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With the sweaty palms and nervous smiles of new graduate students at the dean’s annual welcome event, the new school year is upon us.
Dean @JamesShanahan welcomes new grad students and new and returning faculty to a new year at @IUMediaSchool. #360 pic.twitter.com/HpurLod9be
— Kenny Smith (@kennysmith) August 18, 2017
For the record, I voted for an endless summer. But at least I have a 360 camera to tinker with.
We’re still working on those cameras. It turns out that preparing 150 of these things takes some time. Tomorrow they’ll be barcoded. At some point they’ll get put into The System. We’ve put them together in a room that is ordinarily an 18-computer classroom. And the finished cameras fill up all of the tabletop space in the room. Here’s a small sample:
One hundred and fifty cameras. We found that you could get into and out of one box in about eight minutes. You could get six or seven ready, then, per hour. That’s if your fingers were behaving at the time which, for me, is something easier said than done.
Saw these Black-eyed Susans at lunchtime today:
At which point we could discuss the passage of time and the second half of summer and the early hours of August and what comes next. But it is a beautiful day and the flowers are still showing off. There will be time for all of that later, it is inevitable. Enjoy the sunshine, he says to himself, knowing one day it might take.
Today I helped a few people build out some cameras. One of our classrooms had 75 brown boxes. And in each brown shipping box we found two Canon boxes. And in each of those colorful Canon boxes there were three other boxes. Those boxes contained a camera body, a lens and a microphone. And a lot of packaging.
I didn’t think to take a photo of all of the bubble wrap and cardboard and the many piles of literature. There were two manuals, a registration, a warranty and some other stuff too. This was just one pile:
It took all day and then some, unpacking, removing the tape, wrestling with, and sometimes failing to avoid cardboard cuts. Then you had to deal with each part’s individual wrapping. Then put the lens on the body, the microphone in the hot shoe, and then thread the neck strap through the body. Do all of that 150 times. It took all day. They look nice, though:
Students are going to have a lot of cool new gear this year.
Tomorrow
If you’re getting ready for the coming eclipse — You can have two minutes of darkness in the daytime, if you are lucky enough to live, predetermined by your family, work and other migratory patterns, in the path of a shadow which was predetermined by physics many many … err … moons ago — then you will enjoy this map from the Washington Post. Everyone will enjoy the trivia and the tidbits there, just as soon as you get used to thinking of the map of the U.S. from a non-Mercator perspective.
There are cool links and interesting tidbits about places big and small all over the eclipse’s path in that map. My favorite:
McCool Junction, Neb., won’t get McCold, but the air temperature during totality drops by an average of about 12 degrees Fahrenheit, according to astrophysicist Fred Espenak.
I’m not going to be in the path of the eclipse, but that’s almost enough to make me want to drive a few hours, just to experience.
And then I remember that, in high school, I worked in a place with a walk in freezer and realize I’ve more-or-less had this experience.
I remember my first two eclipse experiences, too. One was in elementary school and another in junior high. One was an annular eclipse for which we were well-positioned. The other was a total eclipse and we were well off the mark. The only details I remember were that the elementary school let us go outside after a very serious and stern lecture about not looking up. And being unimpressed by the ol’ hole-in-a-piece-of-cardboard method of eclipse viewing.
If you aren’t in a good locale for the lunar shadow making festival, scientists over at Clemson University are going to help you out. They plan to launch a balloon with cameras for streaming. So you can stare into the second brightest thing burning, your computer monitor, and see the whole demonstration of photons and regolith in action. Ain’t science grand?
It is still the summertime — three more weeks of summertime, but no one is counting — and the student television crew is on a roadtrip:
Today we're out at the @ttskillzsoccer camp in Noblesville. Make sure to look out 4 our story & interview w/ @tthomps7 in the next few days. pic.twitter.com/R5O5AbrtMs
— IUSTV Sports (@IUSTVsports) July 28, 2017
No one made them go, they aren’t in classes and they aren’t doing it for a grade. And they went an hour or so up the road and put together a video package.
Student media is cool.
I once worked with a man who (last year) retired after 61 years on the same station. I watched and admired another gentleman at the end of his career of 63 years on the air. And I’ve read columns by writers who spent their last days on memories of games or people that happened 40 years ago because they or their editors thought that was what their audience was interested in.
Even if you’re mailing in a memories column, even if you’re working part time broadcasting at the end of your career in a station where everyone calls you “Mr.” on air in deference to your time in the business, even if the new kid is printing things out for you because printers are a mystery to you … if you spend that long in the media, you’ve done something.
So I’d like to introduce you to David Perlman:
David Perlman was born in 1918 — a decade before the discovery of penicillin and the Big Bang Theory.
And, for the majority of his career, he covered scientific progress in the 20th century and beyond, writing thousands of articles about everything from the beginning of the space age to the computer age.
Until now.
The 98-year-old science editor is retiring from The San Francisco Chronicle after nearly seven decades at the newspaper, a decision he said had been coming for a while.
It is too easy to say “end of an era” but that is truly the case at the Chronicle. I hope all the young people on the staff there were smart enough to spend some time with Perlman. The man no doubt has plenty to teach us all.
And then there’s the next generation. I gave a tour of Franklin Hall to 15 members of the local Boys and Girls Club. It was a sort of last minute thing: Can you show these kids around in half an hour?
So they show up and they are younger than I expected. Know your audience and all of that, so I showed them the giant screen, the television studio and the video game design labs. Fourteen of them said they wanted to move in. Most did not seem dissuaded by the idea that there are no beds or showers or a real kitchen in the building.
I think they just liked that we could play Xbox or Playstation games on the giant screen.
One of them asks how old you have to be to come to college. And then she decides that’s too far off. Oh, but if you study hard and do well in school, my young friend, you too can sit here with us and watch the giant TV.
I wonder what Perlman would say to a gaggle of elementary school children who stopped by his corner of the newsroom in his last days on the job.
