ugh...

I gave the students in my "What is Science?" class a very simple experiment (the period of a simple pendulum) to do on Monday, just to have some data to talk about and just to have a sort of meta-discussion about experiment design and whatnot.

Complete. Fucking. Disaster.

Most of these students are juniors and seniors majoring in science. It's appalling that these students don't seem to be able to think about HOW to do an experiment... how to make careful measurements, how to control things that need to be controlled, and what to DO with the data once they have it. I got a data table from one group that I can't even make ANY sense of. Their numbers for the period of the pendulum range from 40 to 100 seconds. THE PERIOD OF YOUR PENDULUM WAS NOT 100 SECONDS!! It wasn't even 10. No matter WHERE you put the decimal, those numbers don't make sense.

I don't even know what to DO today to follow up on the experience. I'm considering making them do the whole thing over again... and actually THINKING this time.

energy crisis...

Time to put in a call to the crack team at "Facilities". The electrical outlet in the front of my classroom is on the fritz, and so sometimes when you plug something into it, it requires a little jiggle to get it to make good contact. Well, apparently I forgot to jiggle it today, because apparently the whole time I was giving a presentation in my Astro class the afternoon, my laptop battery just sat and drained away. It's at 36% right now, which is barely enough to get me to the first fucking train stop.

Fuck.

Oh well. Dead computer...? Sounds like a pretty good reason to take a nap.

celebrity sightings of the week...

Today: John Stewart talking on cellphone walking down 6th

Last Tuesday: John Leguizamo nearly ran me down in the Union Square Barnes and Noble

At Least Weekly: The actress who played Paul Buchman's mother, Sylvia, on "Mad About You" lives a couple doors down from my office.

Hey... I didn't say they were all MAJOR celebrities.

the book of limbo...

I guess it's time for an update on the Book Project That Wouldn't Die. Last week I unexpectedly got a check from the original editors for half the contract amount. It's a pittance, money-wise... but given that I have pretty much stopped pursuing them and given up on seeing any payment at all from that original agreement, it was infinity-times more than I was expecting.

And so this week I got an offer of sorts from the NEW editorial firm to continue working on Version 2.0 of the project. The pay is considerably less, the commitment is somewhat vague, and the material I wrote originally will have to be essentially completely rewritten. (The email from the editor is full of vaguely backhanded compliments of the sort - "Clearly you are a great lecturer and a talented writer, but the tone of what you've written here is completely inappropriate for this particular work". I'm paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it.) But I devoted too much of my energy last year to this project to see it shrivel up and die, so... I'm on board, I guess. Some clarifications are still needed, but hopefully I'll be able to spend January writing.

All's I know is... there had better be a damned hardcover book with my name in it at the end of this fucking process.

what to do...?

In most jobs, if you find yourself ahead of schedule, it's probably because you've been working extra hard. But in academia, when you find yourself ahead of your syllabus, sometimes that means you've been being lazy. Leaving out some material here, cutting corners on that topic there... at least that's the case with me. (Surprising, I know...) And as the semester winds down, I'm finding myself looking at a couple of my courses, thinking... what the hell am I going to DO for the last two weeks??

The astronomy class is not a problem. Well... not a big one anyway. If I wind up running out of pure astronomy topics, I can spend a day talking about particle physics and its relation to the big bang, and a day on string theory. Plus I've been meaning to expand the section on extraterrestrial life, and that could involve a whole lecture on natural selection and evolution. It may get scatterbrained, but there will be stuff to talk about.

The philosophy of science class is scatterbrained ALREADY. The topics have taken a turn into things that I'm even less prepared to talk about than I thought. It demands activities and worksheets and such that I just haven't put together yet. Today I'll have them working on a lab activity just to occupy a class while I think about what to do next.

But the worst is the physics class. Ugh. The topic list still fills the last few weeks of class, but when I look at the topics for each day, it seems like each one is something I could cover in 15 minutes. Absolute zero, Maxwell's Demon, entropy and the arrow of time... all interesting things, but none of them quite add up to a whole class.

Hopefully I'll be rescued by administrative minutae in this case. I have a follow-up to a pre-and-post-type assessment tool that I gave at the start of the semester. That should take half a class. I have the course evaluations, which could be stretched out to half a class if I add my own supplement. I'm searching for a movie that might eat up another half. And I'm definitely bailing on the last day of class, which is scheduled for Dec 21, even though the cancellation of that week's Tuesday class means the final will have to be on the 14th, which is a whole week early. If that gets around, I could conceivably get into some trouble, but I think I can judge pretty well when a course is just DONE. And this class is definitely done. Not that it was a bad class... I think it went pretty well. The class dynamic is the best of my 3, and almost half the students are clamoring to get into my courses next semester. But I don't think their little brains are going to absorb much more physics between now and Xmas, and I don't have that much left to give them anyway. So, let's call it a semester.

Meanwhile, the amount of grading I have to do is fucking CRAZY, and if I were smart, I'd get right on some of that RIGHT NOW. I have the in-class writing assignment on the Lord Byron poem in my bag. Maybe I'll give those a quick pass on the train.

grading...

Wow. Grading 15 of these in-class writing assignments only took me 25 minutes. The moral of THAT story...? Give more in-class writing assignments!! And I have to say... the "blue books"? LOVE THEM!! Grading them makes me feel like a real college professor. Of course the irony of writing about a poem in which mankind burns down every living tree for sustenance in a bluebook where only 3 or 4 of the 10 pages are used and the rest are wasted is not lost on me.

Now it's time to gear up for some of the more daunting grading... midterm papers! Shudder...

holiday weekend in brief...

not up for serious blogging. a bullet-point recap...

* Mom, roommate, brother and brother's wife arrived Thursday morning. Much food was eaten.

* Dave and Wife leave for Black Friday shopping at 6:00 AM. Toys'R'Us is sold out of Robosapiens, Kohl's is a crowded nightmare but we stand in line anyway, Target demands the usual $200 per-visit contribution.

* I still have ZERO ideas for the wife for Xmas

* Friday night, dinner at Outback... Mom's treat.

* Saturday we hang out and do very little. My brother and I watch stupid YouTube videos and jam on acoustic guitars and bongos in the basement. Mom plays computer games with the kids.

* Wife spends much time stuck talking to brother's wife. Her opinion that this is the most boring person she has ever met is only reinforced.

* Family leaves Saturday around noon. Recovery begins. We take the kids to see "Flushed Away". Wife enjoys the humor a little *too* much.

* Sunday - Wife works in the basement while I play my new "Dragon Quest VIII" game with the kids huddled around.

* Dave unwinds with the new bottle of Tanqueray and posts a sketchy blog entry.

* That is all.

too old to "rock"...

Saturday night I went next door to jam with my neighbor the drummer and his friends. Short version... played until midnight, drank 2 somewhat large JD & Pepsi's, stayed up until nearly 3:00 AM.

Ugh. Sunday required no fewer than three naps to recover.

Long version...

My neighbor's wife invited my wife out for dinner and a movie with her friends. This caused my neighbor to pout and then organize his OWN guy-night-thing in response. So he invited ME over to jam with him and some other friends of his. (Thus we had to hire a babysitter.) So I head over there at 5:30 with my gear and we get all set up and run through about 6 minutes of 12-bar blues to get loosened up, and then we stop and my neighbor goes - "OK, let's go get something to eat."

I assumed this would involve calling for pizza, but no... it involved piling into 2 cars and driving to a restaurant 20 minutes away. What the fuck? I'M PAYING A BABYSITTER!! I could have stayed home until you guys came back and saved $20. (plus the money I spent on dinner!) I just wanted to play, I didn't want a whole social-occasion thing with people I barely know... especially since going out to dinner with these guys was like going to a restaurant with the cast of the fucking Blue Collar Comedy Tour. And I hate to be all "classist" and shit, but really, when the conversation turned away from Gibson vs. Fender, I really had very little in common with these guys.

And so we leave my neighbor's house and not 5 minutes out the door, my neighbor realizes he brought the wrong set of keys, so we are all locked out of his house. Which involves driving ANOTHER 20 minutes past the restaurant to meet up with his wife (and all the wives) who have elected to go to dinner and a movie at an absolutely insane distance away from home. Why? WHY?

The upshot of this was that we actually got down to playing not at 5:30 as I originally hoped, but at 9:15. I was pretty irritated. Then when we started playing, I broke the g-string on my Strat after about 5 minutes. Fuck.

But once I switched guitars and things got rolling, it went well and I had fun. They were all a little too impressed by my playing, which is flattering, but at the same time... not the perfect situation. It's actually much more fun to play with people who are BETTER than you. The other guitar guy had a fairly fancy recording setup running, so I'm sure I'll post some snippets on the "Weekly Improv" when he burns me a disc.

We wrapped up around midnight, a little after the wives got home and headed over to my house to hang out where it was quiet. (well.. quietER) We hung out talking until about 1:30, when I walked over with my first load of gear and chatted with the wife for a few minutes. She went to bed and I went back next door. We hung out and I had another drink and the guys smoked some cigars, and I finally came home around 2:45.

Ugh.

Then to cap it all off, on Sunday afternoon, after my wife and I had traded off naps all morning, I asked her if we were going to run any errands or anything that evening and she starts in with "Well, I had plans to do this and this and this but since you've spent all morning napping I guess we can't do that... I'm kind of pissed of that you stayed out until 3:00"

Umm... WHAT? Ok... first of all, we've BOTH been napping all morning, and second of all, THIS WAS NOT MY "THING". This was YOUR thing... I only went along with the other thing to be neighborly and polite. It's not like I WANTED to go out to dinner at TGIFridays with the cast of American Chopper. And THIRDLY, if you had TOLD me about these plans BEFOREHAND, maybe something could have been done about it.

Ahem.

I think I'm still a little tired.

failed by technology... saved by technology...

The other night our cable was OFF for some reason when "Survivor" was on, so our TiVo recorded an hour of black screen. So we went to the Apple iTunes store and spent $1.99 to download the episode, and tonight we'll hook my iPod up to the TV to watch it.

See how technology makes our life SIMPLE!!

off-center nurse shark



... a cartoon inspired by my absolute favorite nonsense spam subject line in recent weeks.

from the Chronicle of Higher Ed...

In an article about some kind of national "Professor of the Year" awards...

Alexei V. Filippenko, a professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley, won in the category of doctoral and research universities. The "Introduction to General Astronomy" course that he has taught one semester per year for the past two decades has become one of Berkeley's most popular classes.

"Especially in a large class for students who are not majors, you have to have some way of engaging them. I do demonstrations. One of my favorites is that I jump from one chair to the floor to a desk and toss balls of different colors out to students, and the students toss them back to me. That illustrates how electrons in an atom can go from one discrete energy level to another. If the wrong color ball gets thrown to me, I stay put because it wasn't the right kind of excitation.

"One year I jumped from the desk to a chair and the chair collapsed. A rather sharp spike zapped me in a rib and cracked it. It hurt like hell for a month.

"I tie a doughnut to a string and twirl it around my head to illustrate how gravity works. Eventually the string eats its way through and the doughnut goes flying off -- not radially as many people's intuition tells them it will, but tangentially. I play music before class starts, typically pop music -- "Champagne Supernova," "Black Hole Sun," Monty Python's "Galaxy Song" -- corresponding to the theme of that day's class. On Halloween I dress up as a black hole -- with a black robe, hood, and gloves, and dark glasses -- and at one point I start throwing astronomically themed candy at students, like Milky Way bars, Mars bars, and Starburst candy, to illustrate the quantum mechanical Hawking process by which black holes are thought to evaporate.

"It's just a gimmick to draw students in."

Oh really? Well I can draw my students in without gimmicks, and hold their interest WITHOUT bribing them with candy. Where's MY fucking award? This kind of sideshow approach to classroom teaching really bugs me, and giving an award to honor goofy gee-whizzery only encourages more teachers to devote time to explosions and puppet shows rather than really thinking about how to communicate more effectively.

Ok. My peeve is petted. Carry on...

in lieu of content...

... I instead present, what I spend the last train ride working on... a list of my course descriptions for 2007/2008


THE FOUNDATIONS OF PHYSICS

This course is intended as an introduction to the basic concepts of physics - motion, forces, and energy. During the first half of the semester we will study the birth of physics as a truly scientific endeavor, through the works of Galileo Galilei and Sir Isaac Newton. Then in the second half of the semester, we will study heat and the motions of molecules. We will also explore the ideas of entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the most far-reaching and profound yet puzzling laws in all of physics. The course will combine a problem-solving approach to physics with a historical one, and texts will include primary source works such as Galileo's "Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences", Newton's "Principia Mathematica", and others.


SPACE, TIME, AND EINSTEIN

Albert Einstein is perhaps the most recognizable figure in the history of science, and yet his Theory of Relativity remains a mystery to most people even today, more than 100 years after its publication. In this class we will examine the both the origin of Einstein's theory and its role in shaping the past century of modern physics. Topics will include the universality of the speed of light, the mathematics of the Lorentz transformations, the curvature of space-time, the physics of black holes, and the possibility of time travel. We will also discuss the life of Albert Einstein and his status as a cultural icon and the embodiment of our image of scientific "genius". (NOTE: This is a 3000 level course that requires at least one prior course in physics or mathematics.)



THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

This course will investigate the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, the science of the very small, where the certainty and predictability of the world-at-large dissolves into uncertainty, randomness, and probabilities. The course will explore the early history of quantum ideas (from the likes of Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Heisenberg) as well as the modern so-called "Standard Model" of fundamental particles and their interactions. We will also examine the ideas of string theory, multiple dimensions, and the ongoing quest for an ultimate "Theory of Everything." (NOTE: Not open to students who have taken the "Contemporary Physics" course in Spring 2007)



INTRODUCTION TO ASTRONOMY

In this online course, we will explore both the foundations and the cutting edge of modern astronomy. Topics will include planetary science, stellar evolution, Big Bang cosmology, and the recent discoveries of the existence of both "dark matter" and "dark energy". We will also devote considerable time to discussing the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe. The course format will combine lecture podcasts, streaming video documentaries, software simulations, and online discussion forums.



THE SCIENCE OF MUSIC AND SOUND

If a tree falls in an empty forest, does it make a sound? Your answer to this age-old question depends on your definition of the word "sound". Is sound something that happens in the air? Something that happens in your ear? Or something that happens in your mind? This course will explore all these aspects of auditory phenomena - the physical vibrations and waves that underlie the performance of musical instruments, the biology of the ear and hearing, the cognitive aspects of music perception, and the psychological and emotional impact of music . Other topics may include electronic music synthesis, concert hall acoustics, and the origin and evolutionary roots of musical expression. (This course will be co-taught by instructors from the science faculty and the music faculty.)


(PS - I just found out I have to change the last one, because there is a rule that we're not allowed to have questions in our course descriptions. How delightfully arbitrary!)

the new features keep on coming...

Dave's Weekly Improv #2 is up in the sidebar. I realized that it was silly to host audiofiles on my home site when I could post videos to YouTube!!

future plans and ass-kissing...

So today within the span of 15 minutes I agreed to transform my Astronomy course from a standard classroom offering into a new online extravaganza and multimedia circus (Fall 07) and to develop and team-teach a brand new "Science and Religion" course with the chair of the Religious Studies department (Spring 08, tentative).

Could this be related to yesterday's post about worrying for my contract review? Is Dave just trying to suck up to the administration's every whim?

Pretty much, yeah.

I have always wanted to teach a course on Science and Religion, though. And the guy I'd be co-teaching with is a great guy. Smart guy. Popular teacher. I think that with the two of us in on this class, it could quite possibly be the most ass-kickingist class in the entire University curriculum.

As for delivering Astronomy as an online course, it's kind of a no-brainer. I have a digital audio recording of nearly every lecture I've given this semester. I'll take the 15 best ones, have the students listen to one a week, assign some books for them to journal and summarize, make them watch Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" on Google Video (Shh! Don't tell the copyright lawyers!!) host a few discussion forums about interesting topics, give them some assignments where they have to use the Starry Night software... it'll be no work at all for me to put together. And I get super tech-genius-innovator brownie points!

meetings...

Met with various advisees today. Signed forms, handed out PINS. Fun fun. I was supposed to have a committee meeting tonight also, but that was cancelled for some reason. Which means I get to go home and watch the kids while the wife goes to the PTO meeting at school, then out to get drunk with the PTO Moms. (Only slightly joking.) HAd my meeting not been cancelled, we would have had to get a babysitter. We had an IM snippy-fight about this issue with meetings the other day. She said something like "Well, you know, if taking care of household things is my "job" then going to PTO meetings is part of that job. We need to talk about who's meetings get precedence." To which I replied, "Well. Ok... let's see... Who's meetings could a failure to attend result in them getting fired?" Case closed.

Speaking of getting fired, at some point I should blog about my contract. It's complicated and gives me a headache, though. Perhaps a timeline would help.

2001: Dave gets hired on a 1-year visiting contract with option for renewal.
2002: Dave's contract gets converted to a 3 year renewable contract.
2004: Dave quits before his 3 year contract is up. ("the Lost Year")
2005: Dave gets re-hired. The terms of the hire indicate that this will be considered Dave's SECOND 3-year contract, as if "The Lost Year" had never occurred. This would mean the option of a 5-year renewal in 2008, with sabbatical eligibility.
2006: The administration changes the contract structure. There is now an option for tenure. Whether you choose to go for tenure or not, the 5-year appointment review is now "up-or-out". Meaning if you do not pass the review, you are basically fired. (There is a 1-year "dead-man-walking" grade period.)

So. I get a contract renewal letter that sets the date for my review, which I didn't realize at the time was up-or-out. When I learn that the 5-year review IS in fact up-or-out, I read my letter more carefully only to find that they letter does NOT mention the agreement of considering my first 3 year review, and is treating the 2008 review as for another 3-year appointment, not a 5-year.

Are you still with me?

I contact the Assistant Provost, and she tells me I have a decision to make. I can either go for a 3-year renewal or a 5-year renewal, but they have decided that it's probably a really bad idea for people to go up for a 5-year up-or-out review if they have never been reviewed before. (I was never reviewed... only RE-HIRED!) Combine this with the fact that the whole idea of what is-or-is-not an acceptable level scholarship is being rethought, and you have one big mess that needs to be sorted out. It feels a bit like my career hinges on a big roulette spin.

Ok. I don't want to think about it anymore.

i thought new orleans was a "chocolate city"...

The other thing we did on Friday besides the Festive Showgirl Kickaplaooza was to attend the New York Chocolate Show. If you think there is no limit to the amount of free gourmet dark chocolate you could eat, think again. The samples are so tiny! There are so many flavors! Why thank you, don't mind if I do! After about the 30th booth you feel like you have a fucking 85% cacao BRICK in your stomach.

We won't even get into what it did to the children.

here's some advice for you... 'take your PIN and go away'...

Registration starts this week kiddies, and you know what that means... three days booked solid with "advising" appointments. It's kind of a misnomer, since very few of my advisees ever need "advice". Most of them are freshman and sophomores who haven't picked a major yet. I look at their sheets (those of them who have filled them out... usually about half) and make sure they aren't registering for a schedule of 21 credits of intensive writing classes, I give them their registration PIN and send them on their way. Only about 3 or 4 of them will have questions or issues I can deal with... which usually involves knowing the name of the person to send them to talk to instead of me.

Anyway, the real issue is what it does to MY schedule, which is to cuff me to my desk for three days straight. It makes it hard to get any work done. And it falls during a particularly bad week this year... I have 4 meetings in 3 days. My iCal schedule is hemorrhaging. (Red = meeting)

At least I got the Astro midterms graded this weekend. Finally. With a few exceptions, the grades were ok. I instituted a fairly generous curve, though. There were 210 points on the exam. The highest grade missed 14 points, the lowest 125. (!!) This would have given a range of something like 40% - 96%. But instead of calculating the percentage score by using (210 - L)/210 (where "L" is the number of points you lost)... I used (210 - .8L)/200... which gave a range more like 55% - 98%. It bumped a few clear B papers up to A-, so I'm not totally satisfied with the equation, but I think it gives a pretty good distribution of A's, B's, and C's.

I'm finding it pretty hard to get excited about this astronomy class lately. It's a standard college astro progression... sky, planets, stars, galaxies, big bang... which is ok stuff, but there is no compelling organizational "theme", so the whole class just seems to wander from one topic to the next. I'm considering switching it the year after next to a "Life in the Universe" class. I could still talk about a lot of the same stuff, just with a different focus. For example, instead of just cataloguing galaxy types, I could talk about galactic structure as it pertains to the "zone of habitability" for life-friendly planetary systems. And I could bring the bio prof and the chem prof in to give guest lectures. And I got a really nice free copy of an "Astrobiology" textbook from Addison Wesley a few weeks ago that would make a great text. And we could watch UFO documentaries and mock them. I wonder if you can get the old "In Search Of..." series on DVD?

A few of my other courses are changing for the better too. I think I mentioned that I'm splitting my Modern Physics course (which covers a little relativity and a little QM) into two NEW courses... an introductory "QM for Poets" class and an upper-level Einstein class. This change happens next fall, and I'm really looking forward to it. It will give me a chance to do some more lab stuff in the QM class, and to get deeper into the math in the Einstein.

One place where I'm NOT happy about the situation is my new History and Philosophy of Science class. That course has been going SO well this year, that I was looking forward to it becoming a staple in our department for science majors. I designed the course to fill a clear hole in the curriculum, since the philosophy department had never really offered a philosophy of science course appropriate to our students. Well, guess what? Yeah. Now that I have this amazing course, the Philosophy Department has put forward their OWN philosophy of science course, that covers about 50% of the same material. So now I have to make nice and email the prof and the dept chair and ask to see a copy of the syllabus so we can compare notes and make sure we aren't covering material that is too similar, blah, blah, blah. It probably means that next time I teach it I will have to do less philosopy and more history, which is fine I guess. (I have a great history of science textbook, and it will give me an excuse to finally learn about "phlogiston" theory.) It just angers me that it may have been done kind of on purpose. Oh well. At least the guy who teaches it is a part timer, so I can pull rank a little.

Lastly, the head of the architecture department (which is in another division of the university) wants to sit down with my department chair and I and talk about the physics requirement for architecture majors. It turns out the architecture students have to take physics (many grad schools require it for admission) so the department has been sending students to our sister-instituion to take a physics class THERE, and the class they have been taking is one of these "Light and Color" classes for non-scientists that has NOTHING to do with the kinds of things an architect should really probably know about physics. So the question(s) will be, is MY introductory physics class a better fit, can I make changes to the class to make it an EVEN BETTER fit... and do I want it clogged up with architecture majors every semester? (A: Yes, I'd rather not, and HELL NO!)

Ok. That's enough going on-and-on about my classes. I think some nap-time is in order before the train rolls in.

"The Prestige"...

Pretty awesomely good creepy headfuck of a movie. As if David Bowie playing Nicola Tesla wasn't reason enough to go see it... it gets the Dr. Dave Seal of Approval.

cough, cough...

I have a leeeeeetle sore throat... just a spot... just on one side... just a little sore. That's how it always starts.

Gee, I hope I don't come down with the flu so that I'm too sick tomorrow to go with the family to the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes Slutty-Yet-Wholesome High-Kicking "What Do Showgirls Have To Do With Christmas Again" CHRISTMAS SPECTACULAR!!

Because nothing teaches your kid the meaning of Christmas like two dozen 5'11" blondes in naughty-Santa's-helper outfits.

Ho-ho-ho!

(PS> This marks the first Dr. Dave Grinch/Humbug post of the Xmas season! Deck the halls, motherfuckers!)

fucking hell, people...

This train sounds like a god damned Chuck E. Cheese's... there are TWO people playing video games (one PSP, one cellphone) out loud with no fucking headphones, and another guy listening to music on his laptop so loud that he might was well NOT be using headphones. It's 8:00 in the morning, assholes... keep it the fuck down.

Also... "boink! boink! boink!" What the fuck are you playing? Q-bert??

paperwork...

I've put aside my exam grading once again (go ahead kids, give me bad evaluations because of it, I dare you!) to focus on a piece of Administrivia that needs to get done today. When I came back to this job, I took over the maintenance of the Student Handbook for science majors. Because before that, there really WAS no Student Handbook for science majors. What there was instead was a list of about a dozen documents... course lists, graduation check-off sheets, senior project guidelines... each with who-knows-how-many different versions, and each located on a different hard drive/web page/email/stack of papers on somebody's desk. It was a mess. So two years ago I gathered up every pertinent file and organized them into a single document with one page style and the same damned font and an honest-to-goodness table of contents. This file stays on MY hard drive, it has a version numbering system, and if anybody wants to make changes to it, they submit them to me on paper. The only electronic version that gets distributed is a non-editable .pdf file. My master version is an Apple Pages file which means that it looks gorgeous, and that nobody else can edit it even if they try, cuz I'm the only guy with this program. Sounds like a good setup, right?

Huge mistake on my part.

Because this means every semester, I have to make a whole bunch of changes and compare 3 paper versions of the thing to the electronic version and make sure the changes all make sense, and certain people in the department who were used to being in charge of these documents and changing them whenever they wanted, loooooooove to make changes and tinker with stuff and add stuff that really doesn't need to be added, and I think this person just really wants control of these documents back and is going to keep making their changes more and more complicated until I give up and say, "OK! HERE'S THE FILE!! YOU DO IT!"

Anyway. That's what I'm doing this morning. Or SHOULD be, rather.

dave's election wrap up...

1) Thank god for the House. Even if the Senate doesn't come around when the counting is done, at least we'll have something that looks like an actual government for the next two years, instead of the current Post-Palpatine Imperial Senate sham legislature.

2) I would really love to see a national election go by without hearing the words "too close to call". When the decision between Democrat and Republican comes down with the same statistical properties as a coin toss, it indicates to me that there is something fundamentally wrong. Ok, if it happens now and then, fine... laws of probability and all. But when it happens ALL THE TIME, it suggests that people are essentially just picking one side or the other completely at random. That doesn't seem right.

3) The fucking Green Party needs to pack up and go home and stop it. Now. Seriously. Stop sucking off 1% of the vote from the Democrats just so you can make your whackjob "point" that the Democrats are too conservative. It's not about making a point anymore. The vote is split too evenly to allow your making a point to hand senate races and electoral college votes to the Republicans. Suck it up and vote for the LESSER of two evils, just like the fucking rest of us. If Webb loses in Virginia, and that seat makes the difference between Democratic Senate and Republican Senate, you assholes have fucked us over yet again. Stop it.

4) I'm happy to see my home state of Maryland move back to a Democratic governor. I don't know what the hell happened while I was gone... MD used to be as reliably Democratic as anywhere. Keep it up Maryland. Don't make me come down there.

5) I hadn't really made much of the fact that the majority of Governor's races went Democratic as well, until somebody on the radio this morning brought up the fact that having a Governor act as a spokesperson for candidates can really help in the Presidential election, and this is especially important in close states like Ohio, which went with the Democratic candidate for Governor last night. So... if this fact is true and not just anecdotal... yay for that.

6) I'm trying to figure out where I can go to watch Bush's press conference at 1:00. I'm not sure why I feel the need to watch it. Just to make sure he doesn't declare the election invalid, dissolve the congress, and declare martial law, I guess.


(AFTERNOON PS> Rumsfeld? Really? Well, THAT'S about a week too late, dumbass!)

grading mechanics...

Today I was discussing the advantages and disadvantages of the 12345, 12345, 12345 method of grading versus the 11111... 22222... 33333 method. In other words, when faced with a big stack of exams, do you grade each exam through start to finish, one at a time, or do you grade everyone's page one, then everyone's page two... etc? I think the advantages of each method are fairly clear. The 11111... 22222... method leads to greater consistency. You are more likely to give the same grade to questions that are similarly fucked-up, because you see all the # 3's right in a row, and are more likely to remember the mistakes made by different students on the same problem and treat them accordingly.

I do not do this.

I grade everyone's exam start to finish, because I need to see that pile of FINISHED papers growing and growing over time. It's about accomplishment! And also, I think it gives me a clearer picture of how each student is doing on the exam overall. Most of my classes are somewhat small, also... and I think that makes a difference. I can feel my consistency drifting slightly from the beginning of the stack to the end, but I don't think it ever amounts to any sort of major unfairness.

But today I decided to go through the astro exams with the 11111... 22222... method. Hate it! And I find it impossible to resist the temptation to peek onto the next page of everybody's exam and start making marks there. Then I finish the whole stack and instead of being done, it's like... "Ok, well.. I have to do that FIVE MORE TIMES!!" I think I'll be returning to my old method.

Anyway. Just thinking about that today. There are no conclusions to be drawn.

Riding the train home. Tired, tired, tired. Gotta vote. Then home. Feed/bathe kids. Put to bed. Have paperwork to do. Not much TV to watch except for election returns. Should go to bed at a decent hour. Or else...? Tired, tired, tired again tomorrow.

dave rocks the vote...

Last night I finally got around to visiting the web page of my county board of elections to figure out where my polling place is. (Last year there were nothing but local races up, and I didn't feel the need as a new resident to bother with them.) I couldn't find the hours, though. I guess I'll just stop by on the way home from work.

I also went online to find the polling place of a lazy red-state friend who was thinking about not voting. I figure that is like an extra vote for me. And it makes more sense for me to get that extra vote in a red state, since here in NY, Hillary is up like 72% to 15%. I don't think the Dems in NY really need my help.

Anyway, despite my "no-hopes-up" stance, I fully expect to be glued to some kind of media outlet tonight with a printed-out Senate map checking off seats.

yo' momma isn't as tough as a major clot...

Heart Medicine Commercial: ...No matter how tough you are, you are no match for a major clot.
Dave, paying half-attention: [Pause] Um. Did that pharmaceutical commercial just trash-talk me??

"this one goes to 400 Mb/sec..."

I saw an ad on dealmac.com the other day for a sale price on this electric guitar with a built in USB port so you can plug it in to your computer directly for digital recording purposes.

I am sorry, but there is something so UN-rock-and-roll about a guitar with a fucking USB port... I can't even get my head around it.

And yet... for $99...

I think Computer-Geek-Dave and Rock-and-Roll-Dave are going to have to fight this one out. We'll get back to you.

belated halloween book review...

Apropos to the topic, I finished "The Historian" by Elizabeth Kostova on Halloween night. A few days earlier, when the wife noticed I was about 50 pages from the end, she said "Oh, are you finally almost finished with that?" to which I replied, "Yes, I'm getting close to the end and THERE BETTER BE A FUCKING PAYOFF AFTER ALL THIS!!!"

Well, there is a payoff, but I'm still not 100% sure it was worth the convoluted 500 page train ride through Eastern Europe to get there. I'm not sure I can recommend it unless you really, really like detailed descriptions of Byzantine churches and complicated nesting narrative structures.

I sat in the hotel room reading the letter that my father wrote. "My dear daughter. I can continue now with the story that my friend and mentor Professor Rossi related to me on that day. He took me aside in his office and told me - 'Once I was in Romania and I met a women who knew of this legend. I asked her to tell me everything she knew. She showed me a letter. The letter read. "I, Brother Bartholomew, have discovered a rare document from 11th century Hungary that makes reference to the pilgrimage of monks from Constantinople to Wallachia. The document begins... 'In the year...'"'"'"

I'm sorry? What year? Who is talking? What country are we in? What century is it?

Anyway. There are vampires. So, it's kinda like the DaVinci Code meets Anne Rice, but more realistic. And less gay.

(I should post that review to Amazon.)

burnt...

...out. I could not feel less like working or writing or blogging or... pretty much anything right now. We had a yet another science department meeting tonight that I kinda blew off without telling anyone. The official story will be something like "Meeting? Monday? There was? Oops!", but the truth is, I just honestly can't deal with it today. The weekend was too long and too draining. Before I can face working again, especially grading, I first have to re-acquire my will to live. I managed to stumble my was through class today, and do a minimum amount of paperwork for this thing that needs to be done by Wednesday. That's it. I'm done.

Tomorrow is election day, and I feel like I should blog SOMETHING about that, but I'll probably wait until it's OVER. I am refusing to allow myself to get any hopes up. I am being steadfastly pessimistic about the prospects of a Democratic congress, because I don't want to be disappointed/depressed on Wednesday morning when the numbers don't *quite* add up.

I just don't have it in me to get all political lately. When the news came out about Saddam Hussein being sentenced to death, all I could manage was a general sigh of dissatisfaction. What does one more dead person really gain us over there, really? It's not even that I'm opposed to the death penalty in any kind of absolute sense (although I personally have no confidence in the ability of our country's justice system to apply it fairly) I just get no sense that after it is done that anything will have changed. All the same people will still hate all the some other people. It just seems like a waste of rope in the end. I get the idea that the people on the news want us to "feel" something about it, though.

Nope.

Anyway. It's Monday. Maybe the teevee will cheer me up.

weekend wrap-up...

No time to blog all weekend, what with the crazy schedule of events and the molasses-slow hotel internet connection. No time to blog NOW, really, what with the week's worth of neglected grading and unthoughtabout classes, but... that sort of thing seldom stops me.

The presentation was fine - sparsely attended but well-received. One guy told me it was the best talk he'd seen during the whole conference. Somebody told me something similar at the last conference as well. I'm not in it for the compliments, of course, but it's nice to hear.

After my talk I went back to the hotel to change, grabbed a tea and a brownie at Starbucks and then walked back to Harborplace to have lunch with the wife and kids at the Cheesecake Factory (a two-hour + order with the wait beforehand) ate seriously too fucking much, then drove up to the wife's cousin's (for more food) that evening. Sunday we met for brunch at a greasy diner with my Dad and my Grandmom and I ordered the french toast + eggs + bacon + sausage + heart disease special. I dread getting on the scale this week.

The kids were slightly sick and sleep deprived and generally unpleasant a lot of the time, but it didn't really peak until we got home last night. I heated up some leftover pizza for them, and called them down for dinner, and the Boy walked into the kitchen, picked up his plate, and said "I didn't even WANT pizza". Then he dumped his slice straight into the trash can. Then I beat him unconscious. It's been much quieter since then.

The whole NaNonFicMo idea has been back-burnered, naturally, with all that's been going on. I still want to write every day this month, but instead of a single project, I'm thinking I should spread things around a little. I'm going to pull up some half-written manuscripts and get those polished up and ready to send in. The more we work on these "guidelines for scholarship", the more it looks like things at the college are going to become significantly more publish-or-perishy over the next 5 years or so. And I'd REALLY rather not perish at this point in my career. So it's time to step up from this "two conference talks a year" plan and get a few short articles published. Somewhere around here I have a list of "crappy little journals where I could probably easily get a paper in". Maybe I'll start there.

presentation...

It's a little before 9:00 AM, my talk is at 9:30. I've gone over the Keynote presentation one final time... everything seems to be in order, and I think I can drag out what I have to say to fill the whole hour. I peeked at my room... it's SMALL, but holds ~70 chairs. I got on the shuttle bus this morning and the first person I talked to was planning on attending my talk. This bodes well for attendance. I feel like I'm wasting time if I go all the way to a conference and get less than 50 attendees.

Back in the hotel room, the daughter with pneumonia is doing much better, but the boy started getting fevery last night. My wife had planned on taking them to the "Port Discovery" children's museum today while I do the conference. We'll see. She may just wind up trapped in the hotel room with them, which is only fair, since I was trapped in the hotel room with them yesterday ("I'm boooooooooooored") while my wife attended a day of "Stitches East" some kind of knitting expo that I don't even pretend to understand. It's at the same conference center as my NSTA convention, though, so it's kind of fun to sit around the public areas and play "Science Nerd or Knitting Nerd?".

We had dinner with my Mom last night at one of those Japanese steakhouse places. It was fun to watch the kids watch the chef. Nothing impresses a 3-year-old like an onion-volcano. Tonight we are visiting my wife's cousins who live way "upstate" (I know Maryland isn't really big enough to have an "upstate" but they live about as far away as you can live and still be in Maryland) and tomorrow we are having brunch with my Dad and my Grandmom. Two conferences and three family visits in three days with 2 sick kids. Welcome to my life.

boys are weird...

At this very moment, the Boy is in the bathtub singing a song of his own devising which combines the melody of the My Little Pony theme song with the repeated lyrical motif - "Boba Fett".

"Bo-Boba Fett Fett,
Bo-Boba Fett Fett,
Boba, Bobaaaaa - Boba Fett.

Boba F' Fett Fett,
Boba F' Fett Fett,
Boba, Boba, Boba Boba, Boba Fe-e-ett..."

I'm not even going to ask.

all that was missing was the lab coat...

I did a demonstration in physics class today! You should have seen it... there were beakers and everything... it was like... I dunno... like a fucking science class or something!

In other news, I checked the NaNo page, and it IS only a 1000 words a day. I don't know why I thought it was more. Not sure how well I'll be able to focus on writing for the next few days, what with the looming conference presentation and all. Oh, also... my daughter has pneumonia. How fucked up is that? She's had a fever on and off for 3 days, and my wife took her to the doctor today. They aren't too worried, they put her on high-dose Zithromax for 5 days. Hopefully she'll start to get better this weekend. We have all kinds of crap planned in Baltimore. Dragging a wheezing feverish child around with us will likely make us feel like bad parents.

Anyway... just pounded down a half a grande tea, dozed off for 20 min, then finished the other half. So... zing! Off to work on the presentation.

NaNonFicMo...

I don't even really know what the word-count goals are for the real NaNoWriMo. My guess is that it's pretty high. I'm going to commit myself to the entirely reachable goal of 1000 words a day. More would be good, but if I could have 60 pages or so worth of my "textbook" project in the bag over the next month or so, that would make me very happy. So far since yesterday I've written 1200.

I will say that the train ride goes insanely quickly when you write non-stop for the whole two hours. I also had to compose a quick letter to the provost about a mistake in my appointment review letter. This is the kind of administrative blah-di-blah that I really can't deal with. The very fact that I read the letter 3 or 4 times in September without noticing the mistake is testament to the fact that contracty-legalese and I just don't get along.

Anyway. Now it's time to work on Saturday's powerpoint for the conference. I'm not quite as ready for that as I probably should be!

new feature... lecture snippets...

Not sure how often I'll do this, but I figure it's so rare that Dr. Dave goes for the laugh in class, I figured I'd post it just for fun.

(~4 Mb quicktime .wav)

my life in 7 panels...

I'm usually not one of those link-posty bloggers, but this cartoon so captures my life that I have to share.