Let me tell you about last Thursday. I went to campus with my lovely bride. She had to teach. I had lunch with the provost. He does these occasional sit downs with various groups of faculty and you get invited once every three or four years. So you take advantage of it, for the delicious sandwich wraps, and some chit chat.

We went around the room, introducing ourselves, which is no less painful than when you did it on the first day of school, no matter how old you are. The provost said a few things, and then opened the floor to questions. One of our colleagues asked about the NIH cuts on grants and what effect that would have on the university. The provost answered that question, a long, thoughtful, encouraging answer. He and his office had put a lot of thought into this, which is great, since it is so new and, as he said, there’s still a lot we don’t know. (Which is one of the points.)

Then someone else asked a similar kind of question, getting into the nuts and bolts of that. What precisely the grants mean, how this overhead concept works, and so on. Not everyone is involved in this process on a daily basis, and so it was a good question, and he answered it well.

Then I asked a question about addressing students in the face of all of this uncertainty.

That took up most of the rest of the lunch hour, because there is a lot of that answer to still work on.

The provost is a sharp man, an engineer by training and trade. He believes in the university’s vitality in an easy, contagious, kind of way. We had a pleasant talk, and then he and I talked again after the lunch was over.

And then I went home and got back on this writing project. There was a draft of it due by Friday night. The draft of a project meant to describe my first year. It’ll be about 30 pages. To be fair to me, I’m really writing about four months, and not a whole year. But I’ll drag that out for tomorrow’s post.

Here are some geese I saw last Thursday during a work break.

Today, it was more grading, grinding my way through that Hogan reading I mentioned the other day. Bernie Hogan’s The Presentation of Self, that is. The abstract:

Presentation of self (via Goffman) is becoming increasingly popular as a means for explaining differences in meaning and activity of online participation. This article argues that self-presentation can be split into performances, which take place in synchronous “situations,” and artifacts, which take place in asynchronous “exhibitions.” Goffman’s dramaturgical approach (including the notions of front and back stage) focuses on situations. Social media, on the other hand, frequently employs exhibitions, such as lists of status updates and sets of photos, alongside situational activities, such as chatting. A key difference in exhibitions is the virtual “curator” that manages and redistributes this digital content. This article introduces the exhibitional approach and the curator and suggests ways in which this approach can extend present work concerning online presentation of self. It introduces a theory of “lowest common denominator” culture employing the exhibitional approach.

It is an interesting paper, and an interesting thing is happening with the students. When I taught it last semester I saved a file with all of my notes thinking I might recycle them in some future class. I write to the students about specific questions they think up while reading the paper. This crop of students, however, have asked entirely different kinds of questions. So I have about eight pages of notes that are no good. Meaning I have to write all new answers.

It’s a hard life.

I haven’t been able to ride my bike enough lately. Too many real world intrusions. But I got in a quick hour this evening. And I included a few miles in the quantum realm.

Zwift put in these extra features a year or two ago. They call them climbing portals, where the point is just going up, which I did. I assume, or I read and I’ve forgotten it, that the idea was to give additional climbs without spending all the development time of building the background decoration of the surrounding world. This also means they could alter these relatively easily or quickly. I don’t know if they will, or maybe they have. But I doubt both. Everything you perceive in the quantum realm is weird.

For example, in that photo, I’m actually headed back out and on the descent, bot that you can tell. But, believe me, the legs notice all these differences. Everything in the quantum realm is weird.

Except the one thing. I was going slowly.