The Cult of Instant Pot

My daughter got me one of these infernal devices for Christmas, and I am becoming a devotee. Yesterday, I made split pea soup in it, tossing in 5 cups of water, two cups of split peas, a few carrots and tiny potatoes and a pinch of salt and garlic (garlic goes with everything), and zapped it in the pressure cooker for 15 minutes, and the results were perfection, the creamiest tastiest pea soup I’ve ever made. None of that overnight presoak nonsense, either.

I’m only mentioning it because I’ve been looking forward to day-old split pea soup all day long, and shortly I will be consuming it again. It was so quick and easy I’m going to have to fix it more often, like every day. If there are drool marks on this post, you know why.

OK, I might have to exercise a little more restraint than that, unless I am willing to be served divorce papers.

On second thought, maybe some humans are alien enough

This is the trailer for a house for sale in Beverly Hills. It is not safe for work.

OPUS | Red Band Trailer from Drew Fenton on Vimeo.

It’s going for $100 million. I have no plans to sell my house, but if I do, it’ll be going for a lot less than that. I am going to steal one idea from them, though, and put up a video. It’ll be shot on my iPhone, and it’s going to feature me, in a speedo, painted gold and writhing on our couch. The offers will come pouring in.

Watch the skies!

Or, how not to get a bachelor’s degree:

According to UK Police, UK statistics instructor John Cain had been working late in his third floor office in the Multidisciplinary Science Building on Rose Street on Tuesday night. About midnight, he left to get something to eat. When he returned about 1:30 a.m., he tried to unlock the door, but it was blocked by something.

“He yelled out that he was calling the police and then the door swung open and two young men ran down the hallway,” recounted UK spokesman Jay Blanton.

Shortly after police arrived, one of the students returned and confessed. Henry Lynch II, a 21-year-old junior majoring in biosystems engineering, gave police an earful, including that he’d climbed through the building’s air ducts to the ceiling above Cain’s office and dropped down into the room, then unlocked the door and let in his friend, sophomore Troy Kiphuth, 21, who was not in Cain’s class.

Lynch also told them he had already tried to steal the exam earlier that evening around 6 p.m., but couldn’t find it. And, he said, it wasn’t the first time: Earlier in the semester, he’d successfully stolen another exam from Cain’s office, but he assured officers that he had not shared the answers with other students.

Lynch apparently gained access to Cain’s office all three times by climbing through the building’s ducts, and dropping down through the ceiling. How he got into the core of the building remains under investigation.

I rather doubt that Mr Lynch will be graduating from the University of Kentucky, nor will Mr Kiphuth, who deserves to be kicked out for the stupidity of trying to help cheat on an exam in a class he isn’t taking.

I think there’s probably a way to get into my office by removing some of the ceiling tiles in the hallway and working your way through the space above (which isn’t structurally strong enough to hold your weight), and then crashing through the tiles in my office. But then they too would be foiled by my filing system and never find what they’re looking for.

Done but for all the grading

Scattered throughout this semester, I’ve been discussing my EcoDevo course, Biol 4182, Ecological Development. It’s done now, so I’m just going to make note of a few things that I’d do differently next time around.

  • Fix the squishiness. I envisioned this as more like a graduate level course — a 15 week conversation on ecological development, with a textbook that kept us centered. Assessment was largely subjective, based on students demonstrating their understanding in discussion. I had an oral exam, for instance, where we just talked one on one. I think that went well, but in the end, I’ve only got a few specific metrics to use to assign a grade, and much of it will be built around how well they engaged with the material.

    I don’t mind that, but students are a bit bewildered by the absence of hard grades throughout the term. I’ll have to incorporate more detailed assignments next time around, something where they go home with a number that they can work on improving, artificial as all that is.

  • Personally, I greatly enjoyed the student presentations, and I want to do more to have students bring their interests to the course. I might include a student poster session next time — a different medium, and if in a public place, bringing in new perspectives.

    The oral exam was also valuable in getting to know where their interests were. I think I’d schedule it earlier in the term, when I do it again.

  • No way will I ever offer this course at 8am again. It was stuff that required interaction and attentiveness, and somedays it was tough to wake everyone up. These were really smart students, too, so the fault isn’t in them, but in timing.

    Maybe I’d do it at 8am if the college provided a big pot of coffee with donuts every day for the students in compensation. Hah, right.

  • One of the most dramatic effects on student participation was making it mandatory that they ask at least one question a day. Late in the course I added that requirement, and it worked surprisingly well — I could tell they were paying attention to try and find something to pursue further. They also asked good questions, so it wasn’t just pro forma noise. I’ll do that from day one in the future.

    It would be nice if that provided one of those non-squishy metrics I need to add, but it worked too well — they all met that minimal requirement easily. Guess I’ll just have to give them all As.

  • I was bad. I got summoned to Washington DC for important grant-related meetings twice during the semester, which rather gutted two weeks out of 15. That was unavoidable, but while I managed to cover the material in my syllabus, my hope that we could go a bit further and get into the evolution and development side of the textbook was thwarted. But then I never get as deeply into the subjects of any of my courses as I’d like.

    Next time, if I have planned absences, I’ll try to bring in colleagues from ecology or environmental science to cover for me, and keep the momentum going. I was really reluctant to do that this term because…8 goddamn am. I wasn’t going to ask that of anyone.

What I really got out of the course was getting to go in twice a week, even at an ungodly hour, and getting to think about more than just basic, familiar stuff. The core courses I teach in cell biology and genetics are fine, but fairly routine — I know those subjects inside and out, and the challenge is in improving the pedagogy, not in getting exposed to new science. +1, would do again.

Also, one of the best things about small upper-level classes like this is that I can get to know the students a little better, and they reaffirm my faith in humanity because they actually are smart and thoughtful and likeable (I can say that now, I’m not sucking up, because they’ve already done the course evaluation and turned it into the office). Maybe I should just give everyone an A+, with gold stars and smiley face stickers.

Today is the last day of teaching until August for me

I ought to sit back, laugh, and drink champagne, except, unfortunately, that tomorrow the deluge of term papers and lab reports washes up to my door and inundates my office with work. Then there’s the small matter of a final exam next week.

I’m thinking I may actually be done done next Wednesday.

But I’ll still find time to see the new Guardians of the Galaxy movie tomorrow!

Speaking of place…

I grew up in Kent, Washington (so did my wife). That was long after this photo, though:

It was named for the region in England where hops were grown because, again before I was born, hops were the primary agricultural product around there. What I find fascinating, though, are the vestiges. The article names some of the early pioneers in that area — Ezra Meeker, Everett Titus — and I lived on Titus street, and the central business district was on Meeker. And that practice left a mark on the economy of the town.

The legacy of hops continues today, even though the Kent Valley is no longer farmland. When produce and dairy farming went away, existing railroad networks and flat farmland helped Kent scale up as a center of manufacturing and warehousing.

“We really built an infrastructure that even after hops left has become fertile ground for industry, for manufacturing, for warehousing,” Garfield said.

Yeah. I detested Kent when I was growing up. Warehouses. I lived through a transition, when the city was taking everything that was lovely and green and pleasant about the place, covering it with asphalt, and putting up warehouses all along the river, with the bonus of tearing down businesses to build more gas stations for the commuter population. Kent was a desert for human beings for a long, long time. I hear it has improved since then, but it couldn’t help bet get better.

I watched American Gods, and I liked it!

But then, I also liked the novel, which is not to everyone’s taste. It was refreshingly pagan, with a plethora of gods, and not much difference between a leprechaun and the king of the gods — they’re all manifestations of human belief, and since they merely reflect humanity, they tend not to be very nice. The show has an element of the surreal to it, too.

If you’ve read the book, you know that one of its featured elements is the Upper Midwest. In an interview with Neil Gaiman, the author makes that explicit.

“I couldn’t have written it without living in Wisconsin, and Minneapolis and St. Paul being the nearest big cities,” said Gaiman, chatting last week from a Los Angeles hotel where he was preparing for the world premiere of Starz’s TV adaptation of the book. “It just wouldn’t have worked.”

Gaiman, so thoughtful in responding to questions that you sometimes worry the phone line has gone dead, wasn’t referring so much to specific landmarks, such as the House on the Rock or the wintry landscape, both of which play pivotal roles in his 2001 book. He’s talking about the region’s general weirdness.

“There’s that tiny off-kilter nature in the Midwest that’s in the details,” said Gaiman, 56, who moved from England to Menomonie, Wis., in 1992. “I would enjoy stopping at a little restaurant somewhere and half the place would be selling peculiar stuff like … warrior princess dolls. That’s weird.”

As someone who has lived in the Pacific Northwest, the Desert Southwest, the East Coast, and now, Minnesota, I can confidently say that everywhere is a tiny bit off-kilter from everywhere else. The Midwest is not weirder than any other part of the country, but it does have a different flavor, and as someone who grew up in a place with mountains and evergreen trees and the ocean and temperate weather, long-term residence makes it feel like home-but-not-home, if you know what I mean. You live in it, but you’re not of it, and that small element of disconnectedness makes it uncomfortably interesting.

And now for something truly controversial

I’m not as open-minded as I thought. I was fine with everything on this chart, but my mind rebelled at “A Pop-Tart is a sandwich”.

My working definition is that a sandwich is some kind of filling wrapped in a bread so that you can hold it in your hand, which should accommodate a Pop-Tart…but it is making me question my understanding.

Persuade me, yes or no.

Almost done with genetics!

After a harrowing weekend of grading exams and lab reports, I’m kinda sorta done. All that’s left is the potential for revising lab reports, and an optional final exam (it replaces your lowest exam score; it’s more of a hedge for students who had one bad day or an unavoidable absence). Today I’m handing everything back with a summary of their tentative final grade (cue howls and gnashing and wailing), and doing a post-mortem of the last exam, which had the standard bimodal grade distribution — either students sailed through it, laughing at how easy it was, or they missed key concepts and melted down completely (cue more howls, wailing, etc.).

The results do rather mess up my plans for the last lecture on Wednesday. I was hoping to do something more advanced and give them a peek at where they can go with genetics, but instead I think I’m going to have to pick 20% of the class up off the floor and review the basics, so they can possibly pass the course with a successful surge on the final. That’s disappointing, but I have to make sure people who pass my course are at least somewhat capable on the topic.

Anyway, the current statistics: the mean on the last exam was the lowest so far this term, at 66%, or roughly a C-. Overall in the course 4 students so far, out of 31, have earned an A. A few more might join those exalted ranks by doing well on the final.

Also, more fun: today is the day for student evaluations. I try to do this after I’ve broken the news to them about their tentative final grade, which is probably a poor strategy for getting good evals but I like to think it makes for more honest ones.