Living life publicly

From Gaby Dunn's podcast, "Bad With Money", episode "Get Rich or Die Vlogging" @ 19 minutes:

Youtubers are allowed to have struggled --- in the past tense --- because overcoming makes us brave and relatable. But we can't be struggling now, because then we're labeled whiners.

This observation resonates strongly on any number of dimensions. The incredible skewed, biased versions of ourselves we're encouraged --- by explicit and implicit social pressures --- to present on social media. The way that public behavior is policed and monitored, especially in any minority group (bonus points for each category you don't fit: white, male, cisgendered, straight, wealthy, speaking unaccented English, able-bodied, no mental health issues, ...).

The idea of having to maintain a sort of "purity" of one's personal brand is insane.

There are arenas of life, even outside the weird social-media William-Gibson-esque semidystopian future which we all inhabit, where this bizarre packaging and marketing of oneself is promoted, standard, ideal. I am thinking particularly of applying for jobs,  where there is enormous pressure to present oneself in an idealized version, having overcome struggles but not now being engaged in any particular struggle.


I'm so glad I am employed. The amount of psychological pressure this lifted is still astonishing.


This post's theme word is pungle (verb tr.), "to make a payment; to shell out." If you want my labor, you'd better pungle and pungle hard. I know my worth.

"Flashbacks" and nightmares

The balance of the universe is restored, as today a student informed me that they were having "flashbacks" to my course last semester. The word "nightmare" was used more than once.

Me: "Well, I hope you used your experience to warn future students away from my class!"

Student (chuckling): "No, I told them all to take it! It was really good."

I'm not sure if it's Stockholm syndrome, sheer sadism, or a third option, but I'm glad to see that my veneer of frighteningly demanding professorhood has been restored. (See a few weeks ago, when a student called me "benevolent".)

(On a more serious note, I am now awash in guilt and concern over the negative impact that my job has on student mental health.)

This post's theme word vituperate, "to use harsh or abusive language." In manner and outward appearance mild and approachable, she nevertheless invoked the same fear as if relentlessly vituperating her students.

"Benevolent"

Update from the educational front lines:

A student called me "benevolent" --- to my face.

Context does not excuse this breach of the "I am an implacable monolith demanding only and exactly the highest degree of intellectual rigor from you" façade. Perhaps I will have to reconsider my open-door-and-visible bowl-of-candy office policy.


This post's theme word is honeyfuggle, "to deceive or swindle, especially by flattery." Attempts to honeyfuggle your professors are charmingly inept and ineffective.

Hugo nominees 2017

The Hugo finalists for 2017 have been announced. The slight changes in the voting procedure have modified the style of voting and the sorts of ballots that are produced: this one seems to have succeeded along the metric of "a diversity of authors, not just one slate advanced by a particular sub-group of voters." Huzzah!

As always, I am trying to read all the materials. I've been doing more reading now that all term-time grading is off my plate, so I am, if not catching up, at least falling behind at a slower rate. (For once, I'm slightly ahead --- I have already read (although of course not blogged yet) Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky.)

Best novel:

• All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders
• A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
• Death’s End by Cixin Liu
• Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee
• The Obelisk Gate by N. K. Jemisin
• Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Best novella:

• The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle
• The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson
• Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire
• Penric and the Shaman by Lois McMaster Bujold
• A Taste of Honey by Kai Ashante Wilson
• This Census-Taker by China Miéville

Best novelette:

• Alien Stripper Boned From Behind By The T-Rex by Stix Hiscock
• “The Art of Space Travel” by Nina Allan
• “The Jewel and Her Lapidary” by Fran Wilde
• “The Tomato Thief” by Ursula Vernon
• “Touring with the Alien” by Carolyn Ives Gilman
• “You’ll Surely Drown Here If You Stay” by Alyssa Wong

Best short story:

• “The City Born Great” by N. K. Jemisin
• “A Fist of Permutations in Lightning and Wildflowers” by Alyssa Wong
• “Our Talons Can Crush Galaxies” by Brooke Bolander
• “Seasons of Glass and Iron” by Amal El-Mohtar
• “That Game We Played During the War” by Carrie Vaughn
• “An Unimaginable Light” by John C. Wright

If you're interested in how far I got in the read-all-Hugo-nominees in previous years, check out 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009. I do gradually go fill in the links to my reviews as I read these, but they're all incomplete and this one probably will be, too, for awhile.

This post's theme word is edacity, "greediness, good appetite." This reader's verbal edacity knows no bounds, though her timely posts are not only bounded but quite finite.

Problems with self-reference and recursion (Aronson's sequence)

The most delicious, frolicksomely frustrating things to think about are the problems which reference themselves. Recursion is such a twisted mind-trap. Having just exposed my class to the joys of the halting problem (animated video explanation), and using it to show that all sorts of other problems cannot be solved --- one of the duties of professorhood is teaching students how to solve problems, but the peculiarities of my work are that I teach students which problems they can't solve --- I was delighted to read a snippet about Aronson's sequence:

‘T’ is the first, fourth, eleventh, sixteenth, twenty-fourth, twenty-ninth, thirty-third …

Here's the introduction on Futility Closet.

Here is Aronson's sequence on the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (one of my favorite sites!).

I want to know how the sentence ends, but of course the sentence can't end as long as I'm stuck thinking about the way I expect it to end. I'm sure that some sufficiently proficient linguist-mathematician team could come up with a satisfactory, and finite, end to the sentence. I'd buy that book!


This post's theme word is pabulum (noun), "bland intellectual fare: insipid or simplistic ideas, entertainment, writing, etc." Using the word "fare" makes me think of other food analogies. The collection of results stemming from Gödel's (In)Completeness Theorems are savory intellectual nuggets, with not a morsel of pabulum.

Snowfall!

It's been lovely getting some real snow that stays on the ground and accumulates. Idyllic!

I was amused to see that the artificial turf field gets plowed so that turf-field sports can continue.

This post's theme word is pogonip (n), "a dense winter fog having ice particles." Pennsylvania winter is mild with a minimum of pogonip and a maximum of palpitations over lightly-snowed roads.

Mars Needs Women

A dangerous beverage, I'd guess.

This post's theme word is yardang (n), "an elongated ridge formed by wind erosion, often resembling the keel of an upside down ship." When we settle on Mars, we'll investigate the apparent yardangs.

Musée de Cluny

The Musée de Cluny (alternately, the Musée national du Moyen Âge; wiki) is a lovely museum in the center of Paris, focusing on the middle ages and on the grounds of a Roman bath/abbey/garden. I enjoy museums and I enjoyed traversing this one on hard mode, with no personal concessions to English-translated guides or material.

Some of the illustrations seemed downright whimsical and modern in their styling, for example this image from a combat guide:

"Traité de combat" from "Tradition de maître Johann Lichtenauer, Augsburg, 1490-1500"

The museum ticket was printed with one of several randomly-selected works in the museum, providing a solo scavenger hunt. My ticket was a piece of the unicorn tapestries, although no unicorn bits made it into the clipped ticket frame.

Foreground: ticket. Background: original tapestry.

For part of my visit, I was delighted to be stuck a few meters behind a group of elementary-aged schoolchildren getting a guided educational visit. I learned some easter eggs to look for in stained-glass windows (one guy is winking! look, the camel is sticking out its tongue!) and also got to practice my "guess what that specialty historical word is" linguistic skills. Luckily the guide was excellent and provided simple-words explanations for everything. I tried to stay in earshot but not interfere with the herd.

Eventually the school group diverged and I continued my exhaustive, read-every-plaque grown-up museum visit. I spent a long time in this completely emptied and desacralized chapel, which was used as a dissection room (with observing medical students!), among many things, throughout the years.

This panorama does not really capture how mind-bendingly awesome the room is. But it tries.

 The stonework is really superb, gently curving in really precise geometric formations, with insets of different stonework curves. All completely symmetrical, at least from the floor and to the human eye. I'm curious what tools/templates/techniques were used to construct this, but of course for that we'd have to go over to my favorite Paris museum, the Musée des arts et métiers (wiki).

The stonework, carved vines and leaves and grapes and branches, even includes a scattering of snails, creeping their way along. I lingered in this room looking to find every single one (I'm sure I missed some).


This post's theme word is pleniloquence (n), "excessive talking." A solo visit to the museum is leisurely and absent any pleniloquence.

When you are sick, your comfort food is

I've almost completely lost my voice, but that of course should stand as no impediment to the dissemination of knowledge, which is my primary goal. So I got miked and gave my lecture in a husky "late night radio DJ" voice.

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

When you are sick, your comfort food is:

Soup, in increasing order of specificity:

• soup
• noodle soup
• ramen
• chicken noodle soup
• chicken noodle soup heavy on the noodles
• chicken noodle soup and ginger ale
• 
  

Other starches or sugary foods:

• bread
• crackers
• triangle toast
• cinnamon sugar toast + apple cinnamon tea
• cookie dough
• jello
• Skittles

Outliers:

• ginger
• beef rice pudding
• congee
• water with lemon juice and pulp
• water
• tofu

The most extreme outlier is "hot toddies" --- someone's family has adopted the same "use alcohol to burn out the germs" approach that I've heard bandied around by half-joking grandparents.

This post's theme word is leechdom (noun), "a remedy or medicine." What a wondrous panoply of leechdoms!

Your favorite childhood memory, in one sentence:

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

Your favorite childhood memory, in one sentence:

Certain students obeyed the structure of the question, replying with a complete sentence:

• 4 kids make a mess in a muddy backyard.
• Carrier has arrived.
• Summer Camp is awesome!
• That's personal!
• I ate a banana
• I was bad at softball
• A TV gave me a concussion
• oh god why are there so many ferrets

Others only left sentence fragments, abandoned noun or verb phrases left dangling, their tenuous wisps reaching back into memory:

• climbing trees
• soccer games
• breaking my femur
• summer with grandparents
• going on field trips
• playing
• figuring out how to use a water fountain
• vacation in Thailand
• infantile amnesia
• video games
• [illustration of a ghost chasing pacman eating dots]
• corner
• go karting
• spending time with family
• playing with dogs
• scoring winning soccer goal
• going to beach
• carefree summers

My cold, robotic, grown-up professor grinch heart is warmed by these snippets of lives happily remembered. I'm curious about why "breaking my femur" would be one's favorite childhood memory, but I suppose context counts for quite a bit in comparing memories...


This post's theme word is defervescence, "the abatement of a fever." I vividly remember being sick in childhood, but the gradual defervescence left no distinct impression.