Once More…

So today marks the beginning of my teaching semester. In addition to the deep sense of work failure that such a transition brings, it also means that I have to start teaching again. Awesome. I’m lucky in that this is the 4th time I will have taught this class (I already posted all of the slides even), so the prep will be minimal.

On the downside is, well, everything else. The stupid questions are already building up, sadly. I’m in your Tuesday/Thursday class (no you’re not, I don’t teach those days). What book do I need (handy resources called the student store)? Can I use an older version (the last version was a decade old and I’m not updating every chapter number for you, but go ahead)?

On top of these minor irritants, there’s the joy of dealing with the university itself. Pretty sure I said “fuck” at least 50 times yesterday. Afternoon. In a conversation. With my friend.

It’s that bad.

First, you have the super awesome email transition. I don’t think I can honestly describe how bad this transition is. When Microsoft wants to give you a free product, RUN THE FUCK AWAY. Good lord, this piece of shit is horrible. Not only is it a major upheaval, but I don’t understand the rationale behind it. Last year, they yelled at us because some people were forwarding their school emails to another (read: better *cough* Gmail *cough*) email location and then replying from there. We caught hell because this was insecure and were told that all emails had to pass through the school servers. So now there are no servers and we basically have Hotmail. Right. Give the “sensitive” emails to a company that’s neither secure nor good. Awesome call /thumbs up.

Then, you have the whole mess with department offices. Last year I shared a nice, remodeled office with a couple of other people. The benefit being that with such a small number of officemates, it was not normally a problem to have private discussions with students (as required by law in certain cases). Now I share an office with 8 other people in a room that was last cleaned when the Alpheus and Peneus were redirected. Awesome again.

I’m not going to start on my work issues. Coauthors who want things run for the 10th time. A review due in a week that has maybe 1500 words written. Getting serious comments on a paper after I’ve submitted it. A proposal that seems to grow and expand and get out of control every time I look at it.

Whatever. I got this.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger. . . .
-Henry The Fifth Act 3, scene 1, 1–6

Going Rogue

When I was growing up, I spent a large chunk of my summer in southwestern Kansas, about 30 miles east of Dodge City. My parents would drive me up, drop me off, throw me on a plane or FedEx me to my grandma for a month or two. Ostensibly this was so I could spend time with my grandma and family, though in hindsight, it seems like there was the hidden benefit of not having me around to fight with my sister for the summer. Each summer I would stay with my grandma and help her and my uncle around the farm. Supposedly. I think it’s possible that my effectiveness as a farm worker at the tender age of 8 was essentially nil. If not negative.

I was in middle or high school the last time I was able to spend time up on the farm. That summer my uncle made me an interesting offer for a poor teenager. Before going further, it may be necessary to give a little background for those city-slickers with no farming experience. In addition to dry-land wheat farming, the family also raised milo (grain sorghum) and corn with flood irrigation. One problem with these latter crops is that they are prone to infestations by shattercane. This weed is evil. Seriously evil. As a smaller child, I had spent hours cutting it down and plunging rusty nails into the broken stems. Actually, that story may speak more about me than about the plant. The real problem is that the weed is so closely related to either crop that it is difficult to find pesticides that will work on it but not kill your crop (in a world before Roundup-Ready GMO crops, at least). The response then, is to manually cut out the shattercane, a process we knew as “roguing”.

And this was the offer. I was to go through the rows, using a machete to cut out weeds that I hated and be paid by the acre for my work. Not bad for a young teen, right? Weapons, fighting an evil scourge and cold, hard cash; it doesn’t get much better than that. He only agreed on the condition that I get my aunt (his sister) to help me. After a mild amount of hounding, she finally relented and agreed to work it with me. Now that I think about it, the craziest part of this bargain is that she agreed to it, even knowing what was involved from firsthand experience.

My rude education started the next morning at 5:30, when my aunt woke me up to go hit the fields. What happens next is you select a starting number of rows and walk down them. When you see a weed, you cross over to it apply lethal force. There are a few lessons I learned that day that I am willing to share with you, dear reader.

1. 5:30 AM is a horrible time. It should only be experienced from the other side (thank you after hours clubs and/or late night television).
2. 10AM in a Kansas summer is ridiculously hot.
3. You have to wear jeans to protect your legs.
4. Your jeans will gain about 20 pounds of water from the dew.
5. You will lose your boots, on average, two times a day in the mud. (Remember-irrigated rows!)
6. While it’s easy to see shattercane when it’s so much taller than the crops, it’s really hard when you’re in the middle of it all.
7. The more rows you work at once, the faster it goes but the more lost you get.

After a week of early mornings, we pronounced our main field weed free. I still remember the feeling of accomplishment as I looked over the field and no tell-tale shattercane heads poked above the milo. This feeling was soon amplified by the check that I was handed for all my hard work.

A few weeks later, I was back in Texas. While they were catching up in a phone call, my uncle told my father that the weeds had popped up in the fields we had rogued, necessitating him taking a machete and cleaning it up himself. And that’s when I learned the most important lesson of all: with weeds, you have to pull out the roots.

This post was an entry for the Synchronized Blogging Experiment. This round’s topic was “know your roots.” For better entries, check out the link!

Rhymes with Orange

So, yesterday, L and I discovered that there is indeed a word that rhymes with orange. Apparently, early in the modernization of existing architectural structures, there was a drive to improve (read: speed up) the use of drawbridges in fortified buildings. A simple solution was attaching a motor to the windlass of the drawbridge, allowing faster raising/lowering than was possible even with the counterweight of a portcullis. Among engineers in the drawbridge community, this configuration of drawbridge was known as a “zorange.” The world is a weird place.

Stay tuned for a complete discussion on the perniciousness of humpback whales.

n-body problem

I remember as a small child seeing for the first time a picture of the Earth from space. I’m not talking about the standard awe-striking one with the earth as a blue pebble in a sea of black and stars, but the one that is focused in on land masses and human habitation. The picture shows an uneven sea of lights across the US; some places are dark, others awash in light. Even as a small child, you can see the density of people in certain locations and with even a basic understanding of geography, you can identify the lighted areas. That’s New York City. That one is LA. That one is the DFW area (to a Ft. Worth native, it’s always DFW and never just Dallas). Recently I’ve seen cool art pieces that create similar images with information like air traffic data or internet connectivity.

While my contrarian nature loves these images for their new perspective on things that we already think we know (i.e. the US, the earth), what I really love is how they show the points around which we cluster and how we use the space we inhabit. If we took a curved space time approach to social organization, each of these cities or airport hubs is like a black hole, curving the world around it with its own social gravity.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that I am interested in this level of social organization, being the type of person who has (at least theoretically) planned to dedicate his life to understanding social phenomena writ large. Maybe it’s more surprising that anymore, this macro level organization is less interesting to me than the individual pathways and trajectories that comprise it. More and more though, I care about the individual level, how a single person navigates the forces that comprise his or her life.

I’m sure if you close your eyes you can see your life just like this kind of orbital map. For me, I started with an easy exercise, what my life looked like when I was young. My time was divided between my house, school and my best friend’s house (all of two houses up the street). As time went on, the pattern grew and changed. New nodes appeared on the map: extracurricular activities, Boy Scouts (and the attendant camping trips), work, and finally, lab locations where I did my science. As new centers appear, old gravity loci vanish. The friend I don’t talk to anymore no longer pulls me into their orbit; they drop off the map. Then college comes and gone are the places and people I knew. Now the grid is totally changed; new nodes arise at my dorm room, college commons, friends’ rooms and all the places where you can get alcohol. Each year changes these nodes, as new forces lead to new gravitational orbits. New friends exert pull influences. The girl that doesn’t return your interest or the bar you got banned from push you into new social configurations.

In all honesty, this is a topic I’ve been considering a lot recently. A few months ago, my life was pretty basic. My orbit included campus, home and occasional drinking/social forays. Think of the electron orbital of neutral hydrogen (1s1) or the idealized orbits of planets around a star. I’ve written elsewhere (or you’ve heard the in-person version) about my recent spate of activity and life stuff. Consequently, that map has been subject to revision. Instead of the nice pretty orbit, I live in a complicated solar system with binary stars and insanely large asteroids and planets flying all over. I hate to say it, but my life has become the social equivalent of the n-body problem. But, while this would once have sent me running for the hills (literally possibly), I’m learning to love the eccentric bipolarity of my current social map. Social life is a dynamic process, balancing the forces experienced by all these gravitational centers. This sort of gravitational problem does not have an analytical solution (at least once there are at least three forces and no collisions /hat tip Wikipedia); it has to be lived. You throw the marble onto the table and see where it goes. In the end, the gravitational poles push and pull us, but the orbit they create is what we call life.

This entry is part of the Synchronized Blogging Experiment on the topic of “Centers of Gravity.” Click the link, enjoy the better compositions. Do it.