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.