We went out for an errand today. We, being the responsible sort, wore masks.
It’s odd, somehow, that we’re the responsible ones. We went out to get gas for the cars. More so because we had to use some fuel points before they expire at the end of the month than needing fuel. We missed the expiration of fuel points last month. And the month before that we got fuel because it was cheap, and we had a big discount and not-at-all empty tanks.
We’re staying at home. (I mean, just look at that hair.) We’re wearing masks. I hope you are too. Keep yourself safe. And, do it for others.
Also, these masks — highlighting the mascot, Gritty, and the band, Guster — were presents from The Yankee’s god-sister, who is very kind and works with this stuff in a university laboratory. So she wants you to wear a mask, too.
I had this setup in place today:
And if the many pieces of foam are up that can only mean one thing in my tiny home-office. It’s time to record something.
This gentleman is the director of the Eskenazi Museum here on the IU campus. They have 45,000 objects, with about 1,400 on display. Wikipedia tells me the collection ranges from Picasso to Pollock. There’s ancient jewelry and artifacts from all over the world. Coming up, when they reopen in the next few weeks, will be a wide array of exhibits. But, here, we talked about how museums, in general, are doing without foot traffic.
It’s a great museum, even if he wasn’t ready, today, to say when they are re-opening. That news, he said, is coming next week. I’m guessing late August, early September.
And you’ll need to wear a mask.
photo / Thursday — Comments Off on I had no idea where this was going 23 Jul 20
Everyone is just waiting for this week to be over, right? Or is that just me? There’s nothing wrong with the week, mind you, but there’s nothing of note about it, either. I owe a few phone calls to people, just to catch up, but I could sum this week up embarrassingly quickly. It’s been that kind of week.
I’m hesitant to call it ennui, which would probably be overstating things. Perhaps it is a small measure of ennui.
A wee bit of ennui.
Wee ennui?
Oui.
Here’s a bit of advice: if you’re ever reading anything where the writer is making fun of word sounds and he can only draw words with etymologies traced back to just two languages for his joke, you should consider clicking ahead to the next thing on your reading list.
Unless those two etymologies take you to French and Scottish. Classic exception to the rule, and a good way to keep you here for now.
Here’s something we can talk about.
That’s the creek out back of our house. It isn’t ours, but it’s passing by close enough that the sounds drift into the yard, so the sounds are ours. It’s a shallow thing. You can’t swim in it and you won’t want to float down this part of it. And in places you can jump right across.
It’s fed out of a pond just up the street a bit. Olympians swim in that pond. A FINA Masters World Championship swimmer swims in it. A USA Triathlon Olympic Distance national championship participant swims in it. A North American Ironman Championship finisher swims in it.
Most of those are my wife. She’s not an Olympian, yet, but she knows a few. And we’re always on the lookout for a country with lax representation rules and no Olympic program in something we can halfway do. We’re going to be Olympians yet! Probably it will be in something like creek floating, or obscure knowledge. Those are events, right?
At any rate, that water above drains into another creek which went into a reservoir that was the town’s water supply for a part of the 20th century. Now the water comes from a larger lake, which was dammed in 1965. And the second named creek that that water above is heading to goes through there. That second creek puts out 495 cubic feet per second, Wikipedia tells me. (In the 1970s they found a new strain of a bacteria in it. The study was prompted by an outbreak of Legionnaires disease on campus.) And that 495 cubic feet per second flows into the White River, which in 1997, was listed as one of the United States’ most threatened rivers. Pesticides, pollution and overflow sewage. Hooray, Indiana.
The White flows into the Wabash River, which is big enough to have songs written about it. It was named by the Miami Indians and the translation has to do with the clear water quality. “Water over white stones.” You could see the limestone river bed. The French explored it, and French traders traveled north and south from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The U.S. fought five battles on it in 33 years. Some of them you’ve heard of in passing. It became an instrument of commerce, this river, and it featured canals and its flow defined geopolitical borders. Today, 411 miles of its full 503-mile length flows freely. Its watershed drains much of the state before running into the Ohio River.
Water is funny like that. The bodies near you have this way of figuring into everything. Topography, economics, agriculture, travel, recreation, history, and can promote great diverse local ecologies. And if it isn’t too dirty, you can drink it!
That creek above runs into two more creeks, and then it flows into two more rivers and ultimately reaches the Ohio River. It would be an exciting trip for a rubber duckie, don’t you think?
If the duckie was the adventurous sort.
IU / podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on One over-long note on the interview process 16 Jul 20
I received an email a few weeks ago about a scientist doing a massive study on distance learning. I emailed the guy and said, I’d like to talk with you about this when the study gets to an appropriate point. And so we set a date when he was ready to talk about his findings.
That was today. And my first question was, how do you clear IRB, coordinate research from something like half a dozen universities in multiple states and get several co-authors to all pull their weight between when you started this in April and today?
Actually, my first question was, “What’s the difference between distance learning and distance education?” This was a pleasant surprise for him, and you could here it, because he realized this person might be willing to listen to the details. There are a handful of ways to get on the right side of the conversation. One of the easiest is to show you’re going to let the person do their thing. If you demonstrate to a scientist that you’re going to let him roam through nuanced terminology that is still a minor debate among his colleagues, he knows what you’re there for.
It’s sometimes helpful in getting the good answers.
I was talking with The Yankee about this still in-progress study before I talked to the lead author and she says “What’s his question?” This is a basic way to deconstruct a study, but this particular study doesn’t have an overarching question as yet, because this is all brand new. We’re in this forced march to distance instruction — and we’re going to do it again this fall, you wait and see! — and this is a first-time exposure. The question a study like this is going to try to answer is “What are the questions?”
So I tried to explain the study to my wife, from memory, while away from the study, and while we were riding bicycles. I failed at this explanation because she finally said “I still don’t know what his question is.” Which was when I suggested she stop being a grad school professor for a second.
What’s interesting about this interview, to me, though, is that I started thinking up questions with no idea what the answers might be, still-brand-new study and all. Some Thursdays, you work without a net.
podcast / Thursday — Comments Off on Where will children learn this year? 9 Jul 20
There’s a now sort-of famous poll, I guess, from May (remember May?) that said 30 percent of parents are “very likely” to try homeschooling in the fall. Even more said they were considering it. And a lot of teachers are considering not returning to the classroom this year. Educators are trying to figure all of this out, and there are, as you might imagine a lot of moving parts involved in turned the routine into the crisis-driven responsive.
So we are talking homeschooling here with professor Robert Kunzman, a man who knows all about the research involved.
That’s the third education podcast I’ve done on this program. I never worked an education beat. Politics and courts and hard news, sure, but never education. I’m not sure if this qualifies me for the job.
Anyway, education is going to be tricky this year. In Indiana the state department of education said “The local school corporations will figure it out.” While it probably seems like passing the buck, that does allow for different circumstances over vast geographical areas. And left local superintendents and county health officers to make the call.
It seems like most, here in this immediate area, will be doing some sort of hybrid program. Some days in school, some days out of school. I haven’t seen the particulars so I shouldn’t question the efficacy or the thought process behind it. It is, we can all agree, less than ideal, everywhere.
As I write this I just saw that in Dallas, Texas, some 153,000 students are now looking at a September start date. Kicking the can, says the superintendent there, was the backup plan. But as you get closer to launch dates, backups become realities.
And, in something that really matters to casual audiences, college football is facing similar problems. Today you saw the beginning of the end of the 2020 football season. The Big Ten dumped their non-conference schedule. It’s a nod to more flexibility for the games that matter, a teaser of even-more-cash-strapped-smaller-programs or court, or both. And it feels like frustra sperans that we’ll even get that far.
The smaller Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference, representing 14 schools across six states, is cutting out the middleman, hope, and has canceled their fall athletic seasons. Sometimes the right decisions are the most difficult ones.
The second half of this week already reminds me of the second half of that March week when they shut down the basketball tournaments. That was on a Thursday, too.
Solution: Eliminate Thursdays. Let us go directly to Fridays!
But not yet. First I get to Zoom with some of my students. You don’t pass up those rare summer visits.
I subscribe to Bookbub, a service that sends me emails about books I might like. You sign up, pick your genres, and they send you daily links to Kindle books onsale. I’ve gotten some decent books off the list. Certainly each of them have been worth the money I’ve paid. All of the books range from $.99 to $2.99. And aside from the algorithm sometimes wandering around, it’s been a great service. I tell all of the readers I know about it. No one seems as excited by it as I do, which is fine, but it is a mystery.
Two years ago I got an offer for a complete set of James MacGregor Burns’ three-volume masterpiece, “The American Experiment.” It won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Club award. It was 4,000 pages of reading. It was on sale for $2.99.
The modern world is weird.
I didn’t buy it, but as I type this, I regret that. I do see a lot of books come back around so if that series shows up again, I’ll jump on it. Though, honestly, that feels more like a bookshelf book than a Kindle book.
Anyway, I generally read the Kindle books at night, which makes it slow going. I stay up until I’m exhausted, then get ready for bed and then read myself to sleep. So it’s a few pages here, a few pages there. Meaning it took a while for me to finish this book.
Wrapped it up last night. Coolidge tells you a lot about the former president you didn’t know, because you don’t know a lot about Coolidge. That’s a product of the man and our educational system, I guess. But here you get a lot of his economic politics, which makes sense given the author. It’s also a complimentary book, perhaps just a tiny bit fawning, which makes sense given that Amity Shlaes is also chair of the board of trustees of the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation.
I’m sure it glosses over some of the contemporary criticism. Teapot Dome is in there, and sure, that’s Harding, but it resonated over Coolidge’s administration, but we don’t get what was surely the real heft of it. And perhaps there are other things, too. Which, hey, to a degree that’s fine. I paid $2.14 after tax and it isn’t an exhaustive biography or the most authoritative scholarship, but it’s a decent enough primer. I’d like to find out about the man as anything and there are parts of his life where you’re put in the room.
I love this part. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Harvey Firestone — the vagabonds, they called themselves — have made the pilgrimage to Vermont to see Coolidge before the reelection in 1924. There was the need to give a gift.
Love that line. It’s so New England. Shopworn and perfect.
Coolidge, who was so often a man of few words, probably didn’t say anything like that. Maybe it’s all Shlaes, but the ethos and pathos there say so much. I should make a present-tense version of that and brand it into things I make.
Ford isn’t whispering to Edison there. The great inventor by then was nearly deaf. You learn in the book that the vagabonds were charmed by Grace Coolidge, the first lady taught at a school for the deaf, and she was helpful with clear speaking and lip reading. The Coolidges had, just a month before, buried their youngest son, at just 16-years-old. And suddenly you’re summering at home and then come these huge leaders of American innovation because campaigns never really stop, even back then.
Having finished Coolidge, I started this book last night.
I mentioned it in a group chat recently and became the butt of many jokes. I’m three or four chapters in and, aside for expounding a little more than necessary on fish, it’s a good read.
Fish was an important part of the Mediterranean diet — still is! And of course this was a staple in England — yep! Northern Europe — sure enough, name a country, we checked! And it’s all in this book. I don’t know if it is going to be the most exhaustive book on salt, but if it isn’t you’ll nevertheless be satisfied. The larger point is how this humble little mineral is a culture shaping, societal forming chemical compound. And so far we’ve only covered China, a bit of India and the first part of selections of Europe, bouncing back and forth across several centuries.
Its Amazon’s best seller in geology. And just look at that list and tell me you wouldn’t dazzle people at parties with the things you could learn from those books. The 19th best seller is about mines in a particular county in Nevada. Number 37? So glad you asked, “Carbonate Reservoir Characterization: An Integrated Approach.”
I’d say that’s the sort of thing you read to get some Stop Bothering Me trivia, but how much of that does one really need?
