Final exam

The exam was printed in color. Partly this was to make the diagrams pretty, partly this was as a hint that students should be thinking about colors. Adjacent to some colored text, a student wrote "LOVED THIS HINT, THANK YOU!" which is a very positive piece of exam-writing feedback to me. In a proof for this problem, another student wrote "The hint of coloring the 4 houses the different colors further solidifies [claim they were making]."

Down the margins of the final, one student entered a philosophical reverie: "What is 'correct'? Can approx algs ever even get there"

When asked to give an example, one student wrote "I can't fight the urge to say ∅". This was, in fact, a correct example.

I offered students the opportunity to write a joke. I am not sure these all make sense?

• Solving NP-complete algorithms is like finding a CS prof that doesn't wear khakis. Theoretically possible, but in practice it's too hard.
• The biggest dream for an NPC is to become P(layable).
• Why did the NP-complete problem become a therapist?
  It thought it had a lot of experience with unsolvable isues.
• "That's NPC behavior."
  Normal person interpretation: someone is acting funky like a Non-Player Character.
  Theoretical Computer Scientist interpretation: How did they figure out how to live non-deterministically?
• Why buy cereal from the NP-hard aisle of NP store?
  It's part of an NP-complete breakfast.
• I went to the doctor for my (N)ose (P)ain Problem. He took way too long to find a solution.
• This joke is NP-complete, reducible to everyone else's, hard to understand, and has a polytime verifier. Verifier: print("HAHAHAHAHAHA")
• Why did NP not cross the road?
  Because it wasn't efficient to do so.
• What did NP-complete say to NP-hard?
  Don't worry, your polynomial time is coming!
• What did Vertex Cover say to Independent Set?
  You NP-complete me <3
• Why did the NP-complete problem go to the party?
  It thought it would be a clique-free environment.
• Once NP-complete is verified on tiktok, it has its own verifier.
• A: Did you hear Neal Patrick Harris found his long lost brother, of the same name, Neil Patrick Harris?
  B: Oh wow, how nice!
  A: I know, right! They said now that they found each other, they both feel Neil Patrick-complete!
• Why was Lila late for the CS41 final (theoretically)?
  Because she was stuck in traffic and navigating it was NP-complete!
• Teacher: Prove this problem is NP-complete.
  Student: I just "completed" a solution, so it must be NP-complete.
• Q: What do you call a math-inspired, environmentally-minded tap-dancing group?"
  A: "Al Gore Rhythms: An Inconvenient Troupe"
• Q: Why did the programmer break up with NP-completeness?
  A: Because NP-completeness took too long to solve their relationship problems; she wasn't efficient enough.
• It is verifiable that I will complete my homeworks for ALGO but it can not be done in polynomial time. ALGO TO SCHEDULE ALGO Homework is NP-complete.
• Why did the algorithms problem not talk?
  It was NPC(omplete).
  idk if this makes sense, i don't play video games

I take issue with

• P=NP only if N=1

And indeed, another (more pedantic) student wrote:

• P=NP
  (N-1)P = 0
  N=1 or P=0

I was offered some non-jokes:

• I like to imagine that all of the NP-complete problems are friends with one another, because they can't feel complete without being reducible to one another.
• I am Not Proud of this exam, but it is Completed.
• I'm NP-complete with this test.
• Ironic for it to be NP-complete but we don't know if P=NP.
• I wish you were NP-complete so that all of our problems could be reduced to you.
• I can decide in polynomial time whether a graph is 3-colorable.

That last student is powerful in a troubling way.

When prompted, "Write a joke about NP-completeness." the most wry student in the class wrote:

• I would tell you one, but once you've heard one you've heard them all.
• I would write a joke about NP-completeness, but once you've heard one you've hard them all!
• I once heard an NP-complete joke but once you've heard one, you've heard them all.
• My verifier could assess a good joke if it saw one, but I don't think this problem can be done in deterministic polynomial time. :)

This post's theme word is lexiphanic (adj), "using pretentious words and language." Very few students attempted lexiphanic answers to test questions.

SIROCCO 2023

Some quotes from SIROCCO 2023, a CS conference earlier this month.

"Everything's computation. Any process evolving and solving problems over time is computation." - Yuval Emek. An expression of the "computation is a metaphor for everything" that I hadn't heard framed this way before.

"Artificial neural nets use all kinds of swanky functions." - Frederik Mallman-Trenn

"... so first we need to understand what a human is. I'm oversimplifying a lot, but a human has a head and a body..." - Frederik Mallman-Trenn taking the physicists' approach to framing a problem

"This is the tapas version of the talk... I'm going to be going over a lot of topics to give you a taste of them." - Joshua Daymude

"There's so many dimensions here that we have not yet found one algorithm to rule them all." - Joshua Daymude, expressing an unscripted pervasiveness of Tolkien in popular culture

"This is a crowd that lies proofs, so I don't want to show off my simulations and offend anybody." - Joshua Daymude

"Roger is going to be talking about 'swarm intelligence', if that even exists." - Andréa Richa, introducing the next speaker's talk about swarm intelligence with a devastating level of objectivity

"I don't know how to solve this and I'm afraid to go back and tell them this, so you should help me! I want to hear your ideas." - Roger Wattenhofer, with an earnest appeal to the crowd that I can only imagine comes from unassailable tenure-granted confidence and seniority

[many inscrutable self-notes about the legibility of different presenters' slides, diagrams, and presentation styles]

The mildest possible theory praise: "I think you're touching upon the challenges of this area." - Michael Schapira

"Deep learning is voodoo. We can't debug it, we don't know how it works..." - Michael Schapira

"How do I know in real time that my decisions are no longer sound?" - Michael Schapira, expressing a CS question but also a question which suits intoxicated people

"The nice thing about this algorithm is... but the very horrible thing is, it uses infinite memory." - Bernadette Charron-Bost, expressing a truly beautiful "theory person has found a tradeoff" provable fact

The phrase "we need to use more elbow oil" was mentioned and my brain took a minute to figure out that the non-native English-speaking presenter probably meant the idiom "elbow grease", which on further inspection is a bizarre and faintly disgusting idiom.

Discussing the topic of algorithmic recommendation systems: "It's maybe something questionable from the moral point of view. But it's certainly interesting and I will not talk about it." - Boaz Patt-Shamir

This post's theme word is: craic (n), "good times involving pleasant company, enjoyable conversation, etc." Many speakers reminded us that SIROCCO is the 'fun' conference and is full of craic and jollity.

What is your quest?

New semester, new students. In response to the prompt "What is your quest?" they said

• to seek the Holy Grail (most popular response, 5)
• pass this class / to complete all my assignments / master C++ / achieve all the knowledge
• find riches / find El Dorado
• vengeance
• sleep (x3)
• to have a good day / be happy / live my best life
• Je veux apprendre le français.
• to follow that star
• survive
• self-actualization

This is a good variety of goals and I'm glad the students are thinking at such a wide range of timescales and achievement levels. Hopefully everyone got good sleep over the weekend and is ready to jump into some math tomorrow.

This post's theme word is obtrude (v), "to impose one's ideas/opinions", or "to thrust forward or intrude." The process of teaching is one of a series of obtruding lectures and enticing examples.

Spring 2021 quotes

 I forgot to write attributions so here are some more-scrambled-than-usual quotes:

"Thank you! You've been sucked into the trap alongside me."
"I like being sucked into the trap."

"Are you going to issue some futures on that party?"

"There's two people in the house, so 'who ate it?' has an air of mystery."

"... the robot spy in your house who you just yell at."

D: "Nine times out of ten, if I have banged my head against it, it turns out the reverse triangle inequality does it."

Z: "That's a good question and I should have asked it, but I was a little flustered."
K: "The title of your memoir!"

D: "Um... this is when I need to have two copies of this book open, to flip back and forth."

"All curly-haired girls have an opinion of which founding father their ponytail looks like."

Z: "I like the policy of 'visitors should be neither seen nor heard.'"

S: "I think these [meetings] will be better in person."
J: "They can't be worse!"

Z: "X and I get into arguments about how to pronounce things. I'm like, I don't know if this is because you are 4 or because I came from a weird place."

G: "Why is that cat looking at the thermostat?"
Z: "I have no idea."

"pull request: check yourself before you wreck yourself, [username1]"

D: "Which is why, when your dog asks you a question, you say, 'That will be answered in the next paper.'"

L: ""My toenails are sore from being inside my socks yesterday."

K: "I'm five minutes into butts."

I: "At some point you can drive this probability high enough that your computer will spontaneously *crumble* with higher probability [than that this will fail]."

D: "I have to say that, until this morning, I was convinced that the three musketeers were mice."

Q: "The kid's clearly a knucklehead."

O: "If I need to, I can buy another computer, which will increase the number of computers in this house by... 1%?"

Z: "Python is the language that has unlimited late days."

Q: "I meant to put myself on mute but I turned off my video because I have no idea how Zoom works anymore."

Y: "I'm [X]'s niece, we won't get into how."

C: "Scraping the hair off your face every day is messing with nature."

Z: "Geocaching --- that's where you bury a server in your backyard."

I: "Beautiful. I did a probability."

J: "Hey, let's completely change everything at once and then try to cope with the ensuing disaster."

G: "Friends and the internet are about the same level of uselessness." 

Z: "Students will misunderstand, no matter what we do."

L: "That was Dad! I never used the word 'dynamite'. I prefer 'plastique'."

M: "You know these kids with college educations --- they can read!"

I: "Alright, what else is new, besides bad weather and rain and your illegal activities?"

K: "How about malaria?"
L: "Malaria is just... very inconvenient."

Z: "I think the idea of food and drink is insane."

Q: "They join the major late and are like, 'I picked up CS35 on the street.'"

I: "This hypercube is reaching the limits of my artistic sophistication."

Z: "Your department seems comparatively... cohesive. You all agree on stuff..."

I: "Knock yourself out on Complexity Zoo. But don't do it for the next half hour, we're in class."

This post's theme word is autokinesy (n), "self-propelled or self-directed motion or energy." The instinct to write down out-of-context quotes for my later self is a bit of psychic autokinesy; it goes back in my notes for more than twenty years.

Winter 2020 quotes

These have accumulated for awhile and I might've missed some as there is currently a "scratch notebook" infestation throughout the rooms of my house.

Out-of-context semi-anonymized quotes for your enjoyment!

I: "Evidence is really piling up for us living in a weird simulation. Let's have their teeth fall out, try that!"

M: "What's the official wine pairing for bacon-wrapped chicken?"
L: "Bacon-wrapped wine."

Z: "There's more red flags than potential here."

G: "I'm discovering things about people I never knew."
L: "By looking at their backgrounds?"
G: "By listening to what they say!"

N: "I like that JavaScript is being described as low-level here."

Z: "You accidentally muted yourself."
I: "No, I did it on purpose, but at the wrong time."

M: "I was such a good writer back then. That was before I went to grad school, I can tell."

F: "The problem with legacy code is, they did a lot of stuff in the past, and they keep doing it!"

Z: "Do you have a job, or is this, like, private daycare?"

D: "He died of syphilis because he had all these... incubis... you know?"

Z+D (simultaneously, uncoordinated): "Maybe don't do your taxes today."
M: "I think it'll work out in our favor!"

D: "Julius Caesar was not another Groundhog's Day."

L: "Isn't it being livestreamed on the IRS Facebook page?"
K: "That is a cursed sentence."

I: "I don't trust the government. I don't trust anyone! I don't trust myself! I do trust Paypal."

A: "Tomato grove?"
B: "Tomato thicket."

I, on the topic of grad school: "It was actually quite useful, but not directly."

F: "You know, I'm in a perfect position here to rob the bank."

R: "Can I promise that the results of this won't be used for evil, anywhere, ever? No."

I: "We're all just in a sorry state."

Z: "surveil and digitize" (which I suggested would be a good evil catchphrase)

L: "The problem with buying a fanny pack is..."

Z: "No, I don't want a duck-face filter, I want a duck filter. I want to look like a duck."

D: "When I look at the scores, I think... we shouldn't have explained to her how the points work."

L: "I like to say a long goodbye and get cut off so that my children feel an obligation to talk to me again soon."
D: "Mom, I don't think you should reveal the secrets of how you maintain the social contract!"

This post's theme word is meech (v), "to whine" or "to move in a furtive manner" or "to loiter." Stop meeching about the park, meeching to each other, I see you meeching over there!

Phallacy

Emily Willingham's Phallacy: Life Lessons from the Animal Penis is not what I expected. Based on the cover art and the subtitle, it seemed packaged as a popular science book, so I thought it would be a little biology, some interesting research anecdotes maybe, and (of course) the mandatory discussion of bedbugs and slugs ("traumatic insemination" is an extremely clickbait-y phrase).

The book did include those things, but they were side notes --- its true focus was humans, and particularly the way that we (esp. in the west) have structured society in general and scientific research in particular to ignore things that are female-affiliated, even when that is an obvious detriment to scientific knowledge and research advancement. Plus there was an always-uncomfortable, but straightforward and unforgiving, broad consideration of toxic masculinity.

I think in retrospect that it's mostly "life lessons" and only sort of tangentially about "the animal penis", especially since the book itself contains so many descriptions of ways that various animals transfer gametes that are not a penis. The tone overall was straightforward but wry and unquestionably a woman's voice: it unflinchingly and repeatedly drew parallels to the animal kingdom and pointed out how hollow and stupid and full of preconceived notions those parallels were. It was sprinkled with absolutely fantastic footnotes and asides. Willingham has a wonderful authorial tone and a gift for introducing neologisms and puns, casually adding references to popular culture and ancient history, and overall just making me wish that I was her friend so we could cackle together.

My notes overall ended up being mostly phrases or sentences that just struck me as awesome:

• simile used when discussing evolution: "You can be as fragile as a dictator's ego and still have attributes that prop you up, keep you alive in the current environment, and lead you to successful reproduction." (p 14)
• "When it comes to evolutionary studies of sex, gender, and genitalia, guess who the "winners" are?* [footnote: *Men. It's men.]" (p 15)
• "In this work, they used what they called "haptics" and every one else calls "dildos"" (p 30)
• "Lest I come across as unamused and far too earnest, I do think that genitalia and fart jokes can be hilarious." (p 46)
• "Frogs collect of an evening round the pond," (p 65)
• "Given that the human penis couldn't stab through a perfectly ripe avocado," (p 77)
• "The genre of "arthropod (and invertebrate) sex films" is small but mighty." (p 77)
• "This is a very fighty kind of bird, considering that they all apparently agree to go condo together." (p 84)
• "Who hasn't needed, at some point, to reach a neighbor with a lengthy protrusible organ, even if it was just spraying them with a water hose? If you're a barnacle, ..." (p 86)
• "[footnote: *The noise that they make is called "orgling."]" (p 106)
• p 132 she discusses her previous teaching and describes herself as showing slides and "intoning" and then says "I was obviously electric in the classroom."
• some great neologisms like "intromittens" (used frequently) and "tuatararium" (a terrarium for tuatara, p 216) which often is accompanied e.g. by "[footnote: *Yes, I made this word up.]"
• on p 288 I was caught off-guard by the phrase "squad goals" used w.r.t. mites
• "got his Twitter account... suspended for violating Twitter rules, which we all know is almost impossible to do if you're a white male." (p 243)
• "Lest I attract unnecessary derision (only necessary derision, please), no, I do not really think that..." (p 257)
• "This particular, not especially long (in words, but oh, the psychic pain lingers) paper uses the word "penis" more than a hundred times and the word "phallus" sixty times." (p 268)

Overall the book was interesting and suggested new ways of considering and engaging with these issues, and I liked it. I probably wouldn't have read it if not for the squid on the cover, though, so I know my own vulnerabilities.

This post's theme word is lepodactylous (adj), "having slender fingers or toes." I will not be able to consider mittens for the lepodactylous without thinking of arachnids.

Quotes, summer 2020

I jotted down many quotes in this time interval, because every. single. social. interaction. now feels deeply meaningful and like a carefully conserved resource. Plus they're all happening over video chat, so my notebook is always at-hand. Here is a selection (some quotes were expurgated for being too personal, or too crass when out-of-context); my apologies that my name-randomizing algorithm does only one letter/person, and so has a lot of collisions in the namespace.

M: "I'm super-enjoying not owning things."

Z: "I'm sure there's middle-management goats."

M: "I have the, like, the limping-along ovary."

Z: "Moving online is just an endless stream of apps that stink."

B: "We're DnD role-playing millennial fantasy: we all have stable jobs and healthy relationships with good communication."

B: "Climb the clocktower?"
K: "That's the kind of thing I should wait until AFTER I have tenure to do."

J: "Filibuster #4 has been my favorite"

I: "I am confident our future department chair can be nimble and flexible in the upcoming Battle Royale."

Z: "A lot of this makes no sense."

K: "We learned: everything is bad and nobody is happy."

K: "I can't wait to read your bestselling business novel about How Not to be a Craven Bootlicker." 

Q: "Basically everything the administration does is a giant fuck-you to student culture."

Y: "... not disappointed with the decision, more disappointed with reality."

Y: "You can't compress coding time."

I: "What happens in a COVID year stays in a COVID year."

Z: "I have to look up what is legal or not legal in Pennsylvania."
Q: "Most things are legal if you don't get caught."

N: "[name redacted] stepped on my glasses. I'm trying to fix them."
N': "With a pine cone?"

Z: "All KINDS of things can happen!"
Q: "Meteors?"
Z: "Hurricane season's just getting started."

M: "Oooh, all this talk of working out, I'm sweating."

Z (offhandedly): "high-functioning democracy here"

M: "In theory, anything can be ruined with any move."

N: "If you go by feel you'll know what to do."
Z: "You might be setting your expectations of [name redacted] a bit high."

N: "Winter is coming." (w.r.t. self-haircuts)

Z: "Koi are domesticated carp. They'll eat trash. They're aquatic goats."

Z: "We need to think about how to teach our classes. We can't spend all our time doing other people's jobs."

M: "I don't like shoreline poop."

D: "To Americans right now, euros are fantasy currency."

N: "When I began my homeowning episode..."

Z: "I got the email that Swarthmore ran out of electricity." (i.e., power outage)
Z': "I like that phrasing."

Z: "Postmodern algebra... it's like Bauhaus meets rings and groups."

C: "[name redacted]'s like, this is lovely, I love being so confused."

C: "I tried to write 'an exercise left to the reader' in my homework."
Z: "In physics you can totally just insert a random minus sign to make it work."

C: "I ended up playing with my tmix configuration for a day and a half."
Z: "Quarantine life! ... why do something in 4 keystrokes when you could do it in 3?"

N: "He had it apart several times this week, doing exploratory surgery." (re: the dryer)

N: "You're living the life! Tomorrow you'll be 90 and you found a secret medication that lets you eat salami!"

Z: "I snoozed the email and hoped it would go away in a week. It has not gone away."

K: "We had a really similar form that was much shorter but still as stupid as this one."

N: "The serger so ups the quality of your sewing."
F: "It doesn't if you don't use it."

F: "Bike doula."
K: "I think you mean 'sherpa'."

K: "You're very badly-behaved children." (re: some adults)
F (parent): "They could be worse."

Z: "For upper-level courses I have no problem offering both, and if one of them just dies a natural death, that's fine."

N: "The 38th is conventionally the bandsaw anniversary. ... the 39th is the home security system for birds."

I: "We don't get updates because the policy is changing, we get updates because the slogan is changing."

Z: "Thank god there's a deadly virus around so we don't have to focus on Brexit anymore."

I: "That crisis only affects teenagers, so we don't care."

Z (product pitch): "Each week you get a box of foods that people won't purchase even in an emergency."

Z: "Thank god for climate change and the death of the amphibian."

Z: "Could the Ottomans competently administer a test to teens? I say, welcome to our new Ottoman overlords."

Z: "Someone pored over the outline of the eagle thing. Gotta get paid somehow."

Z: "Everybody universally hates the robot, which is the appropriate response."

Q: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

Z: "I was uncomfortable because I'm an idealist."

N: "It's a circular saw at the end of a string trimmer."
M: "Wait, like... Mad Max?"

[D joins the video chat]
All others: "Good morning! Welcome to Vasectomy Talk."

Z: "I have walked less than 20 steps today & all of them were on this camera."

D: "Whoever is playing the video of my voice, can you mute it?"

Firstborn: "Everyone knows I'm the one who inherits the titles and lands."
Secondborn: "And I have the right to marry a divorcée."
Thirdborn: "And I'm supposed to go into the clergy?"
[laughter]
Parent: "I love my children! That was the best possible answer! Perfect!

Q: "They'll only hear your yowls of pain when you're shocked for typing on the keyboard wrong."

This post's theme word is lithophone (n), "a musical instrument which is sounded by striking pieces of stone." It's easy to fall down a quarantine video rabbit-hole and watch many modern and ancient lithophones played.

School planning chicken

Many schools are now announcing that they will be 100% remote in August/September when they begin, replacing their previous hybrid/fancy rotating schedule/other half-measure plans.

The patient impression:

School administrators are trying to make the best decision they can, for safety, education, financial, and legal reasons. The information available to them keeps changing, so they keep updating their plans. This is a challenging task and they are doing the best they can with limited information and no control over many external factors that keep changing.

The skeptic's impression:

Schools initially panicked, followed by a period of prolonged scramble, and are adjusting their plan to balance exactly on the knife's edge of [safe enough that the employees will not riot] and [still normal enough that the students and parents will not riot]. They'll continue to make new announcements to maintain this balance, so the announcements are interesting mostly to (1) to teachers, students, and their households, and (2) as way of tracking which riot has more potentiality.

The pessimist's impression:

Schools are inadequately-adjusted. Why do they keep announcing plans which are wildly optimistic and have dependencies on local/state/federal guidelines or international vaccine development? The institutional lock-in to a rigid schooling system means that even the most clear-eyed administrator is not allowed to make reasonable decisions or announcements, as the Overton Window in March did not really allow (for example) a superintendent to announce that public school was going to be 100% at home for the next two years. Or announce that all school was cancelled. Or any of the other things that I can imagine, in future-retrospect, as having happened (or as being equivalent to what will have happened).

So here's where we are, in a repeated game of chicken. It's asymmetrical, and maybe chicken isn't the right game-theory model to use, since we know which strategy to pick in order to lose, but not which strategy to pick to win. And also it's not mutually-assured destruction. And viruses aren't considered sentient, and have never been observed to drive cars around steep one-lane mountain roads...

This post's theme word is palmary (adj), "of supreme importance; outstanding; praiseworthy." A palmary plan is educationally elusive.

Fall semester 2018 quotes

There are giant, luxurious expanses of whiteboard in my office. They go almost floor-to-ceiling, which means that there is a considerable margin above which I cannot feasibly write. This margin ends up getting filled with quotes that students hear or say in my office, and find amusing to document. Occasionally I add to it myself (on a stepstool, on tip-toe).

The semester is over, so I'm clearing the whiteboard. Here for posterity are the quotes, anonym-ish-ized:

"I think I am approachable and friendly but no one puts a quote like that up there."

"I'm allowed to extend social niceties. It is one of the things that helps me blend."

"I'm an old-fashioned maniac trapped in the body of a thirty-year-old professor."

"Because long story short I'm a freak."

"Having a filter is like being the protagonist in everyone else's life."

"Solving problems is for lesser beings."

"I was hedging my bets so that way I would get something happy."

"I thought the population of America was like 200,000." (<-- astonishment="" board="" for="" on="" p="" quote="" the="" this="" value="" went="">
"You are the most accessible professor by far." (someone said this to me!)

"Thank you, wise professor." (someone said this! first usage of "wise" applied to me AFAIK)

"You harvest tears, I harvest souls, we all have our quirks." (delivered in a flippant tone to me)

"Try not to say anything obviously dumb." (actual direction I was given)

"It's not all bleak."
"It's just mostly bleak."

"So you're going to be THAT professor?"

"I will, in future, NOT ask questions. Just remain silent." (said by the Most Inquisitive Student)


For those keeping track at home, the semester timer finished at 45:23:04.52. I'm considering how to invoice this time.


This post's theme word is scrouge (v intr), "to squeeze, press, or crowd." The office hours scrouge is the scourge of the studious and enthusiastic.

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.

Pride in teaching

SCENE 1: to the victor the spoils, to the curious the puzzles

Interior hallway, mid-day. LILA is walking purposefully to a meeting.

STUDENT 1: Will you be around later? I think I solved that puzzle you told me but I want to check and see if you can break it with more counterexamples.

STUDENT 2: How are you giving out secret puzzles? This seems unfair.

LILA: Anyone can come ask me for puzzles, I have a lot of problems I want to solve. Come to my office hours!

SCENE 2: wherein educational goals are satisfied

The scene is set: office hours, Friday afternoon. The campus is quiet as students flee for the weekend. Only the truly education-seeking students remain, winnowed down to their scholarly core.

ENTER a student.

STUDENT: I am confused about topic X which we learned two weeks ago. I remember it was confusing then and I'm not sure what to ask you, but I'm confused.

LILA: [quick explanation of topic X, reframed in terms of what we've done in the past two weeks]

STUDENT: Oh, it seems so simple now! I have no idea how I was ever confused, this is totally straightforward and easy.

LILA explodes in delight and absolute teaching fulfillment. Bystanders are scalded by beams of pure joy, campus security must be called, paramedics are deployed, the area is cordoned off and several students are rushed to emergency medical services.

Sinkhole in the adjunct faculty lounge

The season has rolled around again, just as you thought that maybe your soul had renewed slightly, your skills increased, your experience enriched, your knowledge expanded... but no: here we stand again, upon a heaping mound of the corpses of our colleagues' academic careers, desperately seeking future employment.

"About the sinkhole in the adjunct faculty lounge, and other mid-semester announcements" strikes the tone perfectly.

For the record, I think computer science departments treat their employees well, because computer science departments comprise genuine and nice human beings (and also because qualified computer scientists are able to seek well-compensated employment elsewhere).

This post's theme word is sprattle (noun), "a scramble or struggle" or (verb intr.) "to scramble or struggle." Though I sprattle day and night, yet the sprattle never ends.

Bubble soccer

This was a pretty ridiculous but lovely thing to see on my walk home across campus: students in giant inflatable bubbles running into each other like some sort of particle simulation, nominally playing "soccer".

This post's theme word is ensiform (adj), "shaped like a sword or sword blade." The defensive air bubbles were susceptible to ensiform attacks.

Compare/contrast: support spouse

We all know that I am magnificently interesting and lead a charmed and wonderful life.

That's why we're here, reading this self-indulgent blog.

When introduced along American smalltalk guidelines, my interlocutors are wowed that I lived abroad. I am often asked to compare cultures/cities/lifestyles. There are many interesting and conversation-enhancing topical paths that this can lead to.

But now, for me, there is only one: I have, inexplicably, moved to a place where the default expectation is that I will have a full-time stay-at-home spouse to manage my life for me. This is a bizarre expectation, since AFAIK most people do not have this. I have repeatedly run into the wall of "oh, just get your [full-time support-partner] to deal with that". Apparently it's what everyone else is doing (<-- and="" heavy="" irony="" judgment="" of="" p="" tone="">
It's garbage. It's stupid.

I am familiar with the practices of making people feel like outsiders for their gender, sexuality, physical size, educational/social/cultural background, language fluency, or any other number of things. But outright societal difficulty coming from partnered status is completely new to me. And it's ridiculous.

Somehow, in slightly-more-socialized countries where I have lived, the expectation is that each person is a person as a unit and that is completely reasonable and fine and no one even thinks to talk about it, because why would you? It's obvious. The atomic unit of personhood is one person. Of course. But here, the atomic unit of adult personhood is two people, one of whom manages all logistics and this is stupid and offensive. I may be small, but I'm not half a person.

In my next job negotiations, I will include a personal secretary. It's no wonder people like me choose to "drop out" of academia, if their lives are twice as hard because they have to do the full work of two people in order to achieve one unit of adulthood. If this is true in other job paths, then I marvel that there has not been an exodus from this country of everyone educated and employable enough to move to a country that treats people as people.

Also, the weather is too hot and this renders me surly.


This post's theme word is disprize, "to disdain or scorn." I disprize your social norms. I take no leave of you, I send no compliments to your mother; you deserve no such attention. I am  most seriously displeased.

Blandness is contextual and waning

It was always temporary, of course.

For those keeping tabs, I am more bland at faculty meetings and less bland while teaching. Evidently I am more comfortable being myself in a setting where I am in control.

... surprising absolutely no one.


This post's theme word is exuvia, "the cast-off outer skin of an arthropod after a moult." Beware the professorial exuvia, it's gross and very common on college campuses.

I become bland

Unsure of myself with new colleagues and a new position, and wanting to maintain a certain dignity and thus obtain a level of respect (and respectability), I find that I am curbing most of my sotto voce comments and asides.

I want to appear pleasant and personable. (I am in fact pleasant and personable, although the way in which I express it is different from others... more prickly and dry. My personality is a cactus.)

Perhaps all my stifled remarks will harden deep in my core, and form an iridescent pearl of sarcasm, glistening with wit, and at some future date, a metaphorical conversational trawl will haul it up and expose it to the world.

In the meantime, I am content to be a little bit socially quiet, observant as usual, and with a vibrant inner life of narration and context-driven jokes.


This post's theme word is hebetate, "to make dull or obtuse." My temporary period of retirement from society shall not hebetate me.

Sexual harrassment in academia

This post on sexual harrassment as a long con in academia is worth a signal boost.

As such, defeating sexual harassment... will require a fundamental restructuring of the way we do business, and a reeducation of our field—all of us—in matters related to the culture of science and academe. This will not be easy because our culture fosters a deep distrust and even hostility toward the "soft sciences" such as sociology and psychology that provide us with the best tools for addressing our pervasive inequities. But if we are truly interested in a meritocratic scientific community that makes full use of its talent pool to understand the Universe, we'll see this as a worthwhile investment. Until we do, there will be more stories filling more inboxes as we collectively shoot ourselves in the feet.

Thank you to the author, who used his male privilege to make a stink and write a post that would have received worse internet harassment, dismissal, and personal criticism if it had come from a woman.

This post's theme word is roue, "a debauched man, especially an elderly man from a wealthy or aristocratic family." The academic roue was booted in a rout!

Saarbrücken

Saarbrücken is a pretty city, a lovely place to seek cool refuge from the sweltering sun and treelessness of denser and more tropical cities. It reminded me of Ithaca, featuring an expansive university nestled in hills and trees. The weather was pleasant. I took many photos.

Local church, directly out my window.

The streetcar's modernity nestled against the historical buildings.

This is art. Or a sundial? Or a postmodern playground.

The local language is Germany; proximity to France is completely ignored, and signs are not even bilingual (or, when they are, it is German/English). This combined with a forbidding, darkly gothic architecture, to make me think that I happened upon a vampire nest.

Gothic frontage, part 1.

Gothic frontage, part 2.

I visited an art exhibit in an abandoned chemical factory. It was very cool. The ambiance of abandoned rooms and stark pipes, walls, and windows, reminded me of post-apocalyptic video game settings. Some of the art blended with the setting, so that it was hard to distinguish art installations from decaying building.

I'm pretty sure this was just an empty room with abandoned freestanding plumbing features.

The paint flakes, mirrored windows to the next laboratories, and floor tiles was very cool. Unintentional art re: decay and order.

If this were a 1st-person video game, I would momentarily receive a parcour training session across these glassed roofs.

The weather was great, the university was nice, my talk went well, the research was interesting, the scenery was nice, and my ear was delighted to try to decipher German.


This post's theme word is esthesia, "the capacity for sensation." Travel titillates my esthesia.

Manhood and the gender-parity inflection point

Ack. Here's an article on manhood, with many not-what-I-expected statistics that women are out-earning men, adapting to new social and economic standards, and leaving them behind. Yes, that's right.

It's interesting and befuddling that, in low-income settings, women are so outperforming (and outnumbering) men, while in high-income/status settings (the technology sector comes to mind, as well as higher education) women are discriminated against and an extreme minority. Is there an inflection point,* somewhere on the socioeconomic scale, where men and women have achieved parity?**

I recoil at the suggestion that school needs to be made more "boy-friendly", probably because every other article in my inbox is about how science education needs to be made more "girl-friendly". Dissonance! Although I am soothed by the author's explicit mention that suggested changes to the classroom are "all helpful, and all things that might be appreciated by girls, too."

The article jumps all around, from broad and depressing statistics to accessible anecdotes and prescriptive suggestions from Sweden***. The takeaway message was bafflement, and the unusual and welcome thought that my worldview had been slightly widened to include a world with the statistics and anecdata of this argument. I'm also puzzled why the article is  framed as if gains for women equals (necessitates, requires, produces) losses for men.**** Why must it be a zero-sum game of employment?


This post's theme word is inosculate, "to join or unite." It's intransitive. Who would want to inosculate home, health, and fate with an unpleasant, violent, ill-mannered, uneducated partner?


*An intermediate-value-wish like this one seems unlikely, because the statistics probably aren't dense enough to be continuous. Big discontinuities at: high school diploma, college diploma, parents' socioeconomic indicators, etc.

**On the one hand, I'd like to live at that point, where men and women are equally employed, equally caretakers, equally-represented, equally successful. On the other hand, I probably don't want to move down the socioeconomic scale to reach that point, if I am currently above it.

***This is the parallel of Godwin's Law for articles on issues of economy, family, employment, education, health, or any other aspect of society: the article will, eventually, hold up Sweden as an example.

****On the other hand, the article illustration of a see-saw has a man on one side and no one is playing with him on the other side; yet he is still, inexplicably and in defiance of physics, up.

Bleak outlook for academic postdocs

This article in Nature offers a bleak outlook for science postdocs.

The problem is the aggregation of individual human actions. If the system as a whole could change (as per the US National Academies' recommendation, or the article's call for synchronized, systemic global change), then the problem would be easily fixed. Of course! Simplify away all the complexities, and a theoretical approach can surely offer many solutions [she says, tongue-in-cheek].

In the absence of unanimous, organized global overhaul of the scientific research system, what to do? I take the retrospective of Dr. Thuault-Restituito seriously. I have come to a similar conclusion, luckily much earlier in "the pipeline." I am lucky to have the luxury of choice --- if the system is not treating me nicely, I can take my training and education and leave. I can contribute, and find stable, productive, interesting employment elsewhere. I am mentally and personally flexible. I can switch universities, or countries. I can leave academia. If everyone had such freedom (and stubborn self-respect), then again we would find ourselves in a simplified system where decade-long underpaid, precariously-renewed postdocs are eliminated, for lack of a population willing to subjugate themselves to such treatment.

Aside from solving my own (local) problem by simply refusing to participate, I feel some social obligation to contribute to improving the complicated system as a whole. I'm just not sure how to do that from my current position (or indeed from any position whatsoever, even as director of an entire government's science funding agency).

As with all things in science, we continue to fumble towards* understanding and improvement.

This post's theme word is lebensraum, "space required for living, growth, and development." Some postdocs are academic bonsai, continually pruned and hemmed-in, prevented from obtaining the lebensraum needed to progress professionally.

*my least-favorite preposition to see in any scientific context, esp. when accompanied by "understanding"!