I know that Sam Altman is rich, is controversial, is in charge of OpenAI, yadda yadda yadda, but I was wondering what his expertise was, what he actually does to earn attention, because it’s not as if there’s anything I can point to and say, “Sam Altman was responsible for that.” He just seems to have a lot of money that he spends on other people who do a lot of different things. The Washington Post ran a long and laudatory article that I read to find the answer.

Here’s the shortest summary I could find.

In a Silicon Valley milieu in which shooting star companies often give birth to cults of personality around firms’ founders, Altman has stood out. An investor with a dizzying array of interests, Altman might lack the singular focus of a Steve Jobs — or the sophisticated technical skills to create the products he sells — but according to fans and rivals, he has had since an early age an uncanny entrepreneurial energy and a force of will that inspires others to do their creative best.

Jesus. That’s a particularly vacuous bit of empty PR, isn’t it? So he has an “uncanny entrepreneurial energy” and “force of will,” and what he does with that is inspire other people to do the work he can’t.

Reading between the lines in the rest of the article, it becomes clear that what he has is lots of money, which he acquired by becoming best buddies with people like Peter Thiel, and that lots of people want to say nice things about him in hopes that he’ll give them some of his money. He’s a college dropout with no particular skills, other than money.

The article ends with this bullshit.

“He’s the kind of founder that can bend reality,” said Hemant Taneja, a friend of Altman’s and managing director of the venture capital firm General Catalyst, adding that Altman had invited him to invest in OpenAI but that he declined because he couldn’t understand the company’s complex structure. “By creating the fastest and most popular consumer application of generative AI, he showed us the art of the possible. … This is the first technology where every CEO of every company in every industry is now thinking about how to do AI in their business. He made that happen.”

So he’s a hype machine, aided by highly placed friends, who promotes the AI buzzword which people are already beginning to back away from. OK, got it.

One of our modern problems is that the structure of our society incessantly pushes money-shuffling assholes to the top of everything, rather than competent people with actual constructive skills. I’m not impressed by Altman or others of his ilk…which is, unfortunately, why I’ll die poor someday.

My daughter is having a big Xmas party today, and she doesn’t sound thrilled about it — the in-laws are coming to visit, and she’s doing all the cooking. We’re not adding to the burden though, because she’s in Madison, and a 7 hour drive is just too much for us this week.

Middle son is really far out of reach. He’s in Korea for two weeks!

We were planning on visiting our oldest son in St Cloud, only two hours away, but then we saw the weather alert for Christmas day: “Mixed precipitation expected. Total snow accumulations of up to one inch and ice accumulations of around a tenth of an inch. Winds gusting as high as 40 mph.”

I think Mary and I are trapped together, alone in an icebound house for Xmas day. I don’t exactly have a Xmas feast prepared either, but I did make a simple lentil soup. It’ll help us stay warm.

Meanwhile, several of the webcomics I follow have a tradition of taking a week or two off this time of year, and they make low-effort filler strips that can be weirdly entertaining. Oglaf (NSFW!) has True Slut Adventures, Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) has a Mandatory Xmas Strip, and Questionable Content features a week of Bembo the Bembarian which, this time around, is perfect for me.

We’re all taking it easy (except for poor Skatje) today and this week. I hope you’re all enjoying some slack for the holidays!

Every once in a while, I get an email from 23andme to notify me that I have a new DNA relative. When a new person gets their DNA sampled, and if they have given permission to do so, they send out a message to all the people who have some degree of genetic relationship. There’s a limit, obviously — we’re all related to everyone, so they don’t want to have to send out a notice to all of their subscribers every time someone signed up. It looks like the limit is somewhere around 4th cousins, which is already pretty tenuous. I have over 1500 DNA relatives flagged on the site, most around the 4th degree cousin level of relationship, which means that we share about 0.34% of the DNA inherited from our last common ancestor. I know hardly any of them.

When I look at the list, yeah, I definitely know the top 2 names — they’re my kids. 50% of our DNA shared. I don’t have to go at all far down the list before descending into total mystery. I recognize a couple of cousins, some familiar family names, and then…who are these people? Once you’ve dropped below 4% shared DNA, you’re too distantly related for me to have known you, with some exceptions, not that I would mind knowing you. I’m sure you’re all lovely people.

What I see from these kinds of data, though, is that genes are not at all a good measure of relatedness. Every child of each generation throws away half of one parents’ DNA, so generation after generation “your” genes are rapidly and progressively diluted, unavoidably. If you’re hoping for some kind of genetic immortality, it’s not going to happen, because the mechanics of meiosis are going to steadily break up the particular combination of genes that make up the genetic “you”. You can draw up all the pedigrees you want to illustrate your family connections, but they aren’t particularly meaningful.

As you can see, a fourth cousin would share a great-great-great grandparent with me, but that connection is rather abstract. I personally knew two of my great-grandparents, but anyone before that is, at best, an old black-and-white photo in a dusty family album, or perhaps a line in a census record. 23andme tells me that we have less than a percent of shared DNA passed down from that great-great-great grandparent. Lineage really doesn’t matter all that much, because we’re all just a great sloppy gemisch, a random subset of a population, and it’s the population as a whole that matters in the long run. The unique combination of genes that make up me are going to be broken up and dispersed over time, and some will be lost.

I can’t even stress enough how trivial those genetic inheritances are: I am not the sum of my individual genes, but the product of all of my genes interacting with each other and the environment in complex ways. My kids may each have 50% of my genes, but they are not 50% “me” — each one is unique and distinct, and I can have no claim on them. Part of the pleasures of parenting is creating someone new and watching them become independent and express themselves in ways you wouldn’t have thought of — not as a reflection of yourself, but as someone completely novel in all ways. They may share 50% of my genes, but they’re marshalling them in different ways in different contexts in cooperation with my wife’s genes.

I have no patience with possessive parents who want to mold their children to their preferences. I also don’t have much sympathy for “royal bloodlines” or other such nonsense. The king of England and I might both be related to William the Conqueror, but that drop of blood has been attenuated and reduced to meaninglessness by a thousand years of gene juggling and recombination and drift and mutation and loss. We shouldn’t care any more.

There is something meaningful there, though. I started this post by mentioning my email from 23andme — they had a new member who, they said, was my second cousin. I recognized the last name as belonging to one branch of my family, so I contacted my brother and sisters and asked if they knew who they were, because I sure didn’t. Yes, they did. It wasn’t my 2nd cousin, they were my first cousin twice removed; they were the grandchild of my first cousin. We shared 2.65% of our DNA with my grandparent, their great-great-grandparent, which, as I’ve said is a bit trivial and not at all grounds for showing up unannounced at their house for Sunday dinner. But we do have a connection.

I knew their grandfather well — he was my cousin, we regularly met throughout our childhood and youth to engage in shenanigans at their ranch in Eastern Washington. We hiked, we went fishing, I called him a stupid redneck, he called me a liberal pussy, and he beat me up now and then. It was a sometimes prickly relationship. He got wilder as he got older, while I became more staid, and we drifted apart, which meant fewer bruises for me but fewer wild adventures in the back country. You know, he once killed and ate raw a red-winged blackbird in front of me to prove he was tougher than I was? Kinda grossed me out.

Their great-grandmother, my cousin’s mother, was a rock who earned our respect. She was a tough old bird who raised a sometimes fractious family with love, despite often struggling economically. She was my father’s older sister, and I think she helped hold that family together, too. We visited her a few weeks before her death from liver cancer. She knew it was coming. She was awesomely brave about it all, retiring to a little house on the Palouse, where she could appreciate the country in her last days.

I knew their great-great-grandmother, my grandmother, even better. I spent many happy days in my childhood at her house, which was a crumbling shack next to the railroad tracks, with one wall slowly peeling away from the rest of the house and floors that sagged in odd ways. She had been a widow since about 1939, and raised a family of six kids single-handedly, working as a fruit-picker in season and in a cannery in the off-season. She was always kind and generous with her grandchildren, which was good since she had a great milling mob of them running wild over the house all the time. Sometimes my cousin would visit to twist my arm and make me say ‘uncle’ while I was there.

Those are the ties that bind, the connections that really matter. Native Americans have the right idea — you aren’t an Indian if you have a pedigree that shows some distant relative gave you a dollop of tribal DNA (Elizabeth Warren was taught that lesson a few years ago), what matters is the personal associations, the actual sharing of the life of an Indian. As a biologist, you’d think I’d place more weight on the numbers and percentages and genetics, but no, I’m not at all impressed with a 2.65% genetic share in my twice-removed first cousin’s DNA…but hey, I knew their grandfather, and that matters far more to me. I’d probably enjoy meeting them and having a conversation about family.

Unless they decided to beat me up to prove how tough they were. I would hope that doesn’t run in the family.

We were wondering if we were going to have a white Xmas this year — it looks pretty brown out there with a few small spots of crunchy snow here and there. The weather forecast looks like continuing brownness through next week. So we were wondering how often this happens…and the National Weather Service provided the history. We had brown Christmasses here in 2021, 2018, 2015, 2014, etc.!

I’m not worried. I’m sure we’ll get a white January and February.

This is where American universities are at right now. Enrollment is down, tuition is up, and we’re all wondering where we went wrong…and I think WVU is a great bad example. They hired a bad president.

Then, in December, 2020, the university’s president, Elwood Gordon Gee, announced the start of an “academic transformation.” Gee, who is seventy-nine, has a wry smile and a penchant for bow ties. (He reportedly owns more than two thousand of them.) He served as W.V.U.’s president from 1981 to 1985, then had similarly short stints at the University of Colorado, Brown University, and Vanderbilt University, and two at Ohio State University. His two-year tenure at Brown was controversial—he left abruptly, amid criticism that he had ignored the school’s faculty in some of his decision-making—but he has always been a successful fund-raiser. He returned to W.V.U. in 2014. Gee has long argued that land-grant universities, which were created in 1862 by an act of Congress, are meant to “prioritize their activities based on the needs of the communities they were designed to serve,” as he puts it in the book “Land-Grant Universities for the Future.”

“These are perilous times in higher education,” Gee said, that December. “Across the country, there is a loss of public trust, and the perceived value of higher education has diminished.” Enrollment at W.V.U. had dropped more than ten per cent from eight years before. “We must focus on market-driven majors, create areas of excellence, and be highly relevant to our students and their families,” he said.

The revolving-door leadership is a widespread problem. We’ve had a number of chancellors at my university, most of them forgettable, and I didn’t really know any of them — they were outsiders hired to do fundraising, and little more, and never made any impression (our new chancellor was promoted from the faculty ranks, so we can at least hope for a genuine commitment to this university).

I am not impressed by his bow tie collection. An affectation is not a personality.

What really raises my hackles, though, is that phrase, market-driven. Fuck you very much, you don’t understand education at all, go buy yourself another goddamned bow tie.

What’s telling, though, is how he chose to adapt the university to the “market”. He’s cutting programs, of course.

This past August, W.V.U. announced plans to cut thirty-two programs and lay off a hundred and sixty-nine faculty members. Among the undergraduate majors set to be purged or restructured were music performance, environmental and community planning, art history, German, Russian, Chinese, French, and Spanish. Masters programs in acting, landscape architecture, energy environments, linguistics, and creative writing would go, too. The plans made national headlines, with much of the coverage focussing on what the changes suggested about the state of the humanities. But it wasn’t only humanities courses that were being jettisoned. Also on the way out were doctoral programs in management, higher education, occupational- and environmental-health sciences, and math. (The university was quick to note that fewer than five hundred students would lose their intended program of study.)

That’s a list that made me groan at every step. Music? Killing music? Foreign languages on the chopping block? No creative writing? This is insane. I’ve noticed that people who talk about market-driven tend to devalue creativity and diversity, but this is a great disemboweling of the purpose of a university.

And then…MATH? They’re gutting their math program! At a state university!

They’ve back-pedaled a little bit, but not on math.

The administration was receptive to some entreaties—the plan to drop the M.F.A. in creative writing was quickly abandoned, for instance, as was the proposed elimination of majors in Spanish and Chinese. The math faculty prepared an official appeal, arguing that the graduate programs could be preserved but restructured, with an emphasis on math’s connection to other sciences. The university was unmoved. In September, the school’s board of governors voted on the final recommendations: the master’s and Ph.D. programs in math would be discontinued, and sixteen of the department’s forty-eight faculty positions would be eliminated. The undergraduate curriculum would be revised, both to emphasize applied math and also to be more “efficient.”

There’s another danger word: applied. When some people think of math, after a brief, horrified shudder, they usually think that what we ought to be doing is teaching people how to balance their checkbook or how to do their taxes. That isn’t math. That’s accounting and filling out forms.

Relatively few people study pure mathematics — I’m one of those ignorant people who stopped at calculus. But I can appreciate the beauty of the subject at least, it’s just that I got distracted by other disciplines. Also, I’m definitely not one of those applied biologists, and I’ve spent a lifetime getting asked “why would anyone study that?” so I can empathize.

If you insist on being pragmatic and only teaching what you think students need to know to do a job, though, consider how impractical it is to reduce math to a service discipline. Very few people will want to work there. The article’s author interviewed a mathematician working at WVU, Ela Özçağlar.

In October, I went to see Ela at her office there. When I arrived, she was speaking with a third-year Ph.D. student from Turkey. On a board above her desk, she and the student had pinned a list of schools that the student was considering as transfer options. Standing in the doorway, he told me that he was hoping to specialize in geometry and algebra. Students at W.V.U. whose programs are being cut are permitted to finish their degrees, but he didn’t see value in staying. “All the pure mathematicians are planning to leave here in two years,” he said. “The math faculty will just be a teaching college.” A few days before, the university had contacted teachers who were being let go. Ela and Olgur, to their surprise, were not on the list. The unlucky group included four teaching faculty and two tenure-track faculty. Ten other faculty members, most of them senior, had volunteered to leave on their own.

Of course they volunteered to leave! They were being told that they couldn’t do the kind of work that stimulates them and makes it worth living in West Virginia. Somebody doesn’t understand the professor mindset. I found myself getting trapped in a rut of service courses, the undergraduate required courses that I could teach in my sleep, and volunteered/insisted that I get to teach some more advanced courses, despite the fact that they were going to require more work. Sure, I could sleepwalk through the basic stuff for a few more years, but I wanted a challenge that would help me learn more. I completely understand how being denied that opportunity to stretch oneself would lead to faculty leaving.

The author talked to another math faculty member, John Goldwasser, who chewed out the college president. Goldwasser seems to have expected President Bow-Tie to actually care about the university.

A few days before we met, Goldwasser sent a letter to Gee, castigating him for bowing to public opinion, and suggesting that, with a more concerted effort, he and his allies might have persuaded the state legislature to fund the university more generously. “If you had failed,” Goldwasser wrote, “you could have resigned in protest. That might have made it possible for your successor to reap the benefits of your efforts. If not, at least you would be remembered as a hero who battled to save the university.” At the heart of Goldwasser’s criticism, he told me, was the belief that a public university should help to create and shape values, not just reflect the things the majority of people already care about. “Did you know that guns will be legal on W.V.U.’s campus starting next July?” he asked me, referring to Senate Bill 10, which will allow West Virginians to carry concealed firearms on the campuses of state colleges and universities. “So, if I were still here, a student could bring a gun to calculus. The legislature cares about that.”

Goldwasser won’t be here: he’s one of the senior faculty who volunteered to go. The mathematician who asked that I not use their name intimated that perhaps Goldwasser’s decision was made altruistically, to save some of the younger faculty members’ jobs. I asked Goldwasser about this, and he smiled slowly, nodding, leaning into the silence between us. “My decision was selfish,” he said, finally. “I wouldn’t want to work in the kind of department that’s going to be left.”

That’s understandable. Not at all understandable to a certain kind of college administrator, apparently.

A commission has been busy redesigning our ugly state flag, and they’ve settled on a design that they will submit to state congress. They may diddle with it a bit, but generally, this is what it will look like:

Initially, I had favored a flag that featured an Ominous Loon, but I guess this one will do. It’s clean and simple, the colors reflect our name (Minnesota is from a Native phrase that means “where the water meets the sky,”) and I think it’s just plain pretty.

It doesn’t have a loon, unfortunately, but then our newly redesigned state seal has one.

I look forward to all the Minnesota school children being able to draw their flag this spring. Alas, my poor granddaughter lives in Wisconsin, and will be tortured with the effort to draw the cluttered abomination of the Wisconsin state flag.

I’m ready to fly away from the damp foggy Pacific Northwest to return to the cold snowy upper Midwest. It’ll be good to get home, but at least I can say that I got to watch my mother get visibly stronger in the week I’ve been here. She is off the oxygen during the day, and is able to get up and walk to the kitchen to get a cup of tea all by herself. If she keeps up with her therapy, I expect her to be roller-skating and dancing and changing flat tires next time I’m back this way.

The only downside is that she’ll be complaining even more vigorously about her offspring taking her cigarettes away. It’s for her own good!

When I was a young boy, my grandfather had a special knife hung above the fireplace, one that he said he inherited from his father, and that he would pass down to me when I was grown-up. Things happened. My great-grandfather died, my grandfather died, I moved around chasing an education, my grandparents’ house was sold, the contents scattered, and heck, I was more concerned about my family and family values and all that then in some lump of metal.

The knife, as it turned out, had gone to my mother, and my sister found it, and she says I can have it now. I guess this is my inheritance, a simple, practical knife that brings back happy memories. Here it is:

I think those are silver fittings. The handle has my great-grandfather’s initials (PV, for Peter Westad) picked out with small nails, and an engraving “WESTAD 1908” on the sheath.

Here’s the blade.

It’s still sharp, but I think you can see the edge is a bit rough — it’s going to need some tender loving care. My grandfather always told me that it was good Norwegian steel and would last a lifetime. He was wrong. It’s lasted a couple of lifetimes.

The photo is my great-grandfather and his brothers, taken in Fertile, Minnesota.

My sister is going to ship it to me later (I don’t think it would be wise to bring it on a plane), so it’ll be returning to Minnesota at long last. I’m going to have to consult some experts about maintaining it — it’s in pretty good shape after a century of neglect, so it doesn’t need a lot of work, but I would like to buff it up a bit. After all, I’m going to have to leave it to my descendants now!

Here at my mother’s house, we’re reminiscing about old times, and out come the photo albums. You have permission to mock 1990s me.

This was not a one-off. Mary’s looking good in 1995, I’m just a big dork.

In contrast, this is a photo from 1943, of my grandparents holding my mother. Formal photos look so much better. Classy!