My agenda for the Great Isolation

OK, world, buckling down. It’s time to get a whole lot of course development done in a few days. This is supposed to be my vacation, why am I looking at a scary pile of work?

  1. I have to spell out the new course routine for my students. What that is going to be is:
    • New course video at the start of each week. This will be delivered as both video and as a text script for bandwidth-limited students. The goal is to clearly spell out the concept they must understand that week, and give pointers to textbook material that covers the subject. These will be short, 15-20 minutes.

    • The syllabus is going out the window. There will be less testing, and more regular assignments. These assignments will also be given at the start of the week, and will be due a week later — I’m going to try to accommodate the new demands on our students’ time, so we all have to be flexible.

    • Exams will all be open book, open notes, open internet essay exams. This could be wonderful, or it could be painful. We’ll see.

    • Our regularly scheduled class meeting times will now be used as optional office hours via Zoom. I’ll just be hanging out in front of a camera with a whiteboard.

    • You can’t do Zoom at home? Fine, I’ll be giving out my email (they’ve already got that) and my cell phone number. I’ll be accessible, I hope they are.

  2. My first video and text page will be #1, above. I’ll be working on that for both my classes today.

  3. My second video and text will be a recap of the semester to date, with explicit references to the textbook and the battery of pdf files already on Canvas. With this abrupt shift in narrative style I have to at least nod in the direction of continuity. I should have that done by the end of the week.

  4. Then, over the weekend, I have to assemble the first new videos+text. In my introductory biology course, we’ve just begun the basic genetics section, so this will be an overview of Mendelian problem solving; in Genetics, this will be an introduction linkage and linkage mapping. (Whenever I teach these two together, this is always a problem: I have to simultaneously teach a gentle review of the basics to first year students, and a full-on mathy in-depth deep dive to the seniors. I have nightmares about mixing them up.)

  5. I still have to work around the details of the online lab — the announcement of new restrictions on using the facilities on campus is making that a little tricky. I have homozygous flies growing in an incubator right now. The plan is next week to set up the parental reciprocal cross, photographing the phenotypes and putting those online. A little more than a week later, I’ll photograph representative F1 flies — the two crosses should produce different results, which will be presented without explanation — and set up the F1 cross. Maybe two weeks after that, I should have swarms of F2 flies, which I alone will have to sit down and score, for hours and hours (usually I can just crack the whip and have a legion of undergrads do the tedious work). I’ll post the numbers of each phenotype, again with little comment, and then the students will have to get to work interpreting the data and writing up a lab report describing what I did and what it means. They should have the background to understand what’s going on, since I described sex linkage last week and will be giving them all the logic of linkage next week, so it’s going to be more like a science puzzle they have to put together.

  6. I also have to unwind, so I’m also planning a little social hullabaloo on Wednesday evening with friends on YouTube. Maybe I’ll watch something on Netflix later, or read a book. I was going to use this week to get a draft of a paper together, but that’s another thing that’s going to be thrown out the window, to avoid burnout. Maybe next week, when I’ve settled into a new routine.

That’s my life for the next 6-8 weeks, at which time all the upheaval will be totally over and the sun will be shining and the birds will be singing and my wife will show up at my door and the spiders will be flourishing and the Revolution will be in full swing and we’ll all have happy normal things to do.

I throw a terrible party

I decided that the only way I could celebrate my anniversary this year was to take care of Mary’s birds, so I scattered some popcorn out in the yard, put up some fresh suet, and hung some strange log of pig fat and seeds that I got at the store. They were not fooled. Mary’s not here, so they knew better than to come around to some crotchety old man’s idea of a party. It was a flop. All very high school, to be rejected.

I stood around outside for a while, and finally some bird came by, spurned all the new stuff I’d put up, and just went for the old suet Mary hung up before she left. I guess it tasted better.

There weren’t even any spiders to cheer me up. It’s still too cold, and we had some freezing drizzle this morning. There’ll be no springtime until my beloved returns.

Let’s try that again

Yesterday, I tried to have a remote conversation with some smart people. There were problems.

The good news: Zoom performed smoothly and well. We could hear and see everyone, we had a pleasant discussion, and everything was saved nicely locally. That’s mainly what I need for working with students.

The bad news: The parallel display in a live YouTube stream did not come off at all well. The first sign of trouble was that YouTube ignored all my prior planning and set up, and at the last minute spawned a new video stream. I don’t know what happened there at all. Then this new stream showed everyone, but only included my audio. It was a total mess for viewers at home.

When it was all over, I just killed the planned live stream, deleted the recording with only my voice, and re-uploaded the video. Here it is:

I’m going to experiment today with some private videos to iron out the kinks, and then on Wednesday evening I’ll try again with a casual conversation with some wicked SJWs and Skepticon weirdos.

Forty years ago today

Today is our 40th wedding anniversary! Sadly, because of an accursed virus, we have to spend it 800 miles apart. Our relationship is strong, though, so we’ll abide.

I did flip through our old photos, though. Here’s one with my parents and her parents on our wedding day.

To grumble a bit…we’ve got all these ancient photos that I would nowadays immediately throw out. We just had a relative with a cheap kodak point-and-shoot wander about and snap pictures, and it shows — I take sharper, brighter photos of spiders than we’ve got of the early days of our marriage. Oh, well, it’s the life that matters, these pieces of paper will just end up in a landfill in a decade or two.

Now I just have to get her back home, but even that can wait. Better that she avoids the risk and stays healthy, and it’s also important that she not spread a virus on an 800 mile transit (we have no idea whether either of us have been infected, but it’s wisest to pretend we are. We don’t need to kill immunocompromised or elderly people so we can share a cupcake and a glass of ginger ale.)

What are you doing to keep yourself sane while “socially distanced”?

I’m lucky: I have a lab full of healthy, non-infectious spiders with no other people around, so I’m going to go entertain myself by feeding them flies for a while.

I’m also unlucky: my wife flew off to Colorado before all the alerts started going up, and now we’ve decided that she’ll just have to stay there for maybe another month. Or more. Until the risks are lower. At least she has a grandbaby to provide entertainment, which is almost as much fun as a room full of spiders. It does mean my house is empty except for me and the evil cat, and that I have to do all the dishes and clean out the litter box.

I might be a little bit stir-crazy by the time Mary finally gets home.

Bring out your dead!

Reading the news from Italy is depressing. It might be us a month from now.

Now I find myself confined in a place where time is suspended. All the shops are closed, except for groceries and pharmacies. All the bars and restaurants are shuttered. Every tiny sign of life has disappeared. The streets are totally empty; it is forbidden even to take a walk unless you carry a document that explains to authorities why you have left your house. The lockdown that began here in Lombardy now extends to the entire country.

For many Italians, the normal warnings about this virus were simply not enough to change behavior. Denial comes too easily, perhaps. It was more convenient to blame some foreign germ-spreader, or pretend that the news was unreal. Then came a reality check: Last Sunday, Pope Francis gave a benediction not from his normal window at the Vatican but via video, in part to avoid the crowd on St. Peter’s Square but also to send a message. That was the first strong sign to snap out of it.

In contrast, here’s Devin Nunes (and by proxy, the entire goddamned Republican party). The concern isn’t about keeping people healthy and alive, it’s about keeping the money flowing in the economy.

Hey, Devin: if you care so much about the “working people and their wages and tips”, why isn’t your party working to guarantee a living wage? Instead, you demand that they get out, sick or not, and service the people who are still going out to restaurants…where, if the workers are not infected, they will be by all the selfish people carrying the disease who are out there transmitting it.

Can we please not get to the point other countries are reaching, where the dead are kept with the living because no one wants to deal with the bodies?

When his sister died after contracting the novel coronavirus, Luca Franzese thought that things couldn’t get much worse.

Then, for more than 36 hours, the Italian actor and mixed martial arts trainer was trapped at home with Teresa Franzese’s decaying body, unable to find a funeral home that would bury her.

“I have my sister in bed, dead, I don’t know what to do,” Franzese said in a Facebook video over the weekend, pleading for help. “I cannot give her the honor she deserves because the institutions have abandoned me. I contacted everyone, but nobody was able to give me an answer.”

Quick, everyone, get to the Wal-Mart before all the body bags are off the shelves!

A help-me-out hangout on the pandemic experience

As part of the response to moving our course content online, my university provides all the faculty a licensed copy of Zoom, which I’ve used as a client before, but have never hosted a meeting myself. I’m throwing myself into it this weekend, ironing out my awkwardness by setting up a conversation, to be held at 3pm tomorrow, 15 March. Anyone want to join in? Email me, I’ll put you on a list and send you a link. Depending on the response, I may not be able to add everyone, so tell me a few words about what you’d want to talk about. You don’t need to have licensed Zoom to be able to use it.

The subject: what we’re doing to cope with the pandemic. Fellow educators are welcome, but this is affecting everyone, so everyone has a place in the discussion. Let’s not make it a piss-and-moan session, but talk about the positive actions you are taking.

This conversation will also be streamed to YouTube, I think, if I’ve got everything figured out. Student discussions will be private in the future. You’ll be helping me to master all the details of the technology! Which also means I may fumble stuff up and the beginning might be glitchy. It’ll be fun!

The Cutty Sark has fallen on hard times

In that post about building models as a kid, I mentioned how my old models were left behind at my grandparents’ house, and later demolished (with my permission!) by younger family members. I forgot, though, that there was one rescue, and it came home with me. My grandparents asked me to build a decorative model sailing ship for their mantel, and they bought me a kit.

I worked hard on it, since it was to be a gift for them, and it had to look good and classy. I spent months on it, and remember being a real perfectionist in getting all the shroud lines perfect and taut, staining the sails to get that perfect tone, painting every little detail. I’m proud to say that it was gloriously displayed in their living room for many years afterward, until their deaths. That was the one model my family saved from destruction and brought home for me.

It wasn’t exactly perfectly preserved.

The bowsprit was snapped off, the spars have been torn away from the masts, the rigging is sagging, it’s dusty and stained. I’m thinking, though, that it might be a pleasant project to repair over spring break…a little superglue, some delicate forceps work, I could maybe get the major stuff back in alignment and get it looking battered but presentable. I wouldn’t want it pristine, though — it has a history.

Also, when I lean in real close and sniff, I can still smell my grandfather’s cigars. They added some patina to the sails.