Category Archives: Blog

Photo Hikes Update

I continue to try to set aside one weekend day or so to go hiking with my DSLR camera, getting recommendations of trails from the Walking Man blog. This works both as exercise, and something to do on the computer that isn’t doomscrolling, as I work through the couple hundred photos I’ll take on a typical hike and find the best ones. These mostly end up in Google Photos albums; the two most recent trips were:

Frog in the Schoharie Creek Preserve

Schoharie Creek Preserve, 6/27/2021

Deer in the Hand Hollow preserve

Hand Hollow Conservation Area, 7/4/2021

In the past, I’ve tried to mix this up a bit by visiting built-up areas so I’m not just endlessly taking pictures of trees and birds. I’m probably about due for one of those, but not quite sure where to do it. Maybe I’ll just go stomp around downtown Albany.

Anyway, that’s the last couple of weeks of My Expensive Hobby, now that The Pip isn’t playing baseball all the time.

Wakanda? Whatever.

SteelyKid watching Black Panther

SteelyKid has gone on a big MCU kick over the last week, working through most of the Avengers movies on streaming. The Pip is less committed to this, but not uninterested, so last night we watched Black Panther for Movie Night. Which on one level is perfectly fine as a visual spectacle (I agreed to watch on that basis, despite having seen it before). On another level, though, the Wakanda of the movie exemplifies everything I dislike about the MCU.

A lot of the problem is just the comic-bookery of it all. At one point, the Pip asked “Is that actual science?” (I think regarding the suit storing kinetic energy) and I replied “Anything in these movies that purports to be science is absolute garbage.” That’s a bit harsh– they have famously brought in the occasional Actual Scientist to consult on this or that bit of technobable– but they’re really bad about having any kind of consistent behavior of… anything. Dropping in the occasional vocabulary word doesn’t change the fact that all MCU technology is functionally magic, able to do anything a hero needs at whatever moment the plot requires it.

They don’t even get science as an institution right, in that everything cool is the work of Super Genius individuals. Shuri is what, 22? And she’s personally responsible for the Black Panther suit, and the magic car-stopping beads, and the giant network of glowing maglev trains that whoosh around under Wakanda City for no clear reason? I know it’s a dramatic convention to put a single face on what in reality would be a massive engineering project involving dozens if not hundreds of people, but it’s a dramatic convention that always sets my eyes to rolling.

There’s also a kind of problem of plot ethics that’s characteristic of the MCU, in that the Deep Issues that it attempts to raise about history and kingship and all the rest are basically resolved by T’Challa being a Good Person. He never seems to be personally conflicted about much of anything, but has an unerring sense of Right that guides him, and the movie basically endorses all his choices. They have the same problem with Steve Rogers in the Captain America thread of the MCU, which I guess makes it natural that by the last couple of movies he’s set up shop in Wakanda.

The biggest source of my dissatisfaction with the MCU in general, which is particularly illustrated by this movie, is a matter of genre positioning. That is, they’ve chosen to make it an alternative history, and that’s a speculative subgenre that almost never fails to rub me the wrong way.

This really starts with the Captain America movies, where they push his origin back to WWII. Which, you know, is fine as a tribute to the original comics, but that early a departure point, featuring a weird Nazi faction running around blasting things with energy bolts, should change… basically everything. And yet, other than some fairly superficial differences, the early 21st century in the MCU looks pretty much like the early 21st century of the people who buy tickets for MCU movies.

Wakanda takes this to an extreme, with the departure point being millennia in the past. And yet, despite having been closed off to outsiders for centuries, and evolving a whole complicated system of magical technology beyond anything known to the rest of the world, everything looks… pretty normal. They’re even taking their cultural cues from the normal world– Shuri flips off T’Challa in one early scene, which is a pretty characteristically American gesture, but… why? Other than, you know, that it got a chuckle from The Pip and the millions of characteristically American kids that they’re trying to sell tickets and merch.

Wakanda ought to be dramatically… different, if it’s been operating entirely independently for centuries. But instead it’s just like the (movie version of) real-world Africa, except rich.

Roll all that together, and I just… can’t. I can’t take it seriously without starting to ask questions about how it all works, questions that don’t have good answers because it’s ultimately all rooted in comic books from fifty years ago. It’s an aesthetic, not a created world with any depth in the places that its presentation makes me want to poke at. And that means that the story doesn’t have any real stakes, so when it comes down to two dudes punching each other in front of a green screen, it’s a great big shrug from me.

And, as with many of my negative reviews of things, I fully recognize that this is mostly a Me Thing. Obviously, millions upon millions of people don’t have these issues with the MCU and, you know, good for them. The whole structure is just fatally flawed for me, though. It doesn’t stop me from watching (obviously), but it does make it next to impossible for me to take it seriously.

Recent-ish Media Consumption

We’ve added a regular Movie Night option to our routine with the kids, on Friday and Saturday nights (and the occasional Thursday or Sunday when there’s a long weekend), so I’ve been watching more movies than I have in years. Most of these are re-watches for me, trying to recall things from the 80’s and 90’s that the kids would like– for example, I finally badgered them into watching Die Hard on my birthday a couple of weeks back, and last night we watched Shanghai Noon because The Pip really enjoyed Owen Wilson in Loki. I’m not going to try to reconstruct all of the stuff we’ve watched, but will at least try to comment on the new releases that got into the mix.

The Mitchells Vs. The Machines: I think this is the clear standout of the new movies we watched. Fast-paced, funny, sweet without tipping over into cloying. We’ve gotten some mileage out of the image-recognition joke (“Dog…pig… dog… pig… burrito… ERROR”).

Soul: I liked this more than the kids, I think, which is not super surprising because it’s pretty heavy. The slapsticky bits with the cat played really well, but some of the other humor went over their heads. A really well-done story, making good use of the animated medium.

Luca: The most recent of the new movies, a perfectly fine piece of work from Pixar. Not near the top of their work, but solid.

In the Heights: Kate and the kids are way into Hamilton which is just Not My Thing; this is more of that. It’s clearly a very well done example of what it is, but what it is is not a thing that I want.

Inside: Bo Burnham’s pandemic special. SteelyKid went through a Burnham phase a while back so I suggested it when it popped up on Netflix. It mostly just made me feel old, because it’s very much working in the visual language of SteelyKid’s generation, which I can only barely follow. SK really loved it, though, and has re-watched it multiple times since, and went down a rabbit hole of analysis videos about it to boot.

Update: I knew as I was writing this that I was forgetting something; specifically, that was Raya and the Last Dragon, which we watched when it was released to streaming. This was a pretty good Disney movie; not top-tier, but well done and enjoyable.

In addition to the semi-regular Movie Nights, I got a stationary bike back in December, and we purchased a much larger TV for the living room, moving our old plasma screen downstairs, so I’ve watched a bunch of episodic content on days when the weather was too crappy to exercise outdoors. These include (but are not limited to):

Shadow and Bone: Kate and I actually watched the first couple episodes together, but she wasn’t that into it, so I finished it while biking to nowhere. Netflix clearly put a ton of money into making it look great, and it’s the right level of florid melodrama to serve well as a diversion while exercising.

The Irregulars: A step below Shadow and Bone in the production quality department, but very much in the same melodramatic vein. Everybody involved is very pretty, though maybe implausibly diverse for Victorian London.

The Mandalorian: I watched these more or less as they came out, a rare case where I was actually sort of up-to-date on pop culture trends. It was good fun, though I would’ve been happier if it had avoided connecting to the main Star Wars movie plotline, and just stayed on the fringes of the galaxy.

The Umbrella Academy: I watched the first season right when it dropped, and it was fun; SteelyKid independently discovered it around the start of the second season. It’s pretty ridiculous, but a lot of fun, particularly Five’s contempt for the others, and the bit where Klaus tries to tell the frog and scorpion fable is awesome.

Age of Samurai: A history series about the unification of Japan at the end of the 1500s (Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu), with a mix of talking-head segments and lurid re-enactments. This stuff is great for exercise-bike watching.

The Lost Pirate Kingdom: Same idea as the previous, but about the golden age of piracy in the Caribbean in the early 1700s. Again, terrific to watch while pedaling a stationary bike.

As alluded to above, the kids and I are watching Loki, which has been enjoyable to this point. It’s maybe halfway through the season, though, so not really possible to evaluate as a whole.

Some other things I’ve tried and not finished:

Cobra Kai: I’ve watched most of the first season, and enjoy it when it’s on, but there’s kind of a high level of anxiety around the plot as it’s building up, and I often just don’t want to deal with that. Which is why I’ve leaned a bit more toward florid melodrama, where the stakes are more ridiculous.

Jupiter’s Legacy: I watched one episode, and it is Trying So Very Hard to be Grim and Serious and everyone in it is ostentatiously Troubled and just, no thanks.

Invincible: This was better than Jupiter’s Legacy, but the shocking twist at the end of the first episode was, well, shocking, and I’m not sure I want to watch more.

I’m probably forgetting some stuff, but this is enough of a list to make a point of some sort…

Podcasts Are the Death of Blogging

Charlie the pupper has a great big stick.

With A Brief History of Timekeeping moving into the production pipeline and the end of my directorship at work, I have the opportunity to reorganize a bit of my time, and I’ve been trying to get back into writing more. This includes trying to do more blog posts about more serious topics, which means I need to think of topics for those posts.

Yesterday, I had a great idea for a post about higher education and politics. I think that was it, anyway. Maybe it was just one of those and not the other? I don’t know any more, because in addition to having a blog, I have a dog, and I thought of the idea just as it was time for him to get his morning walk. And during the course of the walk, I completely lost whatever my great idea was.

The reason for this is podcasts. I started listening to a bunch of podcasts several years ago as something to do while sitting in one or the other of the kids’ bedrooms waiting for them to fall asleep, but that quickly expanded to be a thing that I do while walking the dog, and while running errands in the car. And on the whole, I think it’s been a positive development– I’ve found some smart and funny commentators on current events and pop culture, so I’ve gotten some good laughs and a bit of edification out of the deal.

One negative feature, though, is that I’m rarely without somebody else’s voice in my ear. That’s fine when the goal is either information transfer or pleasant diversion, but it’s actually terrible for thinking. There’s a reason why I don’t listen to podcasts while writing or doing class prep, after all– if I pay enough attention to the podcast to understand what they’re saying, I don’t have enough spare processing capacity to do the actual task at hand.

And that’s what happened yesterday. I had an idea for a blog post that I thought was really promising, but when I set out with the dog, I spent the next half-hour listening to somebody else’s thoughts. Which left no real room for… whatever it was I had wanted to write about. This isn’t to say that the podcast in question was Bad, mind– I enjoyed it quite a bit, and it had some useful analysis of current events. But paying attention to that distracted me from my own idea, to the point where I completely forgot whatever the idea was, and ended up writing a thing about sports and academics instead, that wasn’t at all what I was thinking of earlier.

(This is not that unusual an occurrence, by the way, which is why I’m not more upset. I regularly think of great ideas while in the process of doing other things and totally lose them by the time I get to a place where I could even write down what the idea was. They usually come back around sooner or later.)

Anyway, in thinking about what to write this morning, it occurred to me that this is almost certainly a contributing factor to the decline in my blog writing over the last few years. I used to do a lot of pre-writing while walking the dog– turning the general idea over, thinking of some choice sentences, etc.– but podcasts make that much more difficult, in the same way that they make writing and class prep difficult. If I’m paying enough attention to the podcast to follow what they’re saying, I’m not thinking through my own stuff.

It’s a little interesting to consider why podcasts specifically are a problem, especially given that back when I blogged a lot more, I also read a lot more of other people’s blogs. I think it’s two things: first, I read much faster than most people speak, so I could power through a lot of blog posts in the time it takes for one podcast. (Also, let’s be honest, here, a lot of blog writing doesn’t exactly demand (or necessarily reward) close reading…) More important, though, is when it happens– I wasn’t reading blog posts while walking the dog, after all. Podcast listening taken over in time when I otherwise had nothing else to do but think my own thoughts, and filled it in with listening to other people’s thoughts. And that’s bound to have a detrimental effect on my ability to, you know, write actually interesting stuff.

Does that mean I’m going to cut podcasts out of my media diet? Probably not, because I’ve become very attached to some of them. And there are long-ish stretches of time still when I’m not capable of much great thinking– The Pip still wants an adult in his room as he goes to sleep, for example, and my brain is basically cheese at that point in the evening already. Having realized this, though, I’m probably going to switch to listening to music instead during the morning dog walk, particularly when I’ve got (or need to get) an idea for something to write.

Sports and Academic Success

During the recently concluded Weird Pandemic Year, it seemed like there was an uptick in the number of student-organized events on campus, mostly over Zoom, presumably in an effort to stave off boredom. One of these was a panel, organized by some students from the women’s basketball team, asking faculty and staff who had played sports in college to talk about the benefits of that for their careers.

This probably sounds like a weird idea to many faculty, because they feel athletics detract from academics (to the point where a lot of them are reflexively anti-sports). It initially seemed an unlikely topic to me, as well, because academia isn’t all that overtly sporty– career benefits from playing sports seems like more a Thing in the business world, where my finance-industry friends from college cut deals on the golf course, and so on. On thinking about it a bit more, though, before and during the discussion, I think there are some really positive features that are at least in part traceable to my past playing sports.

On the more trivial end, there are things like an attention to rules and structure that come from playing sports. I’m usually good about hitting deadlines for things, in large part because I played basketball back in the day for coaches from the “When I say practice starts at 5, that means you have to be done with the 15-minute pre-practice warm-up routine by 5:00” school. That really fixed the idea of needing to be ahead of the official schedule in my head, and it’s stayed there all these years (which is sometimes socially awkward…) Similarly, I generally like having athletes in class, because for the most part, when I tell them that a certain thing is due on a certain date, they will produce (a version of) that thing by that date. They might have as much time to devote to it as some other students, or assign it as high a priority, but they’re much less likely to beg for extensions or otherwise view the rules as fully negotiable.

Similarly, there’s a tolerance for a certain degree of adversity that comes from having to fight through getting good at a sport that comes in handy. For one thing, nothing Reviewer 3 says is ever going to upset me as much as stuff I’ve had yelled at me in basketball practice. And there’s a bit of the “Confusion Is the Sweat of Learning” attitude (tm-Rhett Allain) in there, too: I know what it’s like to suck at something and then become good, and recognize that the process involves a lot of false starts and mis-steps along the way. Again, this is a trait that I appreciate when I have athletes in class, who often are a bit more chill about not getting something right off than students for whom school has always come very naturally, who can get upset when they hit harder material that they don’t grasp right away.

(There are, of course, athletes for whom sports come very naturally, who struggle when they hit a higher level of competition, and don’t deal well with that. They’ve mostly washed out by the time they would get to us, though; we’re much more likely to see students hitting the academic version of that problem for the first time.)

The biggest thing that’s served me well, though, that comes out of playing sports for many years, is a kind of competitive attitude that’s a good antidote to impostor syndrome. In order to get good at sports, you have to challenge yourself by playing against people who are better than you are. And that necessarily means you will occasionally find yourself taking the field against somebody who at first glance it seems like you have no business competing with. The secret to success is finding a way to compete anyway, to raise your game to something more like their level.

(When The Pip was worried about his baseball playoff games, I told him a story about the coach of some famous underdog team (I remember hearing it as Jim Valvano of NC State, though couldn’t confirm that on Google) who was asked “Do you really think your team has a chance to beat [Favorite]?” and replied “I think we’re the only ones with a chance to beat them, because we’re the only ones playing.” That’s the right attitude to take into any competition.)

That refusal to be cowed is incredibly useful in all kinds of non-athletic contexts, too. I’ve had a lot of occasions where I’ve found myself on a list of panelists or invitees to some event and thought “What are they thinking putting me in with these people?” One of the ways I get through that is to draw on the same stupid competitiveness that makes me take the court and match up against guys 20 years my junior who are better athletes than I ever was. If that’s what I’ve got to do to be in the game, well, I’m going to do my damnedest to find a way to be better than I’ve been before.

Now, I’m not saying that sports is the only way to get these kinds of results– in particular, I suspect you could get a lot of it from music, as well, particularly if you’re in a system where section chairs and the like are competitive. I think it’s a good demonstration, though, that even things that too many of my colleagues would say are in direct opposition to academic success are, in fact, complementary to it. You can pick up skills and character traits through extracurricular activities that turn out to be extremely helpful in a professional context, even when the two areas seem to have nothing whatsoever in common. In many cases, this can more than justify the apparent loss of time to practices and competitions.

So, as I said, it was an illuminating discussion, and I’m glad the students put it together and I agreed to do it. It was also interesting to trip over the fact that even I have internalized the idea that sports and academics are completely separate, if not in tension. It’s also a necessary reminder of a thing I say a lot to other faculty about student life stuff: that it’s important to think carefully and honestly about what positive features students are actually getting out of the the things that they do. Especially when those activities don’t seem directly connected to our overall mission, or when they’re not necessarily things that we’d choose to do in their position.

A Brief History of Timekeeping: Resubmitted

It’s been exactly seven months since I last updated my progress on A Brief History of Timekeeping, with a report that I had submitted the complete manuscript last December. I have since gotten two rounds of editorial comments on it, and made corresponding revisions, and I sent my editor the (hopefully) (mostly) final versions of the figures yesterday, so it now moves off to the production team at BenBella; in a couple of weeks, I’ll get the joy of going over the copyedits…

In celebration of that, here’s the new and improved table of contents:

  • Introduction: A Clock Is a Thing That Ticks
  • Chapter 1: Sunrise
  • Chapter 2: The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars
  • Chapter 3: “Give Us Our Eleven Days!”
  • Chapter 4: The Apocalypse That Wasn’t
  • Chapter 5: Drips and Drops
  • Chapter 6: Ticks and Tocks
  • Chapter 7: Heavenly Wanderers
  • Chapter 8: Celestial Clockwork
  • Chapter 9: To the Moon . . .
  • Chapter 10: Watch This
  • Chapter 11: Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
  • Chapter 12: The Measure of Spacetime
  • Chapter 13: Quantum Clocks
  • Chapter 14: Time and Gravity
  • Chapter 15: Time Enough for Everyone
  • Chapter 16: The Future of Time

And, up at the top, you see the US cover (there’s a UK cover as well, though I’m not sure that one’s officially released yet). It also has a release date (January 25, 2022), and can be pre-ordered at Amazon and B&N if you are the sort of wonderful person who likes to do that kind of thing (insert boilerplate here about how pre-ordering books is a tremendously good and important thing to do for your favorite authors, and greatly increases the book’s chances of success).

Finishing this one was a bit of a slog, what with the entire world deciding to go batshit crazy when I was four chapters into the first draft. I’m proud of the final product, though, and look forward to it being released to the wider world at last.

Clip File: News Explainers

Another day, another handful of Forbes pieces moved here for ad-free archiving. This is a sampling of pieces explaining physics stories that made news for one reason or another (two are about Nobel prizes, three not).

How [2016]’s Nobel Laureates In Physics Changed The Game

The ALPHA Experiment Records Another First In Measuring Antihydrogen

Nobel Prize In Physics 2018: How To Make Ultra-Intense Ultra-Short Laser Pulses

How Does The ‘Shape’ Of An Electron Limit Particle Physics?

Three Hundred And Fifty Years Of Testing Gravity With Clocks: Einstein, Popper, And Jean Richer At The Tokyo Skytree

I used to do more of this kind of thing, but they’re kind of a lot of work often for little reward (in terms of reader engagement), so I tend to do them only when I’m 1) not very busy, and 2) it connects to my other interests in some way that makes it rewarding to write in spite of the low traffic. You can see that in the above, where a couple of these are very explicitly filling in gaps in other coverage of the same stories.

The Year in Pandemic Education: Professor Version

In-person students in my Winter term class on Quantum Computing (photo originally taken for attendance/contact tracing purposes; note the Chromebook being used as a secondary Zoom camera).

Yesterday, I looked back a bit on the kids’ experience of school during the pandemic. In the process, I reminded myself that I haven’t done the same for my pandemic education experience, though we wrapped up classes for the year a few weeks ago. That’s also probably worth a look backwards at what did and didn’t work.

The pandemic year really covers four academic terms at Union: the Spring 2020 term, which was fully remote, and then the three in-person-with-restrictions terms this year. Each of these was weird in its own way; I’ve already written about the fully-remote term over at Forbes, so I won’t repeat that in great detail. The short version is that I was lucky to be teaching a two-week module of a science course for non-majors, so I set the whole thing up to be fully asynchronous: pre-recorded video lectures at the students’ own pace.

This past Fall, thanks to some scheduling quirks, I was again doing only a two-week module of a team-taught course, this one our first-year seminar class. I pre-recorded video versions of all the lectures– you can watch them on YouTube if you’d like— but only as a back-up in case we were forced to go fully remote again before my turn came around. The actual class got in-person versions of these lectures, albeit with masks and distancing requirements in the classroom.

In the Winter term, I did a team-taught class on Quantum Computing with a colleague in CS. This one was in a full hybrid format: we had a handful of students who were remote only (two of whom were in Asia), so all the lectures had to be screen-shared on Zoom. We also had a couple of weeks of “campus quarantine” when case numbers spiked briefly, and we moved the course online.

My Spring term course was the Integrated Math and Physics class, another team-taught class, this one covering the E&M part of intro physics, and the vector calculus portion of intro math. It’s a heavy lift at the best of times, counting as two courses, and I probably shouldn’t’ve agreed to do it, because that’s also the heaviest term for the administrative responsibilities I had as Director of Undergraduate Research for the last four years.

Taken all together, this ended up being weird even by the standards of this weird year– in the Fall, I was barely on campus, only teaching in-person for two weeks and otherwise staying home. Then in the Spring when everyone’s nerves were maximally frayed, I was on campus all the time, which was Not Fun. It’s also a year somewhat lacking in feedback, as two of the four terms (last year’s full remote and this fall’s seminar) involved classes that we didn’t do traditional course evaluations for, so I don’t really have a way to judge student response.

What did we learn from this? Well, mostly that teaching on Zoom kind of sucks. I at least have the benefit of primarily using PowerPoint/ Google Slides for my lectures, so I didn’t need to work all that hard at making the classroom whiteboard visible to remote students. Projecting them in the room in Screen Share mode doesn’t detract much, and the remote students can see almost everything the in-person ones do. It’s extremely difficult to provide a good interactive experience for a hybrid class in this form, though, and both of us teaching Quantum Computing got absolutely killed on the Winter term evaluations around that.

Even for full-remote classes, in-person was vastly better than Zoom: the classes were way more engaged and interactive. There’s just no way to know, in a Zoom lecture where you can only see maybe a handful of thumbnail images of those students who have their cameras still on, whether a concept is clicking with them, or whether a joke landed. It’s a completely different experience, and not a terribly pleasant one. Even with everybody masked so you could only see eyes, it was a lot easier to read the room in person than on Zoom.

The primary positive lesson I took from this experience was that I like Zoom for office hours. I have a real gift for choosing times for my office hours that coincide with other classes my students are taking, so I always struggle to get anyone to come. On Zoom, though, I can schedule an office hour in the evening, at a time when I’m not willing to come to campus but am not really doing more than counting down to bedtime at home, and students actually come to that and ask questions. (It helps if it’s the night before the homework is due…). And if nobody shows up, well, it’s just a matter of having a Zoom window open in the corner of my monitor while I do the same puttering around on the Internet that I would’ve been doing anyway.

A small secondary lesson is that it’s relatively easy to make not-all-that-high-quality class recordings by doing slides on Screen Share in a Zoom meeting with nobody else in it. I may start doing that somewhat more regularly for the benefit of students who miss classes for good reasons (illnesses or extracurricular events), so they get more than just a PDF of my lecture slides. I don’t think I’ll offer it as a synchronous option, though.

One final comparative note: as I said in the post about the kids’ school, I think we had it way easier than the elementary, middle, and high-school teachers did. I certainly did, since my teaching load was relatively light (in recognition of the large amount of service work I was doing as Director), but even people who were teaching more had the ability to limit their time on campus in ways that public school teachers really don’t. And my college faculty colleagues had the option to teach in whatever format they wanted– some fully in person, some fully remote, some hybrid– which, again, the public school teachers mostly didn’t. My kids’ teachers had to be there all day, every day, and they all had to teach hybrid format the whole time. The elementary teachers had half their class in the room, and half on Google Meet every single day, but the other half was at least in the building, using the local network. The middle-school teachers had half their class in the room, and the other half God knows where, using God knows what kind of Internet access.

This is not new– college teaching is always easier that high school teaching (which, for the record, is always easier than elementary school teaching, he says as the son of a man who taught sixth grade for 30-odd years). But those differences were magnified during the pandemic– we had it harder than we usually do, but things got even harder for the teachers handling my kids’ classes. As I said in the earlier post, it’s hard to overstate how much we owe them for that.

To sum up, when we had our two commencements in mid-June (one for the class of 2021, and a second ceremony for 300-odd members of the class of 2020 who came back to get the chance to walk across the stage in person), a lot of parents said things like “I bet you learned a lot this year…” And that’s absolutely true– we had to pick up a lot of new techniques and technology on the fly, and that involved a lot of learning. But as I said to all of them, these are lessons that I fervently hope never to need to use again.

Clip File: Quantum Weirdness

My deal with Forbes allows me to re-post stuff I wrote for them after a short exclusivity window, and I’ve recently decided that I would like to have a more stable, ad-free archive of some of those posts, so I’m putting them together in the “Clip File” category in the menu at left. This batch collects a bunch of posts about weird features of quantum physics; some of them lost images to Forbes platform changes even before being copied here; I will try to replace them later, but make no promises.

What the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics Really Means

How Quantum Entanglement Can Help You Understand Many-Worlds

Why Do Interpretations of Quantum Physics Matter?

Why Do We Think Quantum Mechanics Is Weird?

The Weirdest Thing About Quantum Physics

These are topics I could probably write about endlessly, just repeating the same basic points over and over, and to some extent, I have. I’m a little tired of that, though, so it’s kind of nice to pull a bunch of the best versions of these into one place, and just say “Here, read these.”

The Year in Pandemic Education: Kid Version

The Pip at the “Biography Bash” for his class, with his report on Harriet Tubman.

Today is the first day of the day camp that SteelyKid and The Pip have been going to since they were toddlers; last Friday was the last day of the regular school year. This seems like a decent spot to pause for a brief reflection on this exceedingly weird year, and how the kids have weathered it.

In fact, the start of camp is a great moment for looking back, because the start of camp last summer was a real turning point. When the shutdowns hit, the kids’ schools went to a remote mode, but only in a very half-assed way– they were (rightly) concerned about accessibility of online options, so didn’t do much synchronous work. SteelyKid had a school-issued Chromebook already, so had somewhat more regular and in-depth assignments, but a couple of teachers were technophobes, and basically just put assignments on the Google Classroom site for the kids to work through and hand in. The Pip’s school just sent home worksheets that he would power through in about an hour in the morning, and they did maybe one live Google Meet a week.

(One of these provided the all-time remote education highlight, though: The Pip was doing his Google Meet class at Kate’s computer, on the other side of the Chateau Steelypips library from mine, and I heard his teacher say “[Pip], you have a question?”

(“Yeah,” said The Pip. “[Classmate], are you wearing pants?” which was followed by a startled squeak from [Classmate] who had, in fact, just been sitting there in his underwear.)

Anyway, this pseudo-remote education was a disaster, particularly for SteelyKid. Not grade-wise, but more personally because of the sudden loss of any human interaction for a couple of months straight.

Following on that, summer camp was a godsend. It was limited in scope compared to past years (free swim daily but no swim lessons, fewer activities than usual, no all-camp gatherings), but it got them out of the house and interacting with people who weren’t blood relatives. They were vastly healthier and happier for it (once The Pip got over no longer being able to play video games for six hours a day, anyway).

So, we were really hoping the local district would be able to come up with some scheme for in-person school, and happily they did. It wound up being really complicated. SteelyKid was in-person every other day, and joining via Google Meet on the Chromebook on the other days. The Pip went to school every day, but only had his main teacher in the room every other day, and on the off days was overseen by the music teacher as they joined a Google Meet with the teacher and the other half of the class in a nearby classroom. Neither group left their classroom during the day, other than outdoor recess for The Pip, and SteelyKid going to a different room for French (the other kids in the class stayed in place for Spanish)– they had lunch in the room, and in the middle school the different subject teachers rotated in, while in the elementary school, the “special” subjects were handled with pre-recorded video lessons.

This seemed really unwieldy, and also required some large-scale reorganization– the fifth grade classes were moved from the elementary schools to the middle school, to make room for splitting the regular classes into cohorts in separate rooms, and the middle school classes were shortened by several minutes and the start of the day pushed an hour later so they could clean and re-use the buses. This was a huge lift for the teachers and staff– as much as my faculty colleagues complain about being asked to do more, we had it relatively easy.

Back at the end of last summer, there was a lot of argument about whether schools could possibly be re-opened, with the usual overheated rhetoric about how the proposals favored by the other side were literally killing people in one way or another. One of the big arguments against re-opening was that school-age kids couldn’t possibly be expected to follow the necessary safety precautions. I’m happy to say that that turned out to be dead wrong– the kids were required to be masked all year, and they did it with minimal complaint. Having helped coach The Pip’s baseball team this spring (see previous post, with photos), I can say that the kids were way more conscientious about this than the adults– a handful of them stayed masked to the very end, after the league (following the state guidelines) said they no longer needed to keep masks on outside. Kids are resilient, and they did what they needed to do.

As a result, we made it through this pandemic year in a much better place than we could’ve ended up. It wasn’t easy or anything– SteelyKid still disliked the remote days, and there were the inevitable tech glitches from time to time– but they got it done. I really can’t say enough to praise the hard work and dedication of the teachers and staff who pulled this off, or the kids who held up remarkably well under the weirdest and most stressful circumstances any of us have ever seen (and I hope ever will see).

Not actually remote school, but a simulation thereof.