We Can Fix It!

Jess Fink's We Can Fix It! is a brief graphic novel that investigates the question: what if you could travel back in time to formative points in your youthful memories, to try to advise your younger self against making embarrassing mistakes?

What follows is a series of comedic exchanges. Some people never change, and the self-awareness to realize this makes the entire comic wry and clever. No big solutions are achieved, but saving your younger self from choking, from making out with the wrong teen, and from various self-esteem missteps is presented in a charming and delightful manner.

Recommended! It's a quick read.

This post's theme word is skiamachy (n), "a mock fight or a fight with an imaginary enemy." Philosophists debate whether the metaphorical skiamachy with insecurity is too on-the-nose when represented as a slap-fight with one's childhood self, enabled by time travel.

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.

Cryptid Club

Cryptid Club is a book collection of Sarah Andersen's series of comics about fictional/mythical creatures. The art style is cute but with a sarcastic twinge, and the humor leaves a lot of space for beats and reading between the lines (and glances) on the page. Overall this was a delight and a quick read, since it's a short comic series, and I loved it. Recommended.

Plus, the cover glows in the dark!

This post's theme word is peritext (n), "the material surrounding the main text of the book, such as covers, preface, bibliography, colophon, etc." The Cryptic Club peritext is delightful and includes an author-bio-style glossary in the back with pictures and descriptions of all starring cryptids.

2021 quotes

 I: "Every online lecture is like a seance: Steve, can you hear me? --- give me a sign!"

Z: "This two-minute hazard distraction video is sponsored by Michael Bay."

re: students: "Let's not traumatize them more than is necessary... it's important to keep our goals realistic."

L: "I sent you the recipe for this sweater."

D: "You're usually an Eagles fan, right?"
M: "I'm an easy and willing turncoat."

F: "What happened? Did you take a pill of youth? You look amazing! Did you shave your beard?"
E: "Four years ago."

L: "I was so tired when I was done that I had to take a nap for two days."

H (regarding his rash): "Did I tell you, they took an autopsy?"

G (petting Ika): "Even [Z] doesn't look at me this deeply."

L (on omicron): "This is great. This is, like, nostalgia for the first part of the pandemic when I ordered groceries all the time."

C (Saturday, 3pm): "I think I can do this whole thing without a trip to Home Depot or Lowe's!" [and actually that came true!]

K: "I mean, who can say which direction the Earth spins in?"
D: "North-to-south. Prove me wrong."

A: "We can't follow every path, because in any kind of interesting code, there are infinitely many paths."

This post's theme word is revet (v), "to recheck or reexamine." Revetting my quote board and I do not remember the context of some of these.

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.

Quote board, fall 2020

Inexplicably, people keep talking around me and my brain keeps latching on to the strange ways they arrange words and ideas.

K: "96% of your quarantine room capacity is available."
Z: "Book now and save!"

(assorted chorus of voices): "Did you get the spoiler for the back to cut down on air resistance? can it pop wheelies? how much does that keyboard bench?"

K: "You're getting feature requests from a feral cat?"
Z: "Yeah."

Z: "But your parents aren't there, right? As far as raucous house parties go, feeding your dog bacon to get her to like you is, like... fine."

Z: "Our hot take is that you need to just lubricate the freshmen so they have snail trails and can't actually get close to each other, they just slide off... we want to make McGill Walk into a slip'n'slide."

K: "I'm not a colonizer."
F: "It's widely regarded as a mistake."

R: "I once realized I was a WASP and was shocked."

F: "When Lenin was young and the revolution was strong, THAT would be the way to take power."

Q: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

F: "Sometimes it's a conjunctive AND and sometimes it's a disjunctive AND."

F: "It's the prosperity gospel of tenure lines."

D: "Tiny houses intended for birds: very cute. It is a truth universally acknowledged."

K: "Have you tuned the wheelbarrow?"
L: "I've been trying to hit it with a hammer. I'll post it on YouTube."

F: "I've been appreciative from the beginning. And I'm waiting to receive one more... make it blue to match my eyes."

? (from a 66-person video call): "That is a way not to have a coup: you think you're on private chat but you broadcast to the entire school."

? (on 142-person call): "I look forward to meeting some of you in person one day."

L: "I don't exactly understand the science of Wifi --- I know it's little elves that fly through the air and whisper the voices of other people..."
K,M, and O (simultaneously): "You basically got it."

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

L: "In the sewing room --- well, in the third sewing room, ..."

S: "If you don't like my build infrastructure, we can talk about that offline." FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Z: "[Q] has been on sabbatical for the past 10 years, so..."
Q: "from future import *"

N: "I have to say, for me, experiencing it on film was sufficient."
Z: "You don't feel the call to the southern pole?"

D: "Some would argue that this 'premium content' is not, in fact, content. But I would argue that it takes time to watch and is unedited."

D (in response to me): "Lila, did you lose your Zoom premium? I'm getting ads." (I did a funny bit!)

Z: "Extend the cat a line of credit. [beat] Step 3, profit."

R: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

I: "Is that your foot in front of you?"
N: "That's his face."

C: "Can the system keep the chipmunks out?"
D: "Are the chipmunks committing identity fraud using your credit card?"

N: "I succumbed to the lure of firecrackers in my youth, so I remember the attraction."

F: "I found a way around it."
N: "He naturalized the bayonet."

R: "Plus their proprietary blend of whatever they think almonds taste like."

C (distantly, off-camera): "Ooooh! Ow ow ow!"
N (distantly, off-camera): "I gave birth to three children, it hurt more than this."

F: "That was when the sun didn't rise. That day."

K: "I have a +1 resistance to emotional damage."
F: "I need to activate that."

D: "Our first thought was to go to Denver. But it's far away and on fire."

Z: "I lightly overshopped because I was excited about the squash."

M: "What is the saying?"
A: "More money, more problems."
M: "Oh. My first thought was, more children, more problems."

D: "Here's my backend. Please engineer it to something useful. I wrote... no test cases."

D (on Zoom): "I'm streaming this on Instagram Live right now."

L: "If I misunderstand something, you can be almost sure I didn't misunderstand it."

N: "Congratulations on assembling those Ikea shelves."
Z: "It is what I was raised to do."

U: "I don't know how much we can train people to be nice."

F: "You've solved the dilemma! I'm going to die in a warehouse fire."

K: "If you lose by 5 pants I will be very interested to see how that plays out."

D: "You definitely shouldn't buy a vintage electric blanket."

K: "I like to turn the cereal box off and on again."
L: "On the cereal box, they hide the controls."

Z: "Do I not know my own course number?"

F: "It's not screwed over in the sense that... I could have played better. But I didn't."

L: "Rampantly floating with pubic hairs."

J: "Bread is the bread of life."

D (faintly, with astonishment): "Oh, Mom, you added me to your friends."

D: "It's your turn. Disappointingly, I am prepared to talk you through beating me."

J: "It's about the journey. The slow, inexorable journey."

K: "I can't believe we're moving past 'arbitorium'!"
L: "Arbitrarium!"
M: "Arboretum?"
N: "I got it, clearly: Lab of Ornithology." (<-- this was, unbelievably, correct!)

Z: "I just think --- and I hear myself saying this as it comes out --- when people ask questions they don't think about what they don't know."

K: "How'd you get out of the pentagram?"
F: "It's a demon-backed demon trust."

Z: "It's hard to both get off at the same time. It's also hard to both go down at the same time." (IIRC this was about internet service uptime but WOW)

F: "A mountain of lawyers, in a giant mech suit, as another lawyer. With missiles."

Z: "We're just multiplying matrices by vectors in my course, man, I'm not touching that third rail."

Z: "The other thing --- there are lots of problems bathroom-related --- living with my sister..."

Z: "They came up with 2 major options to save money. One was to demolish the building."

R: "If you decapitate someone, it's rated R."

This post's theme word is heterophemy (n), "the use of a word different from the one intended." It's easy to get on the quote board by accidental heterophemy in earshot of me.

Every Place I Cry

Every Place I Cry was an improvised emo concert, whose direct-to-me marketing absolutely worked because I love Jess McKenna and Zach Reino (of the terrific Off Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast -- watch e.g. this live performance of "We Object to Fear").

It was great! I've appreciated the artists who have managed to set up the tech and broadcast live performances from social-distance-ville; it has broadened the variety of art available to me here in my house (and even in my city).

There were lots of little nods to the emo genre, familiar from middle and high school and possibly not even accessible to anyone of a different age or background, but... just... so... completely... delightful! to me. And kudos to them for their many consistent character choices (including emo artist names on each performer's Zoom byline), set dressing (crows! perched on everything! terrible shirts and hair!), and on-stage banter as if in an in-person venue, including ending the night with "thank you"s and "Be safe on your way back... to the other rooms of your house."

This post's theme word is heteroclite (n), "a person who is unconventional; a word that is unconventionally formed." Inventing an emo band is stereotyping heteroclites: curiously contradictory, but verbally delightful.

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.

April Fool's?

These posters mysteriously appeared on April 1 across campus.

They are expressing ... something ... stridently.

It's just not entirely clear what.
And there's no call to action, or url, or reference to a student group... The posters are handwritten in marker, mostly all-caps, on scrap paper. (At least, the pages I read were unrelated middle pages of math or biology articles.)

Is this an April Fool's joke? If so, ... what is the joke?

[Update April 2: posters still up, so reduce the probability estimation of "this is an April fool's joke".]

[Update April 3: found a poster with slightly more context.

Updated my weight for "this is a protest or other political movement" with some connection to climate activism.]


This post's theme word is ekistics (n), "the study of human settlements, drawing on such disciplines as city planning, architecture, sociology, etc." Climate scientists of the future will focus on ekistics as a subdiscipline.

Giant beer pong

The ingenious engineering students organized a fun, interactive "prank" accessible to every student at the college and harmless, while also being college-themed and lightly edgy. I admire the design, style, and execution of this idea.

Beer pong, but: giant. Sober. With enormous slingshots firing volleyballs into red-cup-clothed garbage cans!

It turned out to require a lot of knowledge about current wind conditions. Many trials were necessary to figure out a good angle and distance to get an even reasonable-looking parabola towards the targets.

In conclusion, this was an Extremely College "prank", more like an interactive performance art piece or, frankly, a game. No binge drinking required, all daylight-hours wholesome fun. Adorable. Students here are fantastic.


This post's theme word is endogenous (adj), "originating from within." I admire and am impressed by students' endogenous creativity and ability to execute ideas.

Mathematical property of friendship

As part of my lecture, I ask interactive live-polling multiple choice questions. Today, one of those questions was:

Let S be the set of Swarthmore students. Consider the binary relation "is a friend of" defined over S x S. This relation is symmetric.
(a) true
(b) false

The point of this question was twofold: first, I wanted to confirm that everyone was on board with the notation, vocabulary, and definitions involved in reading the question. Second, I wanted everyone to laugh --- the joke is that either answer can be correct, depending on your attitude about friendship. (The class was pretty evenly split across (a) and (b), with one outlier protest vote for (d).)

Imagine my complete and sheer delight when one student's defense of answer (a) was "This is a Quaker school, so we are all friends."

HAH

It is utterly, totally perfect as a response: it confirms that the student understood the concepts AND that they got the joke AND that they joked right back, indicating they're comfortable with the classroom environment already, in week 1.

Dear student: you made my day, 'twas a stellar reply, thank you very much for your in-classroom participation today.


This post's theme word is breviloquence (n), "speak briefly and concisely." English humor favors breviloquence.

I Hate Everyone But You

Allison Raskin and Gaby Dunn (comedy duo with YouTube channel Just Between Us) write/create/star in funny video sketches, and vlogging(?)/advice snippets, and also have now written a book!

The book is called i hate everyone but you, and it is a modern epistolary novel --- it consists of text messages and emails sent between two friends (parallelling the real-life friendship and characters of the authors). The book contains some pop culture references, some timely culture references (the issues of today!), and lots of feelings between best friends attending college on opposite sides of the continent. In two completely different ways, they manage to have "usual" college first-year experiences, with the added update (from my now out-of-date memories) that everyone has a smartphone all the time, which makes documenting and contacting anyone instantaneously available.

I liked it. The book was cute (it's marketed as YA, so it's a little outside my usual reading zone) and funny. In an amusing meta-twist, one character suggested to the other, "Maybe start a YouTube channel! Those things can blow up!" (p. 109), and later links to the Just Between Us channel and says "You're such an Allison" (p. 282) to the obviously-an-Allison-analogue character. 

I also appreciated the overwrought, highly-dramatic versions of their lives that the characters wrote in emails; there are certainly emails in my own "sent" folder that are as ridiculous, condensed, and silly. In the midst of juggling a description of many people attending a party, we have this snippet (p. 158):

Cassidy preferred to join a grating conversation about the semicolon. He could later be heard quoting Oscar Wilde from the other room. The night proceeded without further incident until...

Possibly it's not as funny without the context, but I'm unwilling to type in pages of text and besides, you should read it for yourself! It's a quick, fun read.

This post's theme word is tarnal, "damned." The comments section is full of the tarnal dregs of the internet.

Theory of computation jokes

I encouraged my students to write jokes (about the course subject matter!) on the back cover of the midterm and final exams. (Writing a joke was worth 1 point of extra credit.)

I then foolishly didn't copy these jokes into my permanent lecture notes! I chalk this up to my first-year teaching experience; I'll not make such a grievous error again.

I only remember a few, usually the GROAN-inducing ones; so here, with no attribution, I share them with you below.

What is the title of your autobiography?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the title of your autobiography?

I've expurgated names below to protect the innocent. As a side effect, this protects the rest, too.

Some people went with an extremely literal title:

• A Book about ME
• "Don't Read This Book"
• I
• [student's own name]'s Autobiography by [student's own name]
• "Book"
• A Book about [student's own initials]
• The Life + Times
• [student's own name]: A Life
• "I Should Write an Autobiography -- Selected musings of [student's own name]"
• The Brief Wondrous Life of [student's own name]

I'm a bit worried about that last one --- does that student for some reason expect to live a particularly "brief" life? Yikes.

Others made obscure references (?) that I hope would be thematically highlighted and tied together in the text of the autobiography:

• "Thoughts About Everything"
• "The Little Engine that Could"
• My Life by Bill Clinton (<-- amp="" art="" cover="" have="" li="" might="" misleading="" publisher="" the="" trouble="" with="">
• "Sir"
• "Eh,"
• Content Free
• "No"
• Untitled
• I don't know
• 1337
• "ε"

Others chose something self-deprecating:

• "Fashionably Late and/or Asleep"
• A look at where it went wrong
• The Science of Laughing at Yourself

My favorite was easily "A look at where it went wrong", not only because it's a good hook --- I'm interested! I want to read that book! --- but also because either this student already thinks it's gone wrong, or this student anticipates that it will all go wrong sometime, for sure, and so that's a reliable autobiography title. Plus it's already funny. The title, at least, is going right!

This post's theme word is proem, "an introduction, preface, or preamble." My autobiography consists of a series of proems --- I just haven't gotten to the significant stuff yet!

Family quips

Gather sufficient clever and verbose people together, and the resulting tumult of verbiage will dazzle and astound. And, I hope, amuse. Here is a selection of quotes from a recent family gathering --- keep in mind, these were only in conversations I witnessed*, and these were only the things I remembered long enough to jot down. I've interspersed other notes, not quotes, of things that happened.

"I made it sweet for you! ... sweet with chili beans."

"Why is your foot so far away from your body?"
"... I don't know."

"Look, you have all these ingredients, you have to use them all..."

"They made that noise, you know, like when someone chews with their mouth open the week before you get your period and you just want to smack them like aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

A rederivation, on the fly and from first principles, of cold-smithing techniques for certain metals.

"I'm telling you, Mom, I'm not going to adopt a child this fiscal year."

"No, no, it's a theoretical machine that I carry around in my brain."

Regarding sourdough starter:
"You feed the baby, but first you discard half the baby and make sure the other half hasn't died."
"I think nurturing a baby and yeast are a little different."

There was a point in the evening when all the some adults took out their smartphones and installed Snapchat, and then started trying to have snapchat interactions. Hilariously. (I think the youths did not appreciate the situational comedy.)

Pedantry about "=":
"Ernie's mastery of breads and baking! ... it's unequalled in the Western hemisphere. But you don't know how many decimal places we're using to measure."

"That just looks like something you took out of a dumpster."
"Initially, yes, but..."

"It was so nice to see you --- I was so impressed that at one time I fell asleep." (Said without sarcasm.)

Just before the (brief) break for this USian holiday, the students on my course message board asked, "What is a Fontes Thanksgiving like"? These same industrious and forum-using students also posted a poll whose results revealed that several of the students read this blog. This post goes out to you, then, my students: you are almost done with me (this semester), but for now you remain in my pedagogical clutches and I remain tethered to your minds, trying to squeeze in more knowledge in the scant remaining weeks.

*I'm a possible confounding factor here, I acknowledge that.


This post's theme word is fissiparous (adj), "tending to break into parts" or "reproducing by biological fission." The Fissiparous Fonteses are feared far and near.

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.

Six-word autobiographies

I take attendance by having the students answer a question complete a very brief creative writing assignment.

Today they wrote six-word autobiographies.

Many were school- or study-focused, to no one's great surprise:

• Majored in chem, not gonna chem.
• All the labs all the time.
• Too many interests, what I do?
• Work hard, algorithm harder. Word. Word.

Here we see the beginning of the recurring theme of "six, you say?"

• Naive ambition tempered to quiet hope. Rebel.
• Potato, banana.
• Went into math, forgot how to count.

And of course the silly:

• Thank gosh I'm the sane one.
• Thinking about this, unlearning network flow. (<-- lecture="" li="" of="" s="" today="" topic="">
• I tell lies all the time.
• Question: why is it a giraffe?
• Hello darkness, my old friend. [bum]

And the profound:

• Trying to do ok & stuff.
• Once upon a time, I was.
• What is the meaning of life?
• I am my own worst enemy.
• Six words is simply not enough.
• Regret for yesterday, hope for tomorrow.

I liked "Just passing this sheet along. Cool." for being six-words, self-reflective, and descriptive of the student's life without actually saying anything nontrivial. This is the kind of answer I attempt to head off at the pass on homeworks...

This post's theme word is nimiety (noun), "excess or redundancy." Homework solutions should be sufficient, and absent all nimiety.

More like MadLibs

I take attendance by having the students answer a question fill in MadLibs.

A ____________ walks into a bar. The bartender says, "___________________"

This one was a bit open-ended and I'm not sure it sparked the students' witty creative-writing skills optimally.

The traditionalist: A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long face?"
The context-aware: A college student walks into a bar. The bartender says, "ID?"

The literalists: A man walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Ouch." Also appeared as "man/hello"
and "man/try the soup" and "really tall guy/that must have hurt" and "person/yo" and "man with an orange for a head/you have an orange for a head?!"

The animals that appeared were commented thusly: "dog/impressive" (not sure why; dogs walk normally), "bear/welcome", "parrot/This is it." (bartender with no patience left), "cat/hi", "puppy/This is the best day ever.", "caterpillar/You'll be a beautiful butterfly one day.", and the masterpiece of absurdism which is "very very very small horse/hello".

The jokey: A law student walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Walking into too many bars will not help you pass it."

This makes very little sense, but: A foo walks into a bar. The bartender says, "foo-bar."

The minds of mathematical bent:

• A graph walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why so edgy?"
• A triangle walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Looking sharp."
• An infinite number of mathematicians walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Got it --- 2 beers." (I'm guessing this is a joke about infinite sums with finite limits?)

Today's Pandering Prize goes to:

A theoretical computer scientist walks into a bar. The bartender says, "That's strange, most of our customers are travelling salesmen."

This post's theme word is clerihew (n), " humorous, pseudo-biographical verse of four lines of uneven length, with the rhyming scheme AABB, and the first line containing the name of the subject." I would like to see what my students create when prompted for a clerihew or a six-word autobiography, but creative writing attendance questions distract students from paying attention to the lecture.

Nitpicking metaphors with modern engineering

"Jesus had said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven, but rocketry had thirty years of practice working with astonishingly small tolerances and rose to meet the challenge." - Scott Alexander's Unsong, chapter 39

The swoop from cultural highbrow to literal engineering terminology tickles my sense of humor. Is there a name for this genre? "Nerdbait"?

This post's theme word is ultracrepidarian (n/adj), "(one) giving opinions beyond one's area of expertise." Which is truly the ultracrepidarian, the literary scholar with opinions about engineering  details or the engineer who obliterates a metaphor with a cleverly-designed tool?