Seems fair

A Bristol newspaper is outing the jerks who plagued media announcements about Greta Thunberg with threats of violence. They pulled names and faces off their profiles and publicly posted them, with examples of their threats.

Strangely, I notice that all of them are men — who’d have thought it? — and half of them pose in their profiles with alcoholic beverages. I am particularly impressed with the hypocrisy of the guy in the top left who has festooned his profile with the words, “Be kind”.

I’d say media sources should do more of this, except that there are so many of them I’m afraid every paper in the world would be reduced to page after page of photos declaring “these are the assholes who read this paper.”

I’m home at last

Yesterday was something of a lost day, because I had to drive to Minneapolis to stay in Minneapolis overnight, so I could drop my wife off at the airport at 4am (!) for a flight to Denver. Then I turned around and drove home. The good news: traffic is light at 4am. The bad news: freezing fog most of the way home. It’s not much fun driving through white snow with white fog with all the trees limned in white. So for a little variety I stopped by the shores of Lake Minnewaska, to add a frozen lake covered with white snow. You know, for the visual variety.

Yes, that’s a lake. You can tell by the plates of ice rising up at the edge, where the expanding surface ice buckled and fractured. There are also ice houses off in the distance, but they’re invisible thanks to the fog.

I turned around in Starbuck and got some pictures of trees, at least.

Now I’m tired. I should probably take a nap.

Get on the Grandmaphone and get her here right now!

This demanding little girl wants her grandma. We got a call from her mother asking if Mary could come down to Colorado for a few weeks to help with the baby, because she’s (Skatje, not the baby) a grad student trying to finish her degree in a year and discovering that babies eat time like hours are fistfuls of cheerios, and of course Mary eagerly agreed. More time with the one of the two cutest kids on the planet? Yes, please. Also we remember what it was like to be gradstudenting with children, and how nice it would have been to dump them on grandparents now and then, but it was our choice to be poor and living far from our extended family.

So today I get to drive Mary to the airport and send her away for a while. It looks like we’ll be spending our 40th wedding anniversary far apart, but that’s OK, our greatest accomplishment in our life together was creating three great kids, so it’s perfectly appropriate to spend that time helping them out.

Well, except me. I get to stay at home alone and teach genetics and introductory biology and feed the cat, instead. I’m helping by proxy, I get to pretend.

Mmmmm, samosas…

I’m sitting in my classroom, proctoring an exam over lunch, and I’m hungry. Then I read that that Donald Trump was in India, and his host prepared a special lunch by an award-winning chef of vegetarian Indian food, and ol’ Tubby McDrumpf spurned it all. Didn’t take a bite. I mean, they made samosas for him…and right now I’d kill for a samosa. They made an effort to provide some American-style foods, like apple pie. Nope. I guess his idea of great cuisine involves mass produced gunk that sits under a heat lamp for a while.

It’s embarrassing. I was brought up to think it was simply good manners that if you were a guest, and you were offered food, you would taste it and you would at least try to appear as if you liked it, that it was an insult to reject your host’s offer. Yet there he goes, turning his nose up at vegetarian food.

Although I’m insulted back by this line from the Telegraph.

Mr Trump is infamous for enjoying a classically American diet, featuring cheeseburgers, Diet Coke, well-done steak and ice cream among his favourite dishes.

Trump does not consume a “classically American diet”, and while you could argue that cheeseburgers are a common item, “well-done steak” is a tasteless abomination that True Americans™ do not eat. Many of us do not object to vegetarian food, and I at least appreciate Indian food. Many of us are true polygluttons.

Hey, could one of you swing by the lecture hall with some curry right now?

Who ever heard of a liberal arts college as a setting for drama?

Netflix is putting together a new show about academics and the chair of an English department which, to be honest, sounds like it could be about petty, trivial conflicts and excessive over-reactions after prolonged over-thinking, which could be exhausting. But then I learn that two of the people behind the show are those overpaid jerk-offs, Benioff and Weiss, who drove Game of Thrones into the ground, which gives me hope. Anyone who watched any of the featurettes at the end of each episodes knows that those two are dull, dry pontificating twits, and therefore they know the material that has to make up the content of any show about academia. Also, it means the show will feature gratuitous nudity and bloody violence, two things that tend to be lacking around university departments, but which would definitely elevate our appreciation of events. Who hasn’t dreamed of crushing the skull of the departmental chair, or silencing that bore who won’t shut up at the planning meeting with a crossbow bolt? (Note: I am currently the discipline coordinator for biology here, and I’m sure none of my colleagues have ever had such a thought.)

Right now, they’re at the casting stage, and they’ve got Sandra Oh and are trying to hook Scarlett Johansson, because she has to be in everything. I’m going to recommend when they’re scouting locations that they check out the University of Minnesota Morris. Imagine an academic dramedy that takes place in an isolated antarctic research station; we’re the closest thing to that you’re going to get, academic life enclosed in a tiny, remote bubble. We’ve already got a wild cast of extras to fill in the gaps, and all you need to do is add a CGI shapeshifting alien, and the story writes itself.

Except the ending. I have no idea how it would wrap up, but with Benioff and Weiss behind it, who cares? We’ll just kill a few faculty and go hang out at the Old #1 Bar and be done.

Katherine Johnson has died

Aww, crap. I first learned about her in the movie Hidden Figures, which you should see if you haven’t already, where we learn that a black woman was a crucial element in doing the math that got men into space and to the moon. Now she has died after a long and distinguished career, at the age of 102.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.

When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.

You missed the party, but we’ve still got the hangover

Welp, we didn’t get the live YouTube stream of our celebration working, but Jason Thibeault was recording and has put it on YouTube now. One important announcement was that Allegedly: The Website is now up and running, which has all the information on our court case you could want. In particular, check out the timeline of events in the case — it has all the facts & details & links you could want.

Watch it now!

If you are moved to help us out, there are a few ways to make a contribution:

Exam grading done!

That was fairly quick and unexpectedly mostly painless, because I did something I haven’t done before, and that now I’m going to have to do every year. These are all first year students who generally have that deer-in-the-headlights look in class, and I have to coax them to participate. So this year I dedicated one class hour to how to answer an essay question. I told them that grammar and spelling matter, and that one simple recipe for a coherent answer is to describe a few facts and details, and then synthesize in a concluding statement. Facts without synthesis doesn’t mean much, and synthesis without outlining the basic things you’re explaining makes it sound like you haven’t been paying attention in class. We went through a bunch of examples in groups, and I’d evaluate and give them a likely score on the spot.

It worked! The quality of the answers went up — knowing that I had reasonably high expectations meant they took the questions very seriously and answered carefully. It made them much more pleasant to read.

The catch is that it’s expensive. This class only meets twice a week, and dedicating a class hour to something so basic meant that there were other things I didn’t have time to cover. I hope this is a skill they remember, though, so I don’t have to do it again in every class they’re in.