Yes I voted.
Then I dragged myself to the doctor and got a CT scan. Nothing is broken or bleeding; the doctor even said my brain looks good, so I’m thinking I ought to get that testimonial tattooed on my body somewhere. Even as I was sitting in the waiting room, though, I could feel my back and neck starting to freeze up into painful rigidity, so I think I’m going to be feeling this for the next several days.
But not right now. I got a shot of the good drugs, I might just pass out for a while.
Walking into work today on the hellish triple-damned sloping path from my house to the university, which is always coated with a layer of ice, I slipped cartoonishly. Both feet shot out from under me and I fell straight backwards, thumping hard onto the ground, uniformly distributing the pain to my elbows, back, and head. I was wearing my backpack with my laptop and iPad inside, and honestly, my first concern was that I’d just destroyed all of my primary computing power. Fortunately, I was using my Brenthaven™ laptop bag, which was robust and well padded, and everything inside survived just fine. (Contact me, Brenthaven, if you want a testimonial).
The important stuff survived, but my brain is a bit rattled, my left forearm is numb, and my neck and shoulders are badly wrecked to the point where it hurts to turn my head. That’s a bad sign. I’m going to have to make a doctor’s appointment somewhere in this really busy teaching Tuesday.
Man, that stretch of sidewalk is my bane every winter. It’s a slight slope that gets meltwater running over it at the slightest thaw, but not steep enough that the water runs off — it just sits there and freezes treacherously. There’s no way to avoid it, either, because the university is in a shallow depression lower than my house. It would probably be safer to drive the 200 feet than to walk it.
I can tell this is just the beginning, it’s going to hurt much worse later.
That was sudden. Chris Matthews abruptly announced his retirement, and signed off from MSNBC. And nothing of value was lost.
There sure have been a lot of endings lately.
The American Physical Society has abruptly cancelled their March meeting…the day before it was to begin.
Due to rapidly escalating health concerns relating to the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), the 2020 APS March Meeting in Denver, CO, has been canceled. Please do not travel to Denver to attend the March Meeting. More information will follow shortly. #apsmarch
— APS Physics Meetings (@APSMeetings) March 1, 2020
Many attendees are already in Denver, making this a rather ineffectual way to limit travel. It’s also the case that the World Health Organization is not recommending travel restrictions, so I’d be curious to know who argued for this cancellation, and why.
WHO continues to advise against the application of travel or trade restrictions to countries experiencing COIVD-19 outbreaks.
In general, evidence shows that restricting the movement of people and goods during public health emergencies is ineffective in most situations and may divert resources from other interventions. Furthermore, restrictions may interrupt needed aid and technical support, may disrupt businesses, and may have negative social and economic effects on the affected countries. However, in certain circumstances, measures that restrict the movement of people may prove temporarily useful, such as in settings with few international connections and limited response capacities.
Maybe it has something to do with that last phrase — is the US now regarded as a country with limited response capacities? I hope not.
My wife is near Denver right now, and was traveling through the Denver airport yesterday. I hope this cancellation was an unnecessary over-reaction. I’m planning some meeting travel for the end of June myself, and I could imagine cancelling if the epidemic got much worse, but I wouldn’t wait until the day before!
A Bristol newspaper is outing the jerks who plagued media announcements about Greta Thunberg with threats of violence. They pulled names and faces off their profiles and publicly posted them, with examples of their threats.
Strangely, I notice that all of them are men — who’d have thought it? — and half of them pose in their profiles with alcoholic beverages. I am particularly impressed with the hypocrisy of the guy in the top left who has festooned his profile with the words, “Be kind”.
I’d say media sources should do more of this, except that there are so many of them I’m afraid every paper in the world would be reduced to page after page of photos declaring “these are the assholes who read this paper.”
Yesterday was something of a lost day, because I had to drive to Minneapolis to stay in Minneapolis overnight, so I could drop my wife off at the airport at 4am (!) for a flight to Denver. Then I turned around and drove home. The good news: traffic is light at 4am. The bad news: freezing fog most of the way home. It’s not much fun driving through white snow with white fog with all the trees limned in white. So for a little variety I stopped by the shores of Lake Minnewaska, to add a frozen lake covered with white snow. You know, for the visual variety.
Yes, that’s a lake. You can tell by the plates of ice rising up at the edge, where the expanding surface ice buckled and fractured. There are also ice houses off in the distance, but they’re invisible thanks to the fog.
I turned around in Starbuck and got some pictures of trees, at least.
Now I’m tired. I should probably take a nap.
This demanding little girl wants her grandma. We got a call from her mother asking if Mary could come down to Colorado for a few weeks to help with the baby, because she’s (Skatje, not the baby) a grad student trying to finish her degree in a year and discovering that babies eat time like hours are fistfuls of cheerios, and of course Mary eagerly agreed. More time with the one of the two cutest kids on the planet? Yes, please. Also we remember what it was like to be gradstudenting with children, and how nice it would have been to dump them on grandparents now and then, but it was our choice to be poor and living far from our extended family.
So today I get to drive Mary to the airport and send her away for a while. It looks like we’ll be spending our 40th wedding anniversary far apart, but that’s OK, our greatest accomplishment in our life together was creating three great kids, so it’s perfectly appropriate to spend that time helping them out.
Well, except me. I get to stay at home alone and teach genetics and introductory biology and feed the cat, instead. I’m helping by proxy, I get to pretend.
I’m sitting in my classroom, proctoring an exam over lunch, and I’m hungry. Then I read that that Donald Trump was in India, and his host prepared a special lunch by an award-winning chef of vegetarian Indian food, and ol’ Tubby McDrumpf spurned it all. Didn’t take a bite. I mean, they made samosas for him…and right now I’d kill for a samosa. They made an effort to provide some American-style foods, like apple pie. Nope. I guess his idea of great cuisine involves mass produced gunk that sits under a heat lamp for a while.
It’s embarrassing. I was brought up to think it was simply good manners that if you were a guest, and you were offered food, you would taste it and you would at least try to appear as if you liked it, that it was an insult to reject your host’s offer. Yet there he goes, turning his nose up at vegetarian food.
Although I’m insulted back by this line from the Telegraph.
Mr Trump is infamous for enjoying a classically American diet, featuring cheeseburgers, Diet Coke, well-done steak and ice cream among his favourite dishes.
Trump does not consume a “classically American diet”, and while you could argue that cheeseburgers are a common item, “well-done steak” is a tasteless abomination that True Americans™ do not eat. Many of us do not object to vegetarian food, and I at least appreciate Indian food. Many of us are true polygluttons.
Hey, could one of you swing by the lecture hall with some curry right now?
Netflix is putting together a new show about academics and the chair of an English department which, to be honest, sounds like it could be about petty, trivial conflicts and excessive over-reactions after prolonged over-thinking, which could be exhausting. But then I learn that two of the people behind the show are those overpaid jerk-offs, Benioff and Weiss, who drove Game of Thrones into the ground, which gives me hope. Anyone who watched any of the featurettes at the end of each episodes knows that those two are dull, dry pontificating twits, and therefore they know the material that has to make up the content of any show about academia. Also, it means the show will feature gratuitous nudity and bloody violence, two things that tend to be lacking around university departments, but which would definitely elevate our appreciation of events. Who hasn’t dreamed of crushing the skull of the departmental chair, or silencing that bore who won’t shut up at the planning meeting with a crossbow bolt? (Note: I am currently the discipline coordinator for biology here, and I’m sure none of my colleagues have ever had such a thought.)
Right now, they’re at the casting stage, and they’ve got Sandra Oh and are trying to hook Scarlett Johansson, because she has to be in everything. I’m going to recommend when they’re scouting locations that they check out the University of Minnesota Morris. Imagine an academic dramedy that takes place in an isolated antarctic research station; we’re the closest thing to that you’re going to get, academic life enclosed in a tiny, remote bubble. We’ve already got a wild cast of extras to fill in the gaps, and all you need to do is add a CGI shapeshifting alien, and the story writes itself.
Except the ending. I have no idea how it would wrap up, but with Benioff and Weiss behind it, who cares? We’ll just kill a few faculty and go hang out at the Old #1 Bar and be done.
Aww, crap. I first learned about her in the movie Hidden Figures, which you should see if you haven’t already, where we learn that a black woman was a crucial element in doing the math that got men into space and to the moon. Now she has died after a long and distinguished career, at the age of 102.
In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Katherine Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, DC, Cape Canaveral, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission, from blast off to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Katherine Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space.
When asked to name her greatest contribution to space exploration, Katherine Johnson talks about the calculations that helped synch Project Apollo’s Lunar Lander with the moon-orbiting Command and Service Module. She also worked on the Space Shuttle and the Earth Resources Satellite, and authored or coauthored 26 research reports. She retired in 1986, after thirty-three years at Langley. “I loved going to work every single day,” she says. In 2015, at age 97, Katherine Johnson added another extraordinary achievement to her long list: President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.
