We have this large classroom with stadium-style seating. And in the back of the room they built in a magic box that connects the room to the television control room. Take a few cameras up there, plug them into the magic box and then you can use the shots to make a show, record a lecture or whatever. We’re going to do that soon, perhaps for the first time. (We’ve only been in the building for a year, after all.)
So today we lugged a few cameras up to the third floor, and we carried a few armfuls of cables up there and plugged them all in to make sure it worked. And it worked, mostly. We now know what works and what we need to get the engineers to fine tune. And fine tune it, they will.
Anyway, in the back of that room next to that magic box there is a window with a nice view:
That’s the Student Building, which was recently renamed the Frances Morgan Swain Student Building. They picked a good name. Swain graduated from IU, married a man who would later become the school’s ninth president and she raised gobs of money for that building. (And even after they left for other roles at other schools, the Swains kept donating money to various IU funds and memorials.) That was originally to be the women’s building, but then a Rockefeller donation came through to make it the Student Building. All of this in a time when Swain was both an advocate for women in higher education and places for them to actually, you know, live.
When the Swains were at IU the population increased from 524 to 1,285 students. Today there are just over 49,000. He passed away in 1927 and she died in 1936. I wonder what they’d think of the place today.
The Yankee and I visited a bookstore today and I saw this:
The saying has always bothered me. I think, mostly, as a pragmatist. If I have the option to shoot for the moon or shoot for the stars, wouldn’t the latter be the more ambitious? Why do you see it as a consolation prize? I mean, sure, I could go visit the barren rock in orbit around us, or I could go see some other fusion-fission space phenomena, and maybe check out any planets moving around it.
But that’s the one part of it. And it occurred to me today what has always been off about the sentiment: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss you can use its gravity to go deeper into the solar system and we can still chat, until loss of signal, because you’re probably going to run out of battery power before you make it to another star, anyway.”
Now put that on a pencil tote and send the kids off to school with it.
We had a great dinner tonight:
I hope you did, too.
