are braver than I by far. So we have had occasion to talk about protests as they grew up. I held up Gandhi's march to the sea to make salt in defiance of a British ban as a good example: public breaking of an unjust law demonstrating how unjust it is. The protest tied directly to the doing of the thing. Hard to talk about the protest without discussing the subject of the protest. Both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee led protests (at great personal risk) that entailed the protesters acting as full ci...

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...

It is Good Friday again. I have many loved ones scattered around the country for whom this day is significant for their faith. The name refers to something very good indeed in the theological sense; still I find myself struggling with how to share that; "Have a Happy Good Friday" seems inappropriate given the event being celebrated is the agonizing death of someone, let alone of someone who is our savior. And perhaps that is best. While I associate Easter with celebration---he is risen indeed---Holy Weekend has always been a time of introspection and quiet for me. It is far more significant to my faith than Christmas is and so I feel the holiday in anticipation for a long time leading up to it. At heart is a sacrifice made on my behalf that with each day I am reminded was undeserved. I am keenly aware of my own failings. I am at a point where I don't let that realization cascade into depression and withdrawal but it is a fact that the standards I set for myself are not me...

Every now and then (by my estimate maybe twice a decade) I do something that carries a professional risk and is (not independently) fairly public where I work. I'd like to say that I do it intentionally but it's usually a compulsion on an issue that I care deeply about and not subject to much conscious choice. It doesn't always succeed but there is a definite collateral benefit for making the effort. I think I always knew that on an intellectual level but I'm old enough now and reflective enough to have experienced it a good deal. Now that I am in a wait-for-work position (as faculty ombuds) it is often cited by strangers who contact me. I know part of my formative experience was finding mentors who stood firm on issues that mattered to them, and now I take it as given that that is how one should act. It is a joy to see those qualities in my children.

I've lately taken to referring to math conferences as an opportunity for me to spend time with my tribe. I'm not educated in anthropology and may not be using the term accurately but for common usage it feels about right.  I'm a bit leery of the word mathematicians as meaning different things to different people in the profession; I do like being around math folk though. We are all over the place politically (the Unabomber was one of us) but we do share an outlook that is comfortable when shared. Whether we test them as often as we should we're pretty good as a group at articulating assumptions, which makes our conversations more interesting as a rule. We tend to approach many situations as problems (how can this be improved using the accepted metrics) and often think outside the box. We tend not to rely on authority (e.g. my claim is backed up by my reputation and the reputations of its adherents) much which is quite refreshing, especially at the start of my career. We...

I have had the sorrow this past week of saying goodbye to my mother-in-law after her long battle with breast cancer ended as well as visiting my mother in the hospital after a fall in which she injured her head (fracturing her occipital ridge).  For the latter I had been warned about her appearance after her injury, and for the former all of us knew that my mother-in-law would be in an open casket. I am a very squeamish person. One of the reasons that I love to cook is because I am squeamish about foods I do not like, and can feel safe with food that I prepare. As an introvert I run out of things to say quickly in conversation unless I have a role to play (teacher, parent, ombuds, etc.) in which case I'm okay. Otherwise I am ready to be elsewhere and can feel the nervous tension mount. I am not very squeamish about body horror, although I avoid it in entertainment as something that is not entertaining.  I have been with folk who have injured bodies and with embalmed corpses in...

I've known Anna since I started dating her daughter Laura back in 1985. It was clear to me before I became her son-in-law how much she gave to her family out of love (caring for her parents and parents-in-law, caring for her children and grandchildren, and in the last years of his life caring for her beloved husband Donald); it was not surprising then in talking to her about her career as a teacher to hear how much she cared for her students. Her life was one of living her love and her faith and I am glad that I knew her.

I think that we name things "battles" to pretend that conflicts have well-determined beginnings and endings, all of history to the contrary. In particular we do like to celebrate victories even though none are perfect and without long-term implications. I lose track of this frequently. I was happy when Obama was elected twice (and still am very happy that he was) but the celebrations did not prevent the racist backlash that Trump took advantage of. I was saddened when Trump passed his so-called Muslim travel-ban and yet who we allow into our country has always betrayed our bigotries of the moment. This is one of the reasons that I like to read (as an amateur) histories, to see past arbitrary delimiters around struggles. Two eras in particular help me as I yearn for a less debased Congress, for two political parties that champion the values in our constitution, for Trump to go to jail for any and all of the crimes that he has bragged about over the years. The first is the Revo...

My wife and I have been married for 35 years, so I have very much adapted my lifestyle to having a loved one (or more when the kids lived with us) under the same roof. I am a break of dawn morning person, so I have learned to be quiet and am quite good at dressing in the dark, given that I select my clothing the night before. I cook mindful of things that others do not eat (how could one of my children hate the inoffensive pea is beyond me but that is another story), moderate my use of hot peppers, etc. I put my things away when I am done and am pretty good about treating common space as common. My wife and I, empty-nesters that we are now, have a pretty good division of labor for household chores. My love of cooking (while my wife enjoys cooking she doesn't enjoy it as much as I do) means that I handle grocery shopping and other related things. I am OCD in many ways with all my checklists so I'm the one who checks the oil in the cars, the tread on the tires, the smoke alarms, ...

https://www.covingtoninnovations.com/michael/blog/2402/index.html#x240203B Michael always has an eye for nuance and an aversion to rationalization.

A long-time retired colleague passed away recently. I hadn't kept in touch but I have good memories of working with him on some projects. One thing that's been on my mind recently was a component of some professional development workshops he led for department chairs decades ago. The workshops exposed us to different organizations such as Disney, the military, etc. to abstract out some principles that would be applicable in our context. I didn't start wearing a uniform because of it nor did I start wearing Mickey Mouse ears. The discussion was on a more subtle level. The component that stayed in my mind was a list of readings of US Army and Marine training documents about leadership, and in particular what it means to give a good order. People give orders all the time although some folk shy away from that terminology. I am told what is expected of me as a faculty member in terms of office hours. I assign problem sets to my students. In our context the penalties for disobeyi...

Trump was ordered this past Friday to pay 83.3 million dollars in damages to E. Jean Carroll, a woman he was found to have sexually assaulted and has been repeatedly insulting in the years since she came forward with his crime.  Until such time as he actually pays the money and/or expresses contrition there is no immediate cause to celebrate. With all his legal troubles he continues to live a life unimpeded to a great extent by the consequences of his actions, thanks to his daily legal challenges and delays. The interesting accountability to me this past week during the trial was that of his legal team. I don't want to necessarily single out his lead attorney for ridicule, for which she is justly receiving a good deal. Rather I am struck more by the overall sense of surprise seemingly demonstrated, at least in public, by Trump's supporters, that failing to provide a competent legal defense in lieu of playing for the cameras was counterproductive. It feels to me (and I can't...

I spent the first 25 years of my life in PA, NY, and CT and have some experience of wintry weather there. I was blessed with warm clothing and dressed for the weather, never unintentionally experiencing cold in any kind of painful way. (I have spent my lifetime confused as to how folk can live in Buffalo, NY or Fargo, ND where God is doing all God can to tell people not to live there. That is cold.) The rest of my life has been spent primarily in NC. We get some cold weather but nothing too bad. Ice storms are the worst, bringing down power lines on a regular basis. One such ice storm lasted long enough that my family and I were ready to go to a shelter when the power came back on and we had heat again. For some reason politicians use the extreme cold weather as an argument against climate change, and folk who want to believe it do so, even though it is a sign of climate change that our cold storms have gotten more intense. Weather patterns have been shifting long-term with the introdu...

We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday tomorrow.  When I was younger I struggled with naming important holidays, roads, cities, etc. after people who all have feet of clay; it is always disillusioning to learn that George Washington owned slaves, etc. Folk find faults in MLK who, as a human being, had them, and use that to attack the day. As I am older I understand better that for many folk it is a step further than they can take to instead celebrate a Civil Rights holiday explicitly, championing the work of John Lewis, Diane Nash, all the other SNCC leaders, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, and all the many many people whose names I do not know that gave their lives and their deaths to helping our citizens and our nation be more free. So we have an MLK day, and I remember the furious battles having that national holiday caused by people who were willing to ascribe all kinds of evil intentions to someone willing to disrupt a culture of first and second class citizens, of th...

I took a year off from academia to work in an investment bank; I liked the math involved but lacked a sense of purpose (other than self-enrichment) and knew that I wouldn't stay. Otherwise I've been in academia non-stop since 1978, with nine years as a student (undergraduate and graduate) and 35 years as an instructor. I'm a tenured full-professor with no desire to work in administration so I'm pretty much stable in my rank. Academia as such (as opposed to reports of academic research) tends to make the news negatively. Recently the president of Harvard resigned because of accusations of plagiarism. (I do not know the details and will not comment on the merits of the accusations.)  Prior to that she had been called to speak before congress with other presidents due to strife on their campuses re the ongoing fighting between Israel and Hamas and how free expression was on that issue. I'm trying to think of academia in the news that was portrayed positively and to be ...

One of my (many) favorite films is The Usual Suspects. The cast is superb, the story twisty, but it is all based on the concept of an unreliable narrator.  I have seen a few other such films (Rashomon is in its own category) and read several novels using this technique. It is deeply unsettling, to me at least, to have entered a narrative that I know is fictional and have willingly suspended my belief only to find that I have been thoroughly misled. My consent to believe in the story has been abused on some level. It is a fact of life that outside of explicit fiction we rely on unreliable narrators 24/7. The people I have learned to trust over decades of reliability still only share their perspective on events, while folk on the internet trying to sell me things often are at the other extreme. There is no way for sentient beings to tell some kind of absolute truth because ultimately that requires omniscience which I believe to be the province of God and God alone. Absolute skepticis...

1) Long Island seems bigger when driving because you never drive at the speed limit for more than a minute before hitting another traffic jam. 2) Libertarians have lousy roads. 3) COVID protective gear (yellow paper gown, purple gloves) while visiting care facilities clashes with my eyes but we do what we must. 4) There is no moisture in the air on the east coast north of Delaware. (I've seen the ocean but it is being very selfish.) 5) There is no whinier being alive than a powerful person (e.g. Giuliani, Trump) being held accountable for their actions. 6) My kids are far better human beings than I expected them to turn out to be given that they are my kids.

There have been two activities that I've done for multiple years where I have been responsible for informing someone that their application has been accepted or rejected. The first was during the twelve years cumulatively that I served as department chair. I did not have the sole responsibility for full-time applications, which went through a departmental committee and then with our recommendations were judged by the dean, who had the power to hire. (I did have that power when hiring adjuncts, with a much more informal process.)  Ultimately it fell to me to call with the decision when it was a rejection; the dean would make the offer to hire. The second came years later when I started chairing a committee that was responsible for minicourse offerings at national meetings. Following the method of my predecessor I asked my committee to review the proposals and then reported back a summary of their recommendations leading to a slate. It then fell to me to write (email) the proposers a...

Of course I can only comment on what they mean to me; the thorniness of the question comes from its subjectivity.  It has been decades since I was on the receiving end so I shall only comment on giving them. For me, having taught full-time for over 34 years, the grades are categories into which I have historically been comfortable sorting students into based on their performance in my classes. I offer a good deal of assessment (weekly and monthly) of different kinds (computation problems sets, essay exams) and yet I view my assessment as a form of statistical sampling of student performance, mindful of all the noise (a roommate needing to go the ER the night before an exam, etc.) that affects measurement of student performance. In particular I do not feel as if my estimate has the precision to justify +/- grades but follow the system that is part of our culture.  We did not have +/- grades when I began and I was pretty comfortable with the five categories (Excellent, Good, Ave...

If you read the summary of the Ethics Committee report on Santos it was clearly unsustainable for him to continue as he did, particularly the credit card fraud leading to massive ill-well toward him. A very self-destructive individual. For me the biggest lesson from his congressional career is that we need to support local news reporting much more. It is not the responsibility of the voters to do background checks on candidates; we rely on journalists to help us to validate candidates in a free society. I continue to subscribe to my local newspaper that has in the past done a good job of covering the state government. They are diminished by business losses but the context and insight they provide are far superior to any video reporting I've seen.

Things tend to be neither as good nor as bad as I think they are. My estimates tend to be further from the center in either direction than I expect.   I did a sun salute recently. I was tight but I was able to do it, whereas I had not done much yoga for a while and expected it to be horrific. I made a lasagna that is popular with my family for Thanksgiving. It came out well but not as well as I remembered it.  My expectations tend to the extremes more than is justified and I try not to invest too much emotional energy in those expectations and save it for better uses.

I have many deficiencies; one of my particular strengths that has emerged over the years has been my preparation. I didn't always do well with preparation. When I was young I was clever and cocky enough that I could improvise quite successfully. As my responsibilities grew this became unsustainable and I made a commitment to try and maintain that level of success through preparation. I give a lot of credit to my first yoga instructor Gloria Pilot, who taught us new postures by first demonstrating them and then asking us to visualize what we would need to do to achieve them, breaking down complex actions into individual steps. This became a mantra for me, this visualization. Nowadays it is second nature for me to approach a future task by identifying what I need to achieve it, what resources I need to acquire, who will be involved in working with me and when is best to ask for their assistance.  This carries over to teaching as well as public speaking. I have given much thought to w...

I've been teaching since I started at Elon in Fall, 1988 so not counting this semester I've been teaching 70 regular semesters, maybe 20 or so January terms, and 8 semesters when in graduate school. I stand a pretty good chance of making triple-digits, for whatever import that milestone has. I'm down to my last projects to grade, my last exams and homeworks coming in next week, and final exams. Not much course preparation to do, just teaching, grading, and getting my final exams ready. Fall and Spring semesters are very different in flavor. Students more often than not have more energy and sometimes even enthusiasm in the Fall semester. They are depleted a bit in the Spring, as are the faculty. Each semester has its rhythm. Many of my STEM colleagues do as I do in offering three monthly exams (or comparable major assessment), which offers a bit of a pause for reflection on how the month's content coheres.  Each month then has its own cycle of weeks; the first week after...

A certain fraction of my work as faculty ombudsperson is spent dealing with bullying and its consequences. Please note:  I have neither the training nor experience to investigate claims, so I am always aware that my visitors as ombudsperson tell the truth from their perspective which is not and can not be perfectly accurate and true. When I present such claims below please try as I do to always be aware that they are claims and not facts which differ in many ways. When I was young my parents encouraged me to stand up to bullies, something that is easier to encourage than to do. Being small of stature I was on the receiving end of a good deal of bullying until I realized that I could often talk or joke my way out of it. I say this only to stress that I understand how weak such encouragement is and shy away from relying upon it when working with others who are on the receiving end. Academia draws folk who tend not not be normal. Thankfully that is often in a good way in terms of clar...

My Saturday morning was free so I went and voted at the Carrboro Town Hall poll. Having the poll open at 8 AM made it very convenient. The poll was staffed by volunteers from my community, my neighbors. The woman who checked my name and address and printed out my ballot recognized my name and introduced herself as the mother of a friend of my son's from high school. Representatives from the local Democratic and Republican parties were there to supervise the process. Voting consisted of my taking a clearly labeled Scantron sheet and filling in the ovals with a pen. I fed my ballot to a scanner, which confirmed that my ballot had been read and stored my ballot in case of a recount.  I arrived when the poll opened, with five of my neighbors ahead of me. I left seven minutes later. Annually at election time voters in the poorer areas of Durham, a half hour away, stand in line for hours. It is a regular and predictable news story. Sometimes because they come straight from work they are ...

I attended a meeting yesterday of the North Carolina Ombuds. I have often missed in-person meetings but my class schedule permitted me to be off campus for it this time which was nice. I know many of the folk there by face since I've been doing this for over four years. Our meetings are advertised as a chance for us to talk about things that we can't talk about in our home institutions without violating confidentiality or appearing unsure where certainty is expected. As we have both educational and government ombuds at these meetings as well as full-time versus part-time ombuds (such as myself) it was a mix of topics, some relevant, some less so. It is a comfort to be among people willing to do good in messy situations, acknowledging our imperfections and striving to do better. Realistic or not our students often expect us teachers to be fully-formed, even though I am keenly aware when I improve in some area with the passage of time. The conflict resolution in the title refers ...

I am not a scholar of American governance, but from what I have read about the early years of our government the House was viewed as being more authentically representative of the will of the people than the Senate or the two other branches of government. Their powers were proscribed accordingly in the Constitution, with the Speaker of the House being after the Vice President in the line of succession. Some time ago I realized that in my lifetime the House no longer represented the people authentically. A state would be divided in one proportion between registered Democrats and Republicans and their House seats would have a very different proportion. The state legislatures often showed the same imbalance. A simple and thus incomplete answer has to do with the drawing of districts by the party in power every ten years. Technology has advanced to allow the drawing of districts with incredible precision to lead to maximum representation for those doing the drawing. Districts lack compactn...

At various points in my career I have struggled with distractions because of ongoing family issues. I love the members of my family and so when they are in pain it occupies a significant chunk of my mental real estate. The first time I couldn't avoid the issue was the premature birth of our first child, who arrived 6.5 weeks early. I was department chair at the time and I did what I could to teach my classes and enable my department members to do their job for the 23 days he spent in the neonatal intensive care unit when I was only sleeping a few hours each night. It was obvious to all around me what I was going through and my loved ones and friends all worked to lighten my load. Since then I have had other such issues, sometimes obvious (the death of my father) and often less obvious. I am introverted and do not easily go out of my way to share what I am going through or ask for help. I have a close relative right now whose dementia has taken a turn for the worse. I am physically ...

Sometime this past decade I decided that I had more than enough things. When folk ask me what I want for a birthday or Christmas present I've asked for experiences instead.  The experience can be a nice quiet inexpensive meal together; for special gifts I've asked for tickets to concerts. I look around at all the things that I have and somehow "have" doesn't seem to be the right word. 90% of it all seems to be things I have accumulated but no longer or rarely use. These objects all have a pull on me, the memory of their past usefulness. Many times those memories are mundane and not part of who I am. I try to divest when I can. As I do I find myself loathe to part with some things, even if I no longer use them and know that in donation there is a chance that someone else could. There is the real sore spot; some complacent greed I have for the blessings God has given me in stewardship. I work at it, for this is not who I want to be but who I have let myself become t...

Some things are fundamentally different now than during the first half of my life. Much of what I learned about the structure of our federal government seems no longer to be useful. One thing that I knew was that Congress had the power of the purse-strings. While the Executive Branch could spend the revenue, it was Congress who passed the budget, and the President signed it. Checks and balances, fights over priorities, compromises. It was one of the major tasks of the government, to fund itself and consequently fund the services it provides to the country and its citizens, and they took it seriously and acted promptly. I think we can thank Newt Gingrich for changing that. He is a point on a trajectory but I've learned to never underestimate the power of leaders to get large numbers of people to do evil things. He came to power as Speaker of the House by encouraging new legislators to speak of their opponents as traitors, distributing lists of phrases to use when speaking of the Dem...

I occasionally have drug flashbacks. I have never used illegal substances but I knew folk as an undergraduate who did, and sometimes I have memories of them come back unbidden. In particular I do remember a friend (we were both movie fanatics and frequently saw each other at showings on campus) who tried LSD and was not quite the same afterward. I had friends who encouraged me to try things. 99% of the time it was alcohol, and since I had an alcoholic uncle who used to beat my cousins I wasn't enthusiastic about going that route. Occasionally it was marijuana but since I used to be an asthmatic as a child I had no interest at all in inhaling any kind of smoke into my lungs. On rare occasions I would be encouraged to try psychedelics. I was small and uncoordinated growing up and I never prized my appearance or athletic ability but my mind seemed to work well enough to let me achieve things that made me proud. I never wanted to mess with that. The folk that encouraged me all claimed ...

The week has gone by swiftly. I don't believe there were many ad hoc things on my calendar, but it does feel a bit like a blur. This is part of my job and my lifestyle, at least during the academic year. I put a lot of thought and effort into my classes and so my time at work is pretty nonstop. I believe that I am better about being present with my family (mostly my wife now that we are empty-nesters) than I have been in past years, which means that overall I have less time for introspection, for contemplation. I have the summers to balance the rhythm out, and to a certain extent when I don't teach during our January term also a long mid-year break as well. There are more strenuous jobs and I have no complaints. I am someone who is an introvert and does value having time to hear my thoughts. I've made my bargains with the world around me that those moments of reflection are sporadic. Time stands still in them, almost perversely given the speed of the rest of my life. I miss...

I am of an age now where many of my peers have lost one or both parents. Some of them have lost them gradually, to the ravages of cancer, of Alzheimer's, etc.  I have been in that position with respect to one of my parents for a little while with respect to dementia, and the illness has progressed in recent weeks. My siblings who live closest are doing all the work; I try to provide support from a distance with weekly conference calls with them as well as frequent calls to my parent. There will be a big change shortly in the level of care in the facility seeing to my parent's needs as the dementia continues to progress. Phone calls are filled with long silences; letters and emails have long gone unread and I am a nine hour drive away, so I visit when I can. Having this piecemeal loss of a parent has made me reflect a good deal on what makes me me, and what would remain if I suffered memory or cognitive loss. It's probably common for folk in academia to identify their self, ...

I've spent a good amount of my adult life trying to grow out of biases I learned when young. Some are really obvious---being completely open to people of color, to all on the gender spectrum, to folk of all ages. Completely open to me means not limiting my expectations or willingness to interact with someone beforehand. I do have some biases that I want to keep. Maybe I need a different word for biases? Something that sounds more intentional? I don't have much respect for folk who put more than twice as much effort into complaining as they do into making things better. That lack of respect biases how I view them, whether I avoid interacting with them or choose to offer opportunities to other people. I've worked in groups long enough to know how much a whiner can degrade team performance, and I will live a more productive life by not being part of such teams. I will give a second hearing, a third hearing, additional chances over and over again to folk who are working hard. I...

The first (partial) week of classes concludes today. This term I am teaching three classes with a small total number of students (a blessing for grading) but a lot of contact hours; two of the sections are Multivariable Calculus which has so much coherent content that it meets four times a week.  My first grading will begin on Tuesday of next week and my first couple of weeks of lesson plans are already mapped out and yet I haven't had much disposable time this week. Students keep talking to me. This feels weird and not just because of the summer months when it was quiet in my office building. In the Spring I was not successful in encouraging students to come by for assistance; attendance was also poor. The idea of physically being somewhere for academic reasons has become more difficult for the COVID generation, one of the ways the stress of the pandemic played out. (I have not done a research study but this seems to be the consensus of the faculty I have talked to, so I am willin...

Jack Smith's indictments of Trump have focused on Trump alone, mostly. Fanni Willis's indictment included dozens of Trump toadies, including my namesake who was willing to help overturn the election if he would be made Attorney General. My name has been in the news off and on of a while now since the attempted insurrection but now I get to see it daily.  I've had namesakes my entire life and so I don't feel particular ownership of my name. I have a colleague at work sharing my name and emails; the vast majority seem to be wanted by bill collectors, just judging from my experience. I don't think of my children as perpetuating a heritage tied to my family name. They will establish their own heritage and in rearing them I helped in the beginning but that's not really determinate.  If I had to change my name (Witness Protection Program, whatever) I would not stop being me and would not miss it much.

For the longest time I've articulated one phobia that I've had (claustrophobia) although I have other stressors on that spectrum. I avoid window seats on planes because the aisle is the most comfortable location for me for just that reason. I am able to spend almost all of my life without it being triggered (I am not an astronaut, etc.). This past summer I went back to my current yoga instructor and took private lessons to help me to assimilate my knee replacement and how it has affected my strength and flexibility. (I did this once before, right after my knee surgery.) Many of the postures were part of an arc of aging and putting weight on; I am starting from a pretty good place in my twenties and still profit from that investment of time. Unfortunately some of the balance postures triggered something akin to a panic attack:  heart pounding uncontrollably, sweat dripping off my face, etc.  I am contemplative by nature and self-absorbed to the nth degree, so during the closing...

MathFest is an annual mathematics conference, usually held in the first (partial) week of August by the Mathematical Association of America. I just returned from this year's MathFest in Tampa.  For about a decade I attended both it and the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January (which I had begun attending once I was a full-time faculty member) until the MAA pulled out of the JMM over budgeting disputes which were legitimate but too thorny to go into here. Having had the overlap I do have a sense of the difference between the two events, although MathFest has explicitly taken on some of the programming for the MAA (such as award ceremonies) from the JMM.  MathFest always seemed a bit more informal. During the overlap it seemed to always be held in smaller cities than the JMM (such has Madison, WI, Hartford, CT, and Portland, OR) but since the split we have been going to more major cities. Much of the joy for me and from others I have talked with about MathFest is the networking...

Some shallow reflections on my most recent trip to Washington DC. The public heritage (memorials, museums, mall) are nicely set up for a tourist. The hours were accessible and the trains served us very well. I do not like memorials that are all about look-at-me, such as the Washington and Jefferson Memorials. I love the Lincoln Memorial because in addition to the (huge) statue the memorial was about his views on slavery in a land that prizes freedom. At 61 years of age, getting around is nontrivial, particularly in the summer sun. We used Lyft much more than I would have in my younger and poorer days. It is wonderful being surrounded by folk speaking an array of languages. Our heritage draws people from other places and we should cherish not just the marble but the principles that it memorializes for that is in large part what draws others to us. DuPont Circle has really nice restaurants. I have been mostly to that area on MAA (Mathematical Association of America) business, for confere...

My wife and I will take a trip next week to DC to celebrate our 35th wedding anniversary (which will occur in October when I am busy with my classes). I went to DC with my marching band once in high school to play for the president at some event that I have long-since forgotten. Not surprisingly the president was called away to deal the Shah of Iran coming to the US for exile but we played anyway. I do remember visiting the Air and Space museum but the rest of the trip is lost in a hazy memory. I've been to DC a handful of times since then professionally. Five times I've gone for conferences, once for a training workshop for new mathematics department chairs, and once as webmaster for the Mathematical Association of America's Southeastern Section for a focus group on the MAA's website. I've enjoyed visiting the Asian Art collection of the Smithsonian and returned there each time. One time I was at a conference at the same time my son was at a university student conf...

I've been taking yoga classes off and on since I was in graduate school. I have a really good teacher now in Durham; my wife and I faithfully went to classes in her studio until our kids arrived and our lives became less controlled. Now we are empty-nesters but are careful re COVID (I'm high-risk and my wife works in a hospital geriatric ward) so the prospect of working out together in a crowded studio even with masks isn't appealing. I also have a prosthetic knee which is a hindrance for many yoga activities. A few months after my surgery back in the summer of 2021 I took private lessons from our teacher specifically addressing flexibility and strength issues for that knee. My school year feels very full with my hour commute each way and I stopped with the beginning of the academic year. Last summer it did not seem like an issue but this summer I have started again with the private lessons. Yoga attracted me in and of itself because of the discipline and mental and physica...

The SCOTUS decision today banning race-based admissions at Harvard and UNC will enforce class boundaries for years to come as affirmative action at other institutions cease. My university (Elon) does not admit individual students, it admits a class. It would diminish the learning experience if they all majored in math, were from Delaware, were Catholic, ... It is in the best interests of educating all students to admit a diverse class. Race-based preferences are part of that. What SCOTUS did not address were legacy admissions, which serve as affirmative action for the status quo, i.e. mostly white applicants. The hypocrisy is staggering.

A large part of our family visit to the Northeast this past week has been spent with loved ones who need care. This has been hard on them; they have been role models of caring for others and the shift from offering to needing assistance is hard on the ego. I have begun that transition and I already see in myself that struggle. Two things are limiting me currently. Firstly, my sleep disorder renders me very groggy at the end of the day. Unless I work hard (ingest caffeinated beverages, splash my face with cold water, etc.) I am not much help then. Secondly my prosthetic knee has been a godsend but it is not the knee I was born with; stairs will be a difficulty for me the rest of my life. It was shocking to me how little help I was moving my daughter into her second floor apartment. During the day I try offer my help freely and I'm still not too bad for carrying things on level terrain, such as grocery shopping and unloading, etc. But if God grants me a long life more and more will n...

By virtue of living 400-500 miles away from family my wife and I (and later our children) have been driving back and forth on Interstate 95 for decades. We have a process when it comes to packing the car, knowing which rest stops work well, where to expect bumper-to-bumper traffic. Separately I have been driving to regional conferences in the Southeast during my career, often a half day of driving. I am pretty comfortable on the highway with podcasts or, if I fear falling asleep, music that I enjoy singing along with. Travel is tiring but most good things are. I enjoy the sense of movement, seeing new types of scenery, etc. Sometimes things go wrong but we've been blessed that they've never gone too wrong.

We will be taking a road trip next week so we celebrated Father's Day a week early yesterday. My father has been gone since 2007. I miss him daily and try to emulate the many good qualities he showed me. One in particular has been on my mind as long as I've been old enough to perceive it. Because we led very different lives, because I had opportunities he lacked, we had very different life experiences. He did not understand much of academia or what I did for a living, but he was happy that what I did made me happy. I am a curious person and so when I don't understand something there is always a tension that I should with effort understand it better. My children's lives now are in many ways to me as mine was to my father; I don't understand many of their day-to-day events and opportunities, pressures and causes as well as I would like.  The one thing that I consciously strive for with them is to take joy in their joy and be open to the understanding of their joy if a...

I have always been a fan of memoir, although I am a bit fussy as to what I enjoy. My current favorites are Michael Palin's three volumes and those of Alec Guinness. Humility, actual true humility---accepting with open eyes one's strengths and weaknesses---is a-if-not-the major factor of what I look for. Truly great and interesting people have depth to them, have learned from their mistakes, have accepted and fought against all the best of things. Memoirs by politicians are the opposite---the need to be right in retrospect at all times feels so desperate and petty to me. I find articulation to be a form of meditation and therapy, clarifying for me who I am in terms of what I care about. With trusted friends good non-casual conversations bring that out in me, but as an introvert I often turn to journaling. Well-written memoirs serve as a template for me. I have been journaling since I went away to university. I finished high school a year early and felt only secure about my acade...

I try to be friendly and so my reflex around most holidays is to wish casual acquaintances a happy holiday. (I'm a bit more selective with religious holidays as appropriate.)  Some holidays don't work with happy; Memorial Day is one of them. We celebrate the sacrifice of members of our military who gave their life in uniform on Memorial Day, which certainly isn't something to be happy about. We do seek to acknowledge and encourage virtue. As much as I find war abhorrent I try to limit my criticism to those making decisions and not those who carry them out in an honorable fashion. But I am dearly reminded at times like this how isolated I am from the costs of combat. I do not know anyone currently enlisted in the military, only ROTC students and members of previous generations.  9/11 was the exception as was 12/7/1941 where many folk enrolled after our country was attacked. The rule with the all-volunteer military seems to be having soldiers fight for us who are worse off th...

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I am currently reading All the King's Men  by Robert Penn Warren. I've seen praise for this work for most of my adult life and finally got around to getting it out of the library. The writing is incredibly textured and so it is slow going. I have seen the 1949 movie version with Broderick Crawford several times (and enjoyed it) but in 1949 movie adaptations were not known for their fidelity to their source material so I'm keeping my mind open re the plot. Another reason that it is slow going is that I am stopped short every time I see what is euphemistically referred to as the N-word. It is painful to see in print. The dialogue is set in the deep South in the early 20th century so it is truthful but that makes it more painful, not less. I grew up in a Philadelphia suburb that struggled with integration. When the first family of color moved into my neighborhood someone greeted them by spray-painting "Niggers go home" on a stone wall facing their house. I was humili...