Rowan « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Rowan

You’re going to watch the video and follow all of the links, right?

Once this day got started, this day got productive. Let’s see, there was a late breakfast. And then I gave Phoebe some extra milk. I did dishes. And then I checked email, and updated various computer things. I pulled in the day’s delivery from the front porch.

I recently met someone who works at the local Amazon distribution center. She told me about the many different kinds of jobs in her building, and the one she’s doing now. I promised to check with her before we ordered anything heavy. Make sure she’s not working that day, ya know. Of course, I could barely pick up the box that arrived today. I hope she didn’t have to heave that to and fro.

I also took care of the garbage and recycling. This was an involved process. There was an extra bag of garbage. And more recycling than usual, owing to cardboard. I haven’t moved this much cardboard since we moved. Some of the cardboard that I recycled today was, in fact, from the move. The move was last June.

Standing at the giant bin, breaking down cardboard boxes by tearing tape with my keys, I narrowly avoided giving myself a cardboard cut. Paper cuts are bad, but cardboard should be registered and require a permit. Dangerous stuff. The guy that works there was patiently waiting on me to finish the task. He was standing down by the two cattle gates at the entrance. I was the last visitor of the day, according to his watch, which said 4:51, but he was ready to get out of there a little early. This was not the regular guy, Milton, that I’ve come to wave at, but another fellow. People are punctual about their early dinner plans, one supposes.

Anyway, the sun was out and it was an easy enough chore, even if it all took the better part of an hour this time. When I backed the car out to set off for the inconvenience center I looked into the yard and the trees beyond and said, “Spring is starting and you can’t convince me otherwise.” I said this to no one but the cardboard and the other recyclables, because there was nowhere to put a human being in my car. But nothing about the drive, the chore, or my return made a convincing counterargument, either.

The long-range forecast calls for the low 60s this time next week.

In class last night we did not talk about the weather. I warmed up, though, with a little history lesson of Voyager 1, the golden record and Blind Willie Johnson. Voyager 1 has been flying my whole life, and more than twice as long as my students have been alive. And these last few months, Voyager has been slowly, sadly, limping to its own end, decades after exceeding its mission parameters. It’s no less sad for the over-achievement. Perhaps more so. Doug Muir wrote something beautiful about it.

Also, a student asked me what I thought about Jon Stewart’s return to The Daily Show. Short version: It felt right. Last Monday’s re-start was a start, a clearing of the throat, a framing of the conversation. His return is going to be best understood over time. So let’s see what he does between now and November.

And what he did last night. My goodness.

My lovely bride and I did our first research in grad school on Jon Stewart. It was one of the first 2,200 or pieces of scholarship about the comedy-satire-politics show. I think the preemptive criticism in the run up to his return was overdone. Stewart still has one of the most unique and powerful voices in the much broader genre, and the circumstances today aren’t that different than nine years ago when he walked away. More acrimonious, but let’s not forget from whence we came.

If anything, the show runners have to consider how the Daily Show’s style of accountability — via the technological breakthrough of database queries and video playback — is finally more widespread now. That, if anything, blunts the ability for him to tackle his first real target, contemporary media. (People forget who the real satire subject matter is.) That part will need to be reshaped, perhaps, and along the way, he’s going to annoy everyone sporting a little letter behind their name. I could do without making the superficial punchline an ad hominem attack, I never liked that part, but he’s still got plenty of punch in his gloves. And the ratings are there too, much to the chagrin of last night’s subject matter.

For the actual class we discussed Ellen Ullman and Nicholas Carr. Basically, what is the internet doing to us, and why is it all bad? The Ullman piece was prescient, she wrote it in 1998, still stands by it, and, what’s more, was correct. The Carr readings date to 2008 and 2010. The latter is a book chapter of his, but that essay in The Atlantic should give us pause.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts,
watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link.

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing.

The first time I read that piece I saw a lot of the same complaints. And so I’ve been trying to change my habits — sometimes with more success than others. I think the change has been fruitful, when I’ve been most successful at it.

One of the assignments the students have to do soon includes an element where they chart their own media consumption. If this is done well some people will look at that and think, “Yes, that seems about right.” Others, however, will look at the data they’ve collected on themselves and be stunned.

Maybe that’ll mean something for them going forward.

Let us go forward together, back under the surface of the water.

I made this video before class yesterday with the intention of publishing it then, as well. Only I made a critical error in the rendering and exporting process. (A two-paragraph explanation of everything between now and then goes right here. An explanation made all the more hilarious because I teach this stuff. So I figured: Tuesday. Today, suffice it to say, instead of having to remake the entire video, I remembered Premiere Pro has a pretty decent autosave function, which was a big time-saver.) Having correctly rendered and exported the video, I was able to upload it and remain quite pleased with the result. I think you’ll like it too. I think the beginning and the end are the best part.

Also, enjoy the flounder, the sea anemone and the beautiful eagle ray.

Tomorrow, I’ll have a few more diving photos for you, we’ll go back in time to meet a local 17th century man of considerable importance and I’ll probably try to find a way to talk about riding my bicycle in place. Because, right now, I’m going to go ride my bike.

Cozumel / friends / memories / photo / Rowan / SCUBA / Thursday — Comments Off
8
Feb 24

A former student, the yard and dive photos

I had a lovely chat with a former student today. I had her in a class when she was a freshman and knew her all four years of her time in college and, today, I have the great good fortune to call her a friend. She is, and was, a talented human being. She sat in the back of the classroom, quiet as could be, but she took in everything. Everything.

One of her classmates and friends was loud and over the top and could command and intimidate anyone in a room. She was funny, but Sydney just sat in the back and soaked in everything.

Outside of the classroom she became a staff writer and then a section editor for the campus paper I advised. Her senior year, she was the editor-in-chief of her campus paper. She was also the section editor of two local community papers her senior year. She also carried a 4.0 GPA. She also was honored as one of the top journalists in the south that year. I’m telling you, this woman is talented.

Two years ago now she was on a New York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize, and if you think I don’t find ways to insert that into conversation you haven’t been paying attention. She’s a book editor and still writes for The Times. Even better than all of that, she does all of these other things. In the last few years she’s taught herself to sew and knit and cross stitch. She has taken up, as an adult and just to try it, aerial gymnastics, and she’s getting quite good at it. She has discovered a green thumb. Late last year she and her husband moved to New England. They are way up there, and enjoying their first real winter.

I was telling her how much I admire all of the things she does. As is typical, I laid it on pretty thick. As is typical, she downplayed everything. She said, “My life is full of more things that bring me satisfaction and make me look forward to the future than I’ve ever had before, and that’s not nothing.”

Something about this young woman, her freshmen year in the back of my class, I knew she’d figure it all out. And now here we are.

There isn’t a term for it, short of the greeting card cliche, but it is so heartening to watch people you like thrive. And to watch them discover the things that make them thrive. Oh! It comes from years of mentally cheering for people daily, and then getting semi-regular dispatches. To see people, who I knew best as students, continue to find ways to learn and challenge themselves well into adulthood, it’s really something.

In my teaching philosophy, I’ve always written that I hope to help teach the value of a true education: the joy of learning.

Best part is, Sydney isn’t the only person I know who has embodied that. Maybe that means I’m on to something. I hope so.

A quick spin through the side yard, just to share some different photos. I got lucky with the light on this shrub, which enjoys a nice golden tint in the late afternoon sun.

This stone path doesn’t go anywhere magical, but it seems like it should, doesn’t it?

We have two-and-a-half stone paths, and one of them does seem like it should go to Narnia. Not this one, though, it just takes you to the utilities. But look! There between the stones!

Is that a periwinkle? An euonymus? Whatever it is, the ground cover is emerging in early February! I am heartened once again!

Maybe I’ll get to the backyard tomorrow.

But, today, we must return to our underwater lair. And if we can’t actually do it, we’ll do it with some photographs from last month. To the deep! And before you do it, I’ve already done. I was humming the opening bars to “Baracuda” at about 65 feet here.

This was our dive master on one of our boats. He was serious until he realized he didn’t have to be. And then he was hysterical. Big laugh. I think his laugh amuses him, too. He reminded me of Carlos Mencia, a little bit. Apparently, in his day job, he’s some sort of underwater welder. So he takes strangers diving as a side hustle.

Imagine that. You get on a boat and that’s where you meet people and, to some degree, you’re kind of responsible for them. Now do that and make great jokes that grizzled vacation veterans haven’t heard before. This is the life of a dive master.

Also, he took this photograph for us.

He was very gracious with his time to do that. We wound up getting quite a few photographs. One day I’ll put that on social media and see if the university will share it. And if they do, this will be a new thing, taking that flag to interesting places and so on.

Also, he wanted to take a photo with the flag, too.

But he never asked what a Rowan was, or what that owl was about. He just wanted a photo, which was cool.

I think I can get about two more weeks of photos out of that trip. And, of course, there are quite a few more videos to upload, too. I may be able to pad this out to spring yet!

Cozumel / cycling / photo / Rowan / SCUBA / Tuesday — Comments Off
30
Jan 24

That was some sunny day

It got up to 42 degrees here today. And, for the best part of the day, it was sunny. This, I think, is why I have the unshakeable and mistaken feeling that spring is just around the corner. It’s the sun. I’m in recovery from years of the midwest’s monotonous gray skies. Right or wrong, early or on time, I look outside and think, it’s coming.

“It” being spring.

But it’s not. Not yet. We could be two months out from spring, somehow, but I see green grass and blue skies and shadows and I smile. I smile and I wait and wonder.

Where I park on campus I have to go through a little security checkpoint. There’s a guy in a hut and he’s looking for a sticker on my car. The guy that works the evening shift is an older gentleman. Quick with a smile and full of good patter. Every time I see him my goal is to make him laugh. I don’t think he gets a lot of that in his work role, because he’s always the one delivering the cheery spiel and the interactions may be plentiful, but they’re necessarily brief. So I try to bring a joke, or an unexpected reply to a gregarious man who has one-liners down to an art. But when you get him, he’s got a fantastic laugh. I asked him if he, too, thought it felt like spring. Two more months, he said.

I was afraid of that. But I smile and I wait and wonder.

Tonight in class we talked about some of the work of Lev Manovich and Jurgen Habermas. The students get Habermas pretty well. Manovich is a bit of a mystery, but they come around. We also talked about Photoshop, because that’s coming up in class.

I start this spiel like this. You don’t have to know everything about Photoshop for this class. You do need to some things, and we’ll touch on many of those. We have terrific tutorials available to you online, and I’ll try to one-on-one with you, if it might help you. I tell them they can follow along on the incredible tutorials and spend 19 hours and be well-versed. I tell them the way you learn this program is by doing, and that there are several ways to do the same thing, which comes down to preference and your efficiency. I tell them I have been using Photoshop for a quarter of a century, now, often on a daily basis, and I don’t know how to do everything. Don’t sweat it. You learn as you go.

I say, if I were a gambling person I would bet you a dollar that I will learn something about Photoshop, this program I’ve used for 25-or-so years, in the course of this class. And so then we do a few things on the big screen — which the students tolerate, I’m pretty sure.

In the new version of Photoshop there are mini-tutorial videos built in. You mouseover a tool or a panel and this little box pops up. You can play a short video that gives you an overview. It’s well done. I point out a few of those. And then, on the third one, I actually play the video. It runs 52 seconds. Tutorial demonstrated.

And then I say to the class, “Remember how, about 10 minutes ago I said I would learn something about Photoshop? Just did.”

Big laugh. Human element of the class instructor established. Another thing crossed off the To Do List.

Back underwater. It is a mild winter here, but I’m still in Cozumel in my mind.

Check out this anemone, which the divemaster is helpfully pointing out.

Look who is strong!

In an upcoming post, I have a great and impressive anecdote to share about strength underwater. So keep coming back to look for that.

But, for now, here’s another mysterious brown bowl sponge.

Or, if fish are more of your thing, here’s a closeup of a sergeant major.

And this is the saddest site you can see on a good dive. You’re tank is running low, and you’re having to ascend on an afternoon dive.

I’ve got another good six, eight minutes of air there, guys.

(For some reason, I suck down the first third of a tank like I’m never going to breathe again, but I can stretch out that last 1,000 or 1,200 for longer than anyone would think possible.)

It probably has to do with heart rate. So let’s talk about cardio. Since I last talked about riding my bike, last Wednesday, I’ve covered 164 miles, and am on a nice little streak of six consecutive days with a ride. My legs are starting to notice, too.

One of those rides was in virtual Scotland. I saw the virtual aurora borealis.

A friend of a friend has a wife who seems … I only met her briefly, once, several years ago. She leaves an impression and it might be the wrong one altogether. Anyway, we were talking about Alaska and she was talking about the shopping there and what there is to do and what isn’t there, and all of those sorts of conversations are insightful about a place, because you can learn new things, and a person, because you can learn what they value.

She found the aurora borealis to be utterly boring. And the malls, too.

I have never seen the aurora borealis in person, but whenever there are photos, videos, when a news story pops up, or when I see them in virtual Scotland, I get a good laugh.

So boring.

Anyway, with any luck, in a few days I’ll set a new personal mark for most consecutive days riding. This is the sort of thing that means nothing to anyone, but the person doing it. Eventually, it won’t mean much to that person, because there will be other goals to achieve.

If my legs keep working.

Tomorrow, we’ll see how January worked out, mileage-wise. The cycling spreadsheet returns for 2024.

photo / Rowan / SCUBA / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
23
Jan 24

Getting ahead of myself

We are still in winter mode. Though it seems like I’ve been there for a while. It’s more of a feeling than a concession to the calendar. And it’s not a glum feeling. Not a “Gah!” for a change. Rather, it is this feeling that spring is just around the corner. Weekend after next. I blame early commercials for the Master’s and auto racing, the earliest signs of spring. This is, of course, where the trouble kicks in. I think it is almost spring, but we’re nowhere near it.

Back home, they’re still three weeks out, minimum. And this is the real problem. The part of my spirit that thinks about the southland in the springtime knows when that is coming. It knows that, mid-February, a big, impossible, miraculous transition will be upon upon us, that nature’s fanfare is set to provide a paradigm-shifting crescendo early in the act. But only there. Not here.

Being my first winter here, I am also looking forward to my first spring here. I have no idea when that will be. But I found a site that suggested the coldest average historical day of the year is in February. Right about that time it turns to spring back home. So it isn’t a glum feeling today, but give me three weeks.

The thing about the weather is that it sticks around. We still have icicles in the air.

And all of the snow is still on the ground.

It’s supposed to warm up a bit today and tomorrow. This will all start to disappear. It’s only been around for four or five days now.

I had a class on campus this evening. My first in-person class of the semester, which began last Tuesday. It is an evening class, the last class block of the day and, as such, it was the last first class of the term.

I did my song and dance, learned the names of a third of the room and the something interesting about almost everyone. In a few more weeks I’ll have most everyone’s names under control. This semester is going to be my best one yet for matching names and faces.

I showed the class this video, which is always more impressive to me than any class that has ever watched it with me.

I think this was the first time I’ve ever watched that where I didn’t see something new, and I’ve watched that video a lot.

We talked about the class, and that felt rushed. I also gave a 36-slide presentation that covers, roughly, 3,000 years of human communication. So we went from Egypt to Martin Luther — with brief stops in Japan and Ghana — in a hurry. Next week, we’ll discuss the late middle ages and the early modern era of Europe. It’s a class called New Media, and this is the curriculum. We stare at all of human history for two weeks, and for the next month or so we’ll read a bunch of brilliant 20th and 21st century scholars discussing all manner of communication concepts that will get distilled down to television and social media.

I’m looking forward, most of all, to the sidebars. I taught this class last term. Occasionally the conversations ran off the rails. Each time it did, that was the best part of the class that day. I’m curious to see if that will be at the same places as the fall, and if this group of students’ comparisons and explanations will be same as last semester’s comparisons and explanations.

Anyway, if there’s snow outside, there are the warm waters of Mexico on this page. Please enjoy with me a few more photos from our recent trip.

The other day I said I’d never seen a filefish, which may as well be a generic a name as you’ll find on the sandy ocean bottom, that looked quite like this. And then, suddenly, I started seeing them everywhere.

The other fish is the black triggerfish (Melichthys niger). In Cozumel, you’ll bump into them quite a bit, but usually only in ones or twos. They’re beautiful, and they only look black underwater. With proper light they take on a complex color scheme. They can even modify their color somewhat. I don’t know where they fit in the Disney hierarchy of fish and underwater creatures, but they seem like they should be in a stately position to me. Something about those two little stripes.

But then you read about them, how they are aggressive looking for food, how they hunt in packs around Ascension Island. Mob feeding, they call it. How they’re opportunists and relentless, and while that probably hurts them in the saltwater caste system, I admire them even more.

One day on this trip, after our dives were done, I confessed to my lovely bride my unpopular opinion of reef diving. I don’t get agog over lobsters as everyone else does. They just … sit there … waving their antennae at you. Now, those times when you see one crawling along from A to B, that’s interesting, but otherwise, meh.

And so she took it upon herself to make sure that I saw every lobster anyone found for the rest of the week. That’s what dive buddies are for. Here are two of them now.

She’s still my favorite fish, though.

I felt like I saw fewer yellow tube sponges (Aplysina fistularis) than our trip last year. This is purely observational, of course, as I was not taking census survey data. I love these little things, and not because of Spongebob. That color really pops, as you can see, and the formations that the sponges make are sometimes highly ambitious.

The hawkbill turtle is a big yellow tube sponge predator. And that’s probably the cause here. As we’ll see in some other photos later, the turtles living on the Palancar reef are quite impressive.

As are the brown bowl sponges. This one needs some scale, and it didn’t work out that anyone was nearby at the moment. But do you see that fish in the bottom-right corner of the photo? That will at least give us some sort of perspective.

A small person could hide in this sponge. I am sure of it.

And we’ll hide from January with more photos, and a video, tomorrow of course. See you then!

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo / Rowan — Comments Off
18
Dec 23

I have five spreadsheets running for some reason

We attended a birthday party for a 3-year-old on Saturday. The theme was pink and purple. And also mermaids and unicorns. I don’t have any mermaids or unicorns, so I wore a pink shirt and a purple tie, and a purple pocket square. The 3-year-old was still better dressed.

The parents got some balloons with giant bits of confetti in them. Sadly I was in another part of the party when this happened, but it was decided to pop the balloons and record the pop in slow motion. Confetti was everywhere. They’ll be discovering it for weeks. The cake was a unicorn. Our present was a dress that was reminiscent of a mermaid, but also included about four layers of multicolored tulle.

The birthday girl is the cutest thing. Every present is just the greatest present that was ever presented. I could have gone outside and found her some pine cones and put those in a gift bag and she would be thrilled. But when she gets mermaid stuff, it’s a different level of joy, entirely. It was all very cute.

Elsewhere, just grading and emails and watching final exams come in. And, also, verifying that my spreadsheets and my formulas are all accurate. The sun, you could say, is setting on the term.

I have the last class meeting of my semester tonight: more video projects to screen. After that, there’s only a small handful of things to score. I’ll submit grades later this week and, finally, all of those long-suffering students will be done with me.

I hope they have all learned as much as I did. I always hope that.

It’s time for the site’s most popular weekly feature. Let’s check in with the kitties.

Phoebe has been enjoying this little box on one of the cat trees. The other archway gives her great views of the flowerbed. They like that for all of the birds, but there aren’t a lot of birds around right now. I’m not sure if she believed me when I told her they would be back.

What does a cat know of patience, anyway? Just put your head between your paws, the birds will reappear.

Poseidon likes boxes. This time of year, Poseidon loves the space heater. So I put a box near a space heater, thinking he would love this arrangement. Now he’s taking naps beside the box.

Last weekend I got a strangely shaped box. Poe likes that one, too.

Such a goof.

My closet has some wire rack thing and it was not conducive to my closet system. But I found a solution that did not involve redesigning the whole space. It just required a quick order from Amazon. I thought it would take the better part of a day to implement the new closet setup. It took about 20 minutes. And now we have to watch out for a cat in this long, slender, box.

I officially gave up on outdoor bike rides for the year. The remaining forecast does not look promising and more days in the 30s didn’t seem exciting and I rode outside until mid-December anyway. Time, then, to set up the smart trainer and update Zwift.

It’s flat here, so of course I chose a route that features 2,700 feet of climbing.

The first trainer ride of the year always feels like a first. It’s easier, but more demanding, than riding on the open road. Putting some simulated 10-14 percent gradients in your legs right away is the smart move. Right?

Let’s see if I can move around in a classroom after 90 minutes of that.