Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I spent last weekend mulling it over, and this past week I contacted my superior at the Mathematical Association of America to ask her to find a replacement chair for a committee I lead. I'm a very proud person and it was difficult but the right thing to do. These past few months have been draining for me; family members have needed comfort, then I was in a car accident, and recently my arthritis in my right knee affected my ability to walk. It's taken a lot of my effort and at some point I needed to back off of something that was under my control. I tend to take on a lot of commitments where I feel as if I have something to contribute. I've had what seems to be more than my share of stamina in most of my life and so worrying about balance hasn't been quite as big an issue.  I've been department chair for two six-year stints and stepping down those two times at the end wasn't as difficult. I had set goals for the department and when those goals seemed to be sati...

Life has been busy for me, so I'm happy to share more  wisdom  from my friend Michael Covington.

I currently have one of the knees that I was born with; the left one was replaced due to arthritis in May 2021. I spent the previous 10 months or so in 2020-2021 in pain when I walked, using a cane. I wanted to wait until I was vaccinated against COVID before entering a hospital for surgery, and after that I wanted to wait until after my classes were done for the academic year to leave a good deal of time for my rehab. On Wednesday of this week something loudly went pop in my right knee as I stepped down from a curb in a parking lot. I believe that I was stepping normally without any particular torsion; it's so much fun getting older.  I had a good deal of pain for the rest of the day and went to Orthopedic Urgent Care after I left work. They suspect a damaged ligament or tendon but since they found advanced arthritis in that knee as well they proposed treating the symptoms until I could replace that knee. I pulled out my cane, put on a knee brace, and am taking prescription anti-i...

  Better written than I could have done by my friend Michael Covington.

I haven't driven many cars in my time. I tend to keep a car until it stops moving under its own power. Since my last car was totaled in an accident I did need to get a new car, or at least one that was new to me. I commute an hour each way by car to work and since I'm hoping not to retire for a little while good mileage was important;  I definitely wanted a smaller car. I also prefer smaller if only because where I live and where I work are university towns with parking spaces the width of a cracker. I do value a car that is very responsive to the road. I'm not that articulate about this but most folk seem to have a sense of it.  Since my kids are grown the need for a gargantuan trunk isn't as pressing, just something to handle my commute and some road trips without three passengers in the car. I was very fortunate this time around. I had enjoyed driving my previous car for a decade and felt that I had been served well by the dealership so I went back to the same dealer...

I was in a car accident a few days ago. There was a stopped car in the interstate and I didn't see it in advance; the car in front of me swerved into another lane and then there it was in front of me. I also swerved but damaged my commuter car, which is old and had many miles on it. The insurance company declared it a total loss.  The damage was where I scraped along the passenger side of my car (and the driver side of the stopped car). I had no deployment of airbags and no damage from my seat belt; no glass on either car broke, so it was a glancing blow if that makes sense. The front passenger wheel was damaged and I could not drive the car very far.  I pulled over to the shoulder and dialed 911. A state trooper made sure I was alright and proceeded to take care of the situation. I was moving slowly, aware that I had had a shock to my system and trying not to do anything to worsen the situation (stepping into traffic when I exited my vehicle, etc.) The trooper took my informa...

I attended MathFest in Indianapolis last week; the day after I flew back I left with my wife and son to drive to Pennsylvania, and we drove to Long Island yesterday. Our current plan is to drive back on Friday but our daughter who hadn't planned to accompany us is recovering from COVID and we may head back early if she needs assistance. I am a creature of structure, with set routines that not only make it easier for others to rely upon me but also, as I grow older and my memory dulls, make it easier to trust in myself and not have to constantly check if I've done what I intended to. My checklists, written and unwritten, give me a good deal of self-confidence. (Whether or not that is earned is a subject for another day.) When by myself at the conference I instituted little routines in my hotel room to allow me to relax and not have to constantly be creative. I have traveled to conferences for decades so these kinds of routines are second-nature to me by now. Traveling with my wi...

I'm at a point in my career where I assign percentiles to the talks I give. I've given enough of them by now (at least two a year for over thirty years) to make that useful. I like to think that I've improved with age and that the percentiles are higher now because of that but I may be getting softer as a grader. It's subjective. I gave a talk this morning that felt good giving and seemed to be well-received. It felt good giving because it was about an aspect of my teaching that I've been using for a long time and am fairly confident in discussing and answering questions about. It was well-received because I'm an energetic speaker when I'm confident (it's a mask I put on) and because the talk was highly visual, which makes the audience more engaged and more likely to respond to its quality. I've given shakier talks (and in recent years) because of my lack of confidence in the material but I do try to follow some basic rules about presentations. It he...

There is a scene that Nien Cheng describes in her memoir Life and Death in Shanghai where she is put on show trial during the Cultural Revolution, listening to accusations of spying for the West. At one point the silliness got to her and she started laughing, despite hunger  and sleep deprivation. Immediately the courtroom was evacuated and she was hurried back to solitary confinement. The demagogues could not handle her laughter. I've been thinking a lot about that now that the Democrats have (justly) started calling Trumpism weird and how much it hurts Trump and his supporters to be ridiculed this way.

Imperfect as I am, I regularly fail at tasks. Some I just moved on from; my ability to shoot a basketball was never good in any way and I just never felt the pay-off of trying to improve. I do love to cook and I used to attempted meatballs regularly. I am not a fan of meatballs on pasta but do enjoy a good meatball sandwich, Swedish meatballs, etc. I had a run in the 90's and 00's of never being able to make meatballs; inevitably they fell apart and I ended up with a meat sauce. There are reasons why my technique was faulty but those were busy years for me and I never invested the time in improving, just decided that with all my other recipes I could do without. This past year I saw a recipe that was appealing for Italian meatballs and I decided to get back up on that horse. They came out really well. I've done Swedish meatballs since then and this morning assembled some Teriyaki meatballs. The specifics (use a crockpot with a good sauce and let them cook slowly and gently)...

I think it's a generational thing; my kids were very anxious for Biden to withdraw his candidacy as a strategic necessity in keeping Trump from seizing power and undoing our constitutional form of government. I hated the thought of rewarding an incredibly good term  (addressing climate change in policy in a meaningful way alone means my kids have a hopeful future) with an invitation to exit. I will say the Democrats rallying to Harris have given me new hope for November and that is a good thing. As important as Obama was to me for breaking that color barrier it has been eight years since Hillary Clinton tried to break that glass ceiling. It's way past time.

I had cause yesterday to reach out to members of math departments at five universities that have been active in the regional professional association that I have been a part of for 35 years (the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America). The contact was to describe a planned national initiative and seek (probably younger) faculty who might be interested. Over the decades I have worked with a number of folk on such things and so I approached the task as I have done in the past:  1) Find someone who I have worked with more than a little at the university and describe the initiative. 2) Give them a chance to let me know if they are interested while acknowledging that they are very busy. 3) Ask for contacts in their department who might be a good match.  I think this was the first time that I have done this that I became aware of how many of my contacts have retired. This time there was only one such person in each department. Sufficient but not what I expec...

Blessed with good and diverse friends over the years I have closely followed the ups and downs in our country for same sex marriage. My first gay wedding that I attended was during the first brief four-plus month period in CA when it was legal before Prop. 8 banned them. James Inhofe, the retired senator who passed away yesterday, was at the forefront of conservative opposition to any kind of civil rights for non-heteros. His obituaries brought back lots of painful memories along with memories of things actually getting better. Trumpism wants to undo these freedoms, very explicitly. We will have to choose between supporting Biden who as VP pushed Obama on same-sex marriage or taking DRASTIC steps backward with Trump. MAGA: it's a spectrum of misogyny, homophobia, and pretty much any kind of hatred that helps hatemongers to acquire power. We are put on this earth to say NO to these demagogues. As Lincoln wrote to H.L.Pierce in an 1859 letter, "Those who deny freedom to others d...

This will be brief; I am too furious at SCOTUS to write constructively. A couple of simple things: 1) We have become freer when we moved from having many kinds of citizens (property-owning white males, men of color, white women, women of color) to fewer. Giving women the vote and actually enforcing the Voting Rights Act were acts of simplifying the categories of citizenship. 2) With the gutting of the Voting Rights Act the (usual suspect) southern states moved to limit who can vote. It was neither subtle nor unforeseen. 3) SCOTUS has declared that the president can break the law if the action is deemed official by some judge somewhere.  We are now back to having a division between the president who is above the law and the rest of us. 4) First the Rehnquist Court and then the Roberts court have consistently empowered the powerful and shielded them from being accountable for their actions. When I celebrate July 4th I celebrate freedom. It was a very sad July 4 this year for me.

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...