Thoughts and Interesting Stories---Jeff Clark

In my youth my primary social justice commitment was through Amnesty International. As an affluent white male I enjoyed freedoms that I thought ideally everyone should share; in the 1980's we had had the vine of United States support for repressive regimes that were nominally anti-Communist bearing cruel fruit and I in my small part of the world wanted to do something about that.  It was a more active support Amnesty International sought back then; nowadays they just ask me for money. We members were encouraged to write to foreign government officials to urge them to take care of political prisoners that we named, the idea being that as long as they knew that they were seen the cruelty would diminish. One letter per prisoner, because they were all human beings, not just a faceless group. I have no independent way of verifying if the hundreds of letters I wrote eased any suffering; I know that they changed me. Selfishly I am grateful. At the time I made a point of reading journalism...

  “I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” ―  J.R.R. Tolkien,  The Fellowship of the Ring

This afternoon I'll sing in a (short) concert of South African songs as part of a choral ensemble of twenty-one singers. I've been in concerts several times a year for about fifty-five years now and I'm okay with being in front of an audience. It's easier when I've rehearsed the songs often enough to have them be muscle memory as with today. I won't claim that my pronunciation is perfect but it's not bad and I think I've got the tunes down. My current choral ensemble is tied to my work (it is a student-group at my university that they kindly allow me to sing with) and with my commute it probably won't continue after retirement. There are some very good local choral ensembles and barring physical infirmity I intend to continue singing as long as I can. I've never been very athletic, and insofar as I was once in good shape I ran long-distance, by myself and not as part of a team. I started musical ensembles in my childhood and I credit them with wh...

I've had three conferences in two months and so it's been a bit hectic, but now that I'm back we have about five weeks left in the academic year. This is the home stretch. Everyone I talk to sounds weary, which is what they always sound like in early April, they being folk on the academic calendar. I've tried to encourage some students to try to cross the finish line at a sprint for whatever a sprint looks like to them; we'll see. I've cleared my schedule a bit for after classes end so that I can have my arthritic right knee replaced and do rehab before my next conference in August.  I have some class prep for this term yet to do but I'm up to the first week in May with it so I'm not too stressed. My Fall schedule includes classes I've taught before so getting ready for it will be a familiar process. Hoping my students can hold it together for a bit longer---

I will be leaving in less than a week to go to a training course on the basics of being an ombudsperson. I have done the job at Elon as Faculty Ombudsperson for going on six years now, with another three-year term ahead of me. I don't feel insecure about my performance in the job but I am aware that I see far fewer cases per year than other ombudspeople, and it is good for me to refresh on the basics periodically. For such a course I am going to Miami for the first time. It is the nature of the trip that the days are very full with training; I have seen the agenda for this trip and there are no surprises. I will try to get away from the hotel for breakfast and dinner (lunch is provided) to see some of Miami but in my sixties I lack the energy to explore much after a day of work.

Our different experiences provide us all with different ways of assessing probabilities that are not axiomatic. (Axiomatic probability tells us that a fair coin comes up heads half the time. It is theoretical and not based on our experiences.)  If I know someone from work then I will have a sense of how likely it is that they will complete a task they have volunteered for. Their partner and children will have different estimates of the likelihood based on their different experiences with them.  We don't often discuss this nor do we often quantify our probability assessments but living in a world with other people requires that we make them. When someone tells me something happened that I deem (imperfectly, subjectively) to be unlikely I don't immediately believe them.  (Nor do I call them a liar to their face.)  I await evidence to shift my estimation.  If someone tells me that the sky is pink with green polka dots I will disbelieve them (and wonder what the jok...

Meta's AI used a pirated database (i.e. without any permissions) of writings for training. The Atlantic has broken a story about this that included a link to search the database. I'm in there at least twice ("Derivative Sign Patterns" and "Forgotten Statistics", the latter with Doug Downing).. I feel validated as a writer to have been plagiarized by an evil billionaire to further his social media empire.

The Memory Palace podcast often finds ways to articulate values about how we use history in our lives that I feel very strongly about but can not put into words. This is a heartfelt defense of keeping the T in LGBT with respect to the Stonewall riot. pca.st/episode/6506...

I'm always nervous using the phrase "old friends" because of how the ambiguity is often used to joke about the age of the friends. I am in my sixties though and have some friendships that began in my twenties so I think the phrase is the best descriptor. One of the members of my department who retired some years ago was the chair when I was hired and I count him as one of my mentors. I know me and how things happen by inertia and decided that I didn't want to drift apart from him as a friend when he retired and asked if he would like to meet for a lunch on a monthly basis to keep up. Both of us being morning people we quickly moved it to a breakfast meeting.  My friend and I started meeting monthly in 2008 and have yet to miss a month. Some of the things that made my friend a good mentor also make him a good friend; he is attentive and remembers things I have said years later. He is good-humored even in times of adversity, and we share a lot of values that make it pos...

My wife and I discovered years ago that it was a useful preventative for us to compare calendars on a regular basis. We both have active professional and personal lives, and particularly with hour-long commutes for both of us and two children and their scheduling it was good to double-check that we weren't missing anything.  Our children have moved out but it is still helpful to compare calendars. My wife and I have noticed thought that in our fifties and sixties the majority of events seems to be shifting toward medical appointments; thankfully most are preventative. My wife had retinal surgery last month and visits related to it; I go in for a colonoscopy today. There are many pleasures to aging; I do find more joy in things, find people easier to understand and accept with each passing day. My children have turned out to be people that I not only love (pretty much a given) but also respect greatly and like a whole lot. That was not a given. Still, at this point more and more of ...

I recently lost an election. It was for a position in a professional organization and I felt that it was a good fit with my background. I don't know much about the candidate who won, just their short bio that was included with the ballot. Seems like a good person to have the job overall. I've had more than my share of opportunities to serve in this organization, and so I am sad but I do not feel that I have earned much of a right to complain. It does make me reflect on the leadership positions that I have held throughout my career. It's been more than a few, with many of them being appointments rather than elections or resulting from elections from within a small group. As an introvert I suspect that I am not good at presenting myself to a general audience for their backing, but that folk who know my record are willing to give me more responsibility. There have been two leadership positions that I have held of some responsibility that came to me when I thought that opportun...

I arrived today in San Diego for a conference. I love the look of the city and the drive from the airport to the hotel was glorious.

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...

One of the core principles of mathematics is that the validity of an argument depends not on the status of the person making it but rather on its inherent worth. We have bigots as do all disciplines but we've been better about treating people the same way we treat arguments in recent years. Trump's opposition to DEI, to valuing people for what they are and not who they love or the color of their skin, is, on top of everything else, bad mathematics.

My university expects faculty to work two Saturdays each academic year. In the Fall we have Family Weekend to try to help family members have a sense of what students do. The faculty side of the programming is for us to be available to meet faculty members during a fixed window. It is usually a pretty cheerful event, although afterward I have always felt the long week and crashed a bit. In the Spring we interview scholarship candidates. The incentive is to help find the students who will be most successful here which is a win-win for everybody, but again it makes for a long week and I crash afterward. I was very nervous with my admission interviews so I go into it knowing that it is a stressful time for the students I meet and that they will not always be at their best. I enjoy engaging them in conversation and encouraging them to display the quality of their thinking processes; the worst-case scenario is when out of nerves a student just clams up, because then there's nothing to g...

Even though staying current and sharing with my professional community is part of my job description, I have always felt that attending conferences was a perk of my job.  Travel is more wearying than when I was in my twenties but I love walking around a campus (regional meetings) or a big city (national meetings). Lately my attendance has clustered in the Spring and in August. I have a regional meeting coming up next week. It is a quick meeting but it is full of people I have worked with over the decades; I'm not sure if seeing old friends qualifies as networking but I do love it. The week after that I go to a national meeting to present a talk in San Diego, one of the most beautiful cities I have ever been to.  A month later I go for Ombudsperson fundamentals refresher training (which I have done at the start of each of my three-year terms) in Miami, a city I have not yet been to. That training is intensive, centered in the hotel hosting us so I won't get out much but I will ...

Our children had service expectations when they were in school as kids. Both of them volunteered at a local food charity providing food aid to any local children that asked for it. My wife and I have paid attention to the charity, deemed them one of the best uses of our charity budget, and have supported them for many years. We love children. We don't think children in our country or specifically in our school district should go hungry. We don't use a filter on who we want to keep from going hungry, because we were raised in faith traditions that teach that our god loves everyone and does not discriminate in that love. Our nation's majority of voters have installed a leadership that does discriminate in ways loud and proud. There are many details to their cruelty. One small detail is their opposition to showing love to small children unless they have citizenship documents or at least look like they do according to some color scale similar to choosing a household paint. The ...

Colleagues, The MAA's core values include community and inclusivity. Like many of our peer organizations, we have a  code of conduct  that articulates what our values are intended to accomplish. It states that "we must pursue collective effort to speak against attitudes and behavior that continue to harm less-privileged members of our profession and our society. To do less is to diminish ourselves and our profession." We live in a diverse and pluralistic society. Many different philosophies and policy objectives exist in tension with one another. As I wrote in an earlier Math Values post,  We Can't Ignore the Political , "the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) does not and will not take overtly partisan stances. But if our work is to remain relevant, we can't ignore the political context in which our profession exists. When mathematical models suggest, for example, that climate change will disrupt the lives of our fellow citizens, and that these disrup...

If my health and the health of my wife permits I intend to work for seven more years after this one and then retire.  I have nominated myself for an elected position in a professional association with a four-year term; the ballot is due by March 6, so I should know in a month. That would last until 2029. I am finishing my second three-year term as Faculty Ombudsperson and have agreed to a third three-year term; that would last until 2028. I intend to teach until I retire and enjoy giving presentations at conferences so I hope to be doing that for the next seven years. I think after the Faculty Ombudsperson and the potential elected office end I will need to stop looking for more work and start winding down. I've had some intense work experiences that led me to wind down; both terms as Department Chair were followed by some soul-searching about how nice it would be to get enough sleep. Chairing Academic Council was more intense, as was chairing our University Curriculum Committee fo...

When I was a student (both undergraduate and graduate) I worked part-time in the university library as a cataloging assistant. This was before computerized catalogs and involved filing catalog cards into drawers. It was monotonous and also required attention to detail, a job for which I am well-equipped. During the first week of filing I clumsily knocked a box of thousands of cards, in order, off of my table, spilling them on the floor. My supervisor spotted this and came over quickly as I was about to push the scattered cards together to place back upon the table and commence to sorting them. Her speed was not from anger but rather to teach a lesson in a teachable moment. She told me to stop and look at the cards on the floor and identify how many of them were still in order. There were five to six bunches that were in order, so that I ended up sorting the bunches into my box and not individual cards, a difference between seconds and hours of work. It was a really good lesson and she ...

My wife had eye surgery this past Wednesday.  She had had some obscuring of her vision in the one eye; her optometrist (and my sister-in-law, who is also an optometrist) listed a bunch of possible causes which either would heal on their own or require retinal surgery. As of Tuesday it became clear (to the optometrist) that she was developing a small tear in her retina.  This matches the definition of urgent:  something where delay makes things significantly worse. She was immediately sent to an retinal specialist who set her up for surgery the next day to mend the tear while it was minor. I went with her which involved a lot of waiting with us being in different rooms in the same building. The surgery took about an hour; I still struggle with the idea of eye surgery being routine but they've been doing it for a while. Modern medicine being what it is they gave her an hour to recover from the anesthesia and sent her home with me. The surgeon thought that all went well and ...

I have been tied to the academic calendar most of my life. When breaks arrive I need them after sprinting to get through the end of a term, but during breaks I have a great mismatch between my expectations of self and what I accomplish. I'm much better in sync during scheduled time, i.e., semesters. So I'm ready to start anew.

I am older and am used to elected leaders that respected fundamental freedoms among all citizens and had serious goals beyond their own enrichment. I will not settle for less.

I like doing crossword puzzles. It's a skill that improves with practice, and I've been doing them for decades. The one thing that really stands out is that the first time I look at a puzzle I often have no clue how to proceed. A bit later in the day I start seeing the answers to some parts, and later more. Eventually the puzzle is done. I've learned that despair when no answer is in sight is often a liar. I've tried not to believe such lies because it was easier to give up and easy things are usually worthless. And so we've hard times ahead with Trump and his minions moving in. I would be more joyful if it didn't have to be. But despair is a lie that is too easy to give in to. My heroes were always in it for the long haul, not because they saw the path but because of their faith in it.

Let us be plainspoken: anyone publicly advocating that emergency aid should be conditioned on obedience to one party is evil. They could well spend their lives atoning for that cruelty but only by relinquishing their grip on power. Otherwise they are monsters, pure and simple.

This makes sense to me. https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/shadow-cabinet?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web  

I haven't had much professional travel since August. It is tiring, more so with each passing year, but still quite an enjoyable change in my routine. I often have more travel in the Spring and a regular August conference.  This coming Spring term (starting in February) I have three trips planned.  The first one is for my regional association, the Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America. I've been a member for 37 years and led it for a couple of years, so this is a meeting with lots of friends and acquaintances. This time the meeting is less than an hour from work and I expect that we will also have a number of departmental faculty and students; this is not always true when we meet in other states in the five-state association (AL-GA-NC-SC-TN). I will give a talk and may attend the Executive Committee meeting depending on a couple of things. The second one (giving a talk at the International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics) is to San D...

I've spent most of my life in academia; the change of the calendar year has less import for me than for folk outside our very strange community. It coincides with a break in the academic year, and there are the darkest-night-holidays that most cultures celebrate. Still it is not a new year (as I think of it) that begins for me tomorrow; I have classes, committee work, scholarship to do. It is ongoing from the past four months. My family time has concluded as of this morning when I dropped my son off at the airport. We had other guests in town, and before that we had visited others. That family time has concluded and our lives will be quieter, for good and for bad. I am in my office for the first full day in quite a while, and I am rotating between class preparation and my to-do list. I am gratified by each small accomplishment, as so much of my self-worth is tied in with what I accomplish, no matter how small. During our family times the accomplishments I took most pride in were th...

I have an hour-long commute door-to-door and have had it during my time teaching at my university. When our kids were toddlers I went for trunk size for their tandem stroller and gear, otherwise I prefer a small car with good mileage and I have historically maintained my cars pretty well. In response they last for a while. Aside from my car there are a few folk that could give me a ride to work but fewer than in past years. I depend heavily on my car. We had intended to take my car (new to me as of September, when I bought it with 35,000 miles on it) on our visit to see family this past week but three days before our scheduled departure my car battery was completely dead. My garage (which I have learned to trust over the decades) said the battery tested okay (charged up after I jump started it and drove it to them) and suggested more detailed diagnostics at a dealer. We took our trip using my wife's car and today I took it to a dealer, who after three hours of diagnostics could not...

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...

This Fall marks 55 years of being in music ensembles for me. Last night I sang a holiday concert with 26 other singers, most of them students. Our concert included pieces celebrating  Hanukkah as well as Christmas (both sacred and secular). The songs covered a range of styles for chamber singers and I found the program quite enjoyable, ending with a piece by Randall Thompson that repeated the lyric "Alleluia" with lovely harmonies and contrasting rhythms, both emotional and contemplative at the same time. I've sung with many of the students for several years in our group, the Camerata. I've also worked with our conductor for over a decade so it is very comfortable for me seeking how to blend in with the ensemble. I've always valued singing in this group particularly as one of growth, of learning, hoping to model that behavior for the students in spite of our age gap.  The music often touches the sublime and for over half a century I have cherished that externality...

I try to be grateful for what folk do for me. I try to be very clear as to who to thank, though, erring on the side of thanking service workers who help me with my groceries, etc. and who are not nearly compensated enough for their work. So, Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving to whom?  Without a direct object it feels like one of those cultural holidays, like Christmas when we stop talking about Christ's commands to us and party while fetishizing him as an infant. I do like an Autumnal family celebration and I have much to thank my family for. Generalizing that to a Thanksgiving that is vague and fuzzy (lacking any overall thanks to our creator for ongoing blessings) seems to miss the point quite a bit. I'll wait until after it passes before starting my Bah Humbug for December 25, which is Isaac Newton's birthday (but according to the gospels Christ was born in spring . . .)

  The full quote (from the Internet Archive, from a blogspot post after Trump's first inauguration) is still very meaningful and worth your time. Sky

I feared for my country in 2016 and I fear for my country now; then and now I hold on to the words of Bernard Lafayette, a civil rights pioneer, who stated that every defeat was an opportunity if you're in it for the long run. For now I will mourn, but after I will seek those opportunities, particularly ways to defend the vulnerable as we are all called to do.

  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.