As noted in the previous post on this blog, I haven’t been doing very much blogging at Forbes of late, for a variety of reasons. I have been doing some, though, and over the six-plus months since the last round-up post, it’s added up to quite a bit.

— How Strong Is Space?: A question from a very young reader, leading to some interesting physics.

— Book Review: The Alchemy Of Us By Ainissa Ramirez: A book about the physics of various materials and the history of how we came to understand them.

— How Do You Teach Science Labs While Social Distancing?: Some thoughts regarding what I did to move my lab-science-for-non-science-majors course to remote instruction.

— Three Hundred And Fifty Years Of Testing Gravity With Clocks: Einstein, Popper, And Jean Richer At The Tokyo Skytree: A very cool experiment involving ultra-precise atomic clocks.

— Can Atoms Touch Each Other?: Another question from a kid.

— How Were Atoms Created?: Yet another question from a kid.

— “Light Under Flawless Tutelage Knows No Limits”: Sixty Years Of Lasers Finding New Problems To Solve: A post in honor of the 60th anniversary of the first working laser.

— ‘Why Is The Wind Always In My Face?’: Some Physics Of Biking: The Pip learned to ride a bike during lockdown, and asked the question every cyclist asks at some point.

— Book Review: Quantum Legacies By David Kaiser: An essay collection from the physicist and historian.

— Book Review: Six Impossible Things By John Gribbin: Short pieces about quantum interpretations.

— Book Review: Synchronicity By Paul Halpern: A look at the history of ideas about the finite speed of light, culminating in the story of Wolgang Pauli and Carl Jung.

— When Is It Time For A ‘Manhattan Project’?: Based on a discussion I proposed at SciFoo, a look at the question of shifting scientists from basic research to more applied problems.

— Book Review: Every Life Is On Fire By Jeremy England: A surprisingly engaging book about non-equilibrium thermodynamics and what it can tell us about the origins of life.

It may look from this like I’ve made a decision to shift to being a pop-science book review blogger, but that’s mostly a matter of me feeling guilty. Most of those books were review copies sent to me by the publisher, and the lockdown meant I had more time to read the free books that otherwise tend to just pile up. When I do read one, I feel a certain obligation to actually write it up, since that’s why they sent it to me in the first place.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been writing on the physics side of things. Other than, you know, the book I have under contract that’s due one month from today…

Unless something really remarkable happens in the next half-dozen days, August will end up being the third straight month in which I haven’t done a blog post for Forbes. I’m not doing a whole lot of blog writing here, either, which has me thinking a bit about why that is. Inevitably, given how long I’ve been doing this, that turns a bit toward thinking about the late, lamented golden age of “the blogosphere.”

The main reason for the lack of blogging at Forbes is just general busy-ness. I have a book under contract, a day job that requires a bunch of my time, and some other projects that occasionally need my input. And, of course, there’s the global pandemic that’s screwed up absolutely everything, which makes fetching and feeding the sillyheads take up a bigger chunk of my work day that it used to. It’s just hard to find time to blog.

A secondary reason is that writing blog posts had started to feel more like an obligation than something I enjoyed doing. This largely reflects a change in the nature of blogging over the last umpteen years. Back when I started in 2002, it was completely free-form, and I wrote about absolutely anything I wanted, in any form that I wanted. The range of topics and forms that work for Forbes is much narrower, particularly when the question of money gets brought in, because, to put it bluntly, I get paid by the click, and so naturally want to maximize the clicks-per-post.

And, at the moment, there’s basically zero overlap between the sort of thing I might like to write, and the sort of thing that people will click on and read. I could probably generate endless traffic by cycling through a handful of topics over and over. Week one, quantum interpretations; week two, EPR/Bell’s theorem/non-locality; week three, something about cosmology or high energy physics; week four, philosophy of science. Lather, rinse, walk in front of a bus because I’m so sick of all of these.

The other thing that “works” in the sense of driving traffic is the news hit, a quick explainer about some recent high-profile result. But here we run into the problem that I’ve never had any interest in being a journalist. I can do quickie news stories about recent results, but there are lots of other people who can do them just as well, and they probably enjoy it more than I do.

Back in the more free-wheeling heyday of Scienceblogs, my value add was to do a really deep dive on the details of news-y papers in my field, digging into the technical details you won’t get from a Dennis Overbye or Kenneth Change. That doesn’t fly as well at Forbes, for a whole bunch of reasons, most of them relating to the fact that Forbes is a high-profile company and thus feels more bound by standards and practices regarding the use of images. I can’t just grab a data graph out of a paper on the arxiv and paste it into the post the way I did circa 2010, and if I’m not doing that kind of detailed discussion, I don’t feel like I’m adding all that much. And making my own versions of figures that are relevant and important to doing a deeper explanation is a slog.

The deepest problem, though, goes back to the “lost golden age” thing, which is that back when I started in the blogging game, writing a blog felt like participation in a conversation, if not a community. And it just doesn’t, any more. This was driven home this morning when I saw a pair of old-school posts, one from Timothy Burke, the other from Matt Reed. The actual subject matter hardly matters; what hit me was that they’re talking to each other, and I hadn’t completely realized how much I missed that aspect of the ancient blogosphere.

In theory, this conversational aspect of things still exists, it’s just moved to Twitter. That doesn’t entirely work, though, because Twitter is deliberately ephemeral. In the language of remote instruction that we’ve all been forced to learn in 2020, Twitter is a synchronous medium, rewarding live in-the-moment engagement, while blogs are asynchronous, something you can come back to hours or days later.

While I do use Twitter, probably a bit too much, the synchronous aspect of it doesn’t really work for me. The peak times for Twitter engagement, at least for Americans like me, are during the hours when I’m feeding the kids, getting them to bed, and going to sleep myself. The times when I’m readily available to engage on Twitter are 6-10am Eastern US time, which is a great time to engage with people who are really upset about UK politics and Australians who have stayed up too late.

I do post stuff to Twitter, and when I blog things that I want people to read, I’ll post and re-post links to them at later hours. Hardly anyone actually clicks through, though, and there’s rarely much in the way of conversation. So a thing that used to be a huge piece of the experience is pretty well gone.

Putting all that together, blogging has started to feel a bit like screaming into the void. A void that I have to go down a rickety flight of stairs into a damp and low-ceilinged basement to yell at. And at some point, it just didn’t seem worth bothering to do that.

I’m not officially resigning or anything like that– I will eventually have a new book to promote– and it may well be that some near-future event will motivate me to start blogging again. If nothing else, the Nobel announcements are coming in early October, and it’s always possible they’ll give the Physics prize to something that really excites me. For the last few months, though, every time I’ve started to contemplate writing a post, it’s seemed more like a dreary obligation than something fun to do, and, you know, I started this to be a fun hobby, not another job. I’ll pick it back up when it seems like fun again.

Three-ish weeks ago, I realized I was getting incredibly twitchy over the fact that we weren’t doing anything this summer. Normally, we’d have at least one big vacation trip planned, and have kid sports or other such activities on weekends, but all of that has been shut down because of the Covid pandemic. We couldn’t even go to visit my parents, because of some family health issues.

This hits me much harder than anyone else in Chateau Steelypips, because I’m not good with having nothing to do, and I don’t really have sedentary indoor hobbies. The kids are happy to watch YouTube and play Nintendo games, and Kate does cross-stitch, but my preferred hobby activities are all out-of-the-house stuff. I’ve been taking a lot of long bike rides and going hiking with my camera, but even those things get kind of monotonous after weeks of being stuck in one place.

Having realized that, I went on AirBnB and looked for someplace safe to visit within driving distance, and found a rental cottage in Stowe. It’s a free-standing building so no need to interact with other people, it had a pool (and, as it turns out, a basketball court), and there’s no shortage of good restaurants there doing take-out. It’s also near one of my close friends from college, so we were able to get together with them outdoors in a park.

This turned out to be exactly what we needed. Okay, the attempt to do a little hiking wasn’t a smashing success– the parking lot at the very top of Mt. Mansfield was full, and after the half-mile walk to the top from the next lot down, the kids refused to go any further (I walked back down by myself, and brought the car up to get them). But the pool and the basketball court were a huge hit. The kids even tried new foods, which is a huge development, since they’re both insanely picky eaters.

So, yeah, that was our much-needed change of scenery for the weekend. That recharge will hopefully keep us sane through the next couple of weeks of prep for what’s sure to be an incredibly stressful re-start of school…

Freddie de Boer is a… Let’s go with “polarizing figure.” I forget how I first ran across him, but I’ve found him a consistently interesting writer, mostly because he hews very closely to his own very particular interpretation of things, in a way that doesn’t line up especially well with either side in the Culture Wars. He’s an avowed Marxist who’s probably more intensely disliked by liberals than conservatives, which is quite the trick.

The Cult of Smart is a book-length exposition of his take on the American education system (defined somewhat broadly, in a way that mostly incorporates college as well as K-12), and in case you had any doubts on where he comes down based on the title, it helpfully comes with a subtitle: “How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice.” So, yeah, he’s not really a fan… His central argument is that modern American society puts too much emphasis on being “smart,” in a way that’s actively damaging to a significant portion of the population. In the process, he argues, we’ve set goals for the education system that are probably self-contradictory and definitely impossible for it to meet.

That maybe doesn’t sound so different from various Takes you might expect from people who fit comfortably within one side or the other of the Culture Wars, but his basis for the claim is pretty much guaranteed to piss people off. He argues at length that the fundamental problem with using education as a catch-all solution to a variety of forms of inequality is that some people just aren’t “smart” in the academic sense. There are, he argues, necessarily going to be individual differences in academic aptitude that will shut some substantial fraction of the population out of any benefits that can be gained from education. To put it slightly crudely, half of the population is always going to be below average, and nothing you do in the classroom is going to change that.

This is not, as he points out repeatedly (bordering on tediously), but probably futilely, an argument that particular groups of people are less academically capable than others. The claim is an individual one– some people just aren’t cut out to succeed in school, and will thus inevitably be left behind when social and economic rewards are tied too closely to getting good grades and going to good schools.

While this is positioned as a book about education policy– Amazon’s ultra-specific algorithms put it as the #1 bestseller in that area– it’s really not. Or, rather, it’s only half a book about education policy– the first half, which basically argues that none of the options in the discussion about how best to organize the public education system will work as advertised, or even matter all that much. The second part of the book is a pitch for Marxism– the real “from each according to abilities, to each according to needs” kind that avowed Marxists will tell you has never been tried. The argument being that the fundamental problem here has to do with the entire organization of society, and thus just tweaking what we do in schools and colleges is hopelessly inadequate.

That makes this kind of a difficult book to talk sensibly about. I’m largely on board with the first half argument about education, though being a person of a more sunny and optimistic disposition than de Boer, I would phrase it a little differently. That is, I agree that different people have different innate aptitudes and inclinations that make the sorts of things one needs to do for academic success more congenial for some people than others. I would tend not to describe this in terms of a lack of intelligence, or an inability to do certain kinds of things, though, because (as I’ve argued at book length), the mental toolkit we use to do things is pretty universal. Most of the people who aren’t well suited to success in school are way more capable than I am at non-academic tasks, despite my collection of academic credentials.

Framing aside, though, I basically agree with de Boer that there are a good many individuals who are ill-served by a system that ties material rewards too closely to formal educational outcomes. This is much the same argument made in Chris Arnade’s Dignity (which I talked about last summer), which phrases it in a third way but is largely saying something similar. We need a path to material success for people who aren’t likely to get there by going to college, and this is badly neglected in a lot of mainstream politics because the people who dominate those conversations tend to have reached their positions via the “standard” route of academic success.

Where I part company with this book is in the pivot to Marxism, mostly because I’m not a Marxist. Which is not to say that de Boer’s description of his socialist utopia in the final chapter doesn’t sound like a lovely place to live– it sounds great in a lot of ways. The problem is, is also reads a bit like a “Golden Age” SF story about the wonders of the future, in that it doesn’t feel inhabited by recognizable human characters with plausible human motivations. I don’t see a path from here to there that doesn’t involve space aliens replacing us all with pod people.

And that’s a shame, because I think the identify-the-problem part is really good: he’s got a decent collection of (mostly mildly depressing) evidence for his position, and presents it well, and I think the problem he’s identified is an important one. I just don’t find the long-term solution he’s proposing remotely plausible.

I suspect there’s probably a more liberal-wonk version of this book that makes a stronger case for one of the floor-setting systems (either a Universal Basic Income or a Job Guarantee) that de Boer presents briefly and dismisses a little too quickly for my tastes. That is, some intermediate level of resource redistribution that ensures that people who aren’t inclined to pursue a more academic path to success don’t risk lapsing into poverty, but leaves the academic-striver path relatively untouched. I have an easier time believing that sort of arrangement could work, and wasn’t especially persuaded by the arguments against them.

(I have a secondary criticism as well, namely that I think he oversells the awfulness of the academic grind in a way that’s sort of the mirror image of the selection and survivorship biases he identifies in a lot of discussions about school reforms. That is, I think the conversation about the negative aspects of the academic track to success tends to be dominated by people who were especially sensitive to the stresses involved, in a way that exaggerates the problems. But then, as someone with degrees from elite schools who’s a tenured professor at an elite private college, that’s exactly the sort of thing I would say…)

Anyway, I found this an interesting and thoughtful book, and it was very easy to read– whatever his faults, de Boer can certainly write. I thought the final chapters were aimed a little too directly at true believers in a cause I don’t really subscribe to, though, which ultimately made it less successful than it could’ve been. It’s worth a look, though, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, and I hope it provokes somebody to take another look at the problem it identifies and propose a different set of solutions.

So, last night at around 1am basically everyone in Chateau Steelypips was awoken by the piercing shriek of our smoke alarm system. This is not, I should not, a simple thing– it’s a system with multiple detectors, wired into the electrical power, with a unit in every bedroom. These were installed when we did our big renovation a few years back, even in the old bedrooms, because it was required by code. The leads to the mildly idiotic situation of having three detectors within ten feet of one another wired so that if one goes off they all go off, but whatever.

I said that these are wired into the electrical system, but they also have batteries, as a back-up. Which is sort of admirable, but the user interface for these units was apparently designed by a syphilitic chimpanzee, because the only “low battery” indicator they offer is the occasional piercing beep. OK, well, there’s also a status LED on the units that mostly glows green, but occasionally flashes red, at long and irregular intervals that may correlate with the battery level. Not clear, really, because syphilitic chimpanzees tend not to be literate, and thus didn’t provide any useful markings on the outside.

Anyway, while it was unpleasant to be awakened that way, I silenced the alarm, and said “OK, tomorrow we change all the batteries.” We got The Pip back into his bed, and settled down to try to get back to sleep…

And ten minutes later, the alarms all went off again. Shit. Push the hush button to silence the alarms, and this time I go downstairs to check on the unit near the kitchen, which is connected to all the others. Nothing useful there, either, but Charlie the pupper enjoyed getting let out of his gated-in area of the mud room in the middle of the night.

Back upstairs, calm The Pip down, shrieking alarms again. Double shit. The units in the bedrooms are literally the only things we own that take 9V batteries, so I’m fairly certain we don’t have spares, but I go down to check the battery stash, and miracle of miracles, we’ve got two. Of course, there are four units that need 9V batteries, but I figure maybe I can fix it by replacing the batteries that are lowest.

Hah. Syphilitic chimpanzees, remember. There is no clear indication of what the battery status is, other than an exceedingly irregular red flash and the occasional piercing beep. So I’m stumbling from bedroom to bedroom trying to decide if THIS light is more red more often than THAT light, and every couple of minutes the alarms keep going off. The hush button is no longer immediately working to silence them, either, and as a bonus, the unit in the hall has started playing a recorded voice saying “FIRE. FIRE. FIRE.”

Needing more batteries than I have, I start getting my shit together to go look for a 24-hour store where I might get some, but the goddamn alarms WON’T. SHUT. UP., and The Pip is seriously freaking out. (SteelyKid is only barely awake. Ah, to be an almost-teen…) So I start disconnecting the units– pulling the batteries, and unplugging them from the electrical lines. I am just barely calm enough to resist the temptation to rip the miserable things out of the ceiling, but I actually undo the plugs.

Four bedroom units unplugged, fine. Hall unit unplugged, the recorded voice stops. Still beeping coming from downstairs, so I go through the kitchen and unplug the unit there.

STILL beeping. Faint, but audible. Also, the voice. Back upstairs where all the units are silent and unpowered. And the beeping/voice is fainter. Back downstairs, where I don’t see another unit…

And that, dear reader, is how I learned that there’s ALSO a smoke detector unit in the basement, directly above the washing machine. It’s the same style as the hall unit upstairs (which I think may mean it’s also a carbon monoxide detector), so it takes not 9V batteries but AA batteries, and the ones in there are branded with the manufacturer’s name. Since I didn’t know the miserable thing was squatting down there, it didn’t get fresh batteries the LAST time we went through this nonsense (also in the small hours of the night, because the chimpanzees apparently built in a clock to only trigger the alarm at the worst possible time). I’m fairly certain those batteries haven’t been changed since the system was installed in the fall of 2017.

And, again, the only signal we get from this is the alarms randomly going off in the middle of the night. With a recorded voice saying “FIRE. FIRE. FIRE,” which is NOT HELPFUL. If you’ve gone to the trouble of putting in a goddamn voice chip, maybe a “LOW BATTERY” message would be good? Just a thought…

So, anyway, that all took an hour, then there was another good chunk of time waiting for my adrenaline levels to drop back to a point where I could even contemplate getting back to sleep, and now I’m going to be pretty much useless for the entire day today. Much of which will now be taken up with buying batteries and trying to reconnect all these stupid smoke detectors.

As mentioned in the previous post, I was on the DC suburbs for a couple of days, and ended up spending a lot of time in my hotel room binge-watching the HBO series Watchmen, because it was free to stream from Amazon. It was generally very good in terms of the visuals and acting performances, and the subject matter is obviously very timely, but I thought the ending was an unholy mess. Which is probably worth explaining in a blog post, but first some spoiler space:

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So, there are three things about the way this wrapped up that bugged me (with some subsidiary annoyances that come with the genre trappings). From least to most specific to this particular work, those were:

1) I didn’t like that they brought Dr. Manhattan back into this. I thought the show worked best in the early episodes where it was primarily about other people trying to navigate the world and assert some agency without the benefit of actual superpowers. To be fair, I find the Manhattan stuff probably the least compelling part of the original comic, too.

This also ran into some consistency issues with the original, given that a big part of Manhattan’s shtick is that he’s experiencing everything simultaneously, which ought to mean that back when he was going through this whole wrenching break-up with Laurie in the original comics, he should’ve been fully aware that he was going to fall in love again thirty-odd years later. Which, you know, you might think would’ve been worth a mention at some point.

There’s a potentially rich story to be mined out of the “experience everything at once” aspect of the character, and particularly the way that interacts with Reeves’s bitter remark that “He could’ve done more.” That doesn’t entirely fit with the Manhattan character’s regular remarks about the inevitability of the future, and there’s probably a story to be gotten out of the tension between the (apparently) fixed timeline and the seemingly unlimited power of the character, but this isn’t that.

And, ultimately, Dr. Manhattan is just too big for what this is. I think he worked better as a distant McGuffin than an actual element of the plot.

2) Speaking of his role in the plot, the end of the evil schemes drove me nuts. One of the best little bits of the Watchmen comic (and one of the few actually captured in the movie version) is the showdown with Veidt, where he gives his evil-villain monologue, then when they ask when he thought he was going to do this, replies “I did it thirty-five minutes ago.” It’s a great undercutting of the Bond-villain speech trope.

This version of Watchmen, though, has not one but two Bond-villain monologues spilling out the whole plot (one each from Senator Keene (R-KKK) and Lady Trieu), the second of which directly leads to the thwarting of said plot. Not only is this kind of lazy in storytelling terms, they don’t even have Veidt comment on it, when it’s sitting right there. If he had said something along the lines of “And that’s why you don’t reveal your plan before it’s complete,” well, it still would’ve been stupid, but it would’ve been closer to forgivable.

(And, Lord, the plot resolution is stupid. The frozen squid bombing central Tulsa punch a hole through Trieu’s hand and demolish her apotheosis sphere, but the roof of the movie theater right across the street is bulletproof? So is the phone booth where Bian hides? None of the masked cops who show up get holes punched through them?)

That brings us to:

3) The whole Reeves-Angela plot makes next to no sense, and in particular, his final cathartic speech just seems to drop in out of a completely different series. The line about needing to take off the mask because “Wounds need air” is a lovely metaphor, but has essentially no grounding in the world of the show. It’d work a whole lot better if there was anybody you could point to as an example of someone who gave up masked vigilantism and found peace through sharing their pain, but there’s nobody. The closest example might be Laurie, and she’s pretty clearly still a mess.

And I think in the end, that’s the failing of the series as a whole, a failing it shares with the Zack Snyder movie. At the end of the day, Snyder took a book about how the whole idea of superheroism is fundamentally fucked-up and made a movie whose main take away is “You know what’s awesome? Masked vigilantes!” The movie was widely denounced for that, rightly so. In the end, though, I think this series ends up in basically the same place, but largely gets a pass because of its choice of villains. That is, the final message ends up being “Masked vigilantes are awesome, as long as they’re fighting the KKK!” and I think that’s ultimately just as problematic.

Which sort of circles back to the Dr. Manhattan thing, and especially Reeves’s comment about how he could’ve done more with that power. At the end, we’re clearly supposed to think that Angela has acquired Manhattan’s powers, and will use them to do more, and we’re expected to be rooting for that. But that’s kind of diametrically opposed to one of the key themes of the original comic, which is that anybody having that kind of power is a Bad Thing.

There is some potential there for a story about that, with Angela discovering that the seemingly unlimited power in fact comes with tight limits, and that you can’t just fix the world. That could be interesting, but would be a hard turn from where this seems to end, and boy, it wouldn’t be a fun watch.

So, as I said, it was an enjoyable series (modulo the usual genre-imposed silliness), and Regina King and Tim Blake Nelson turn in great performances. Jeremy Irons as Veidt is a lot of fun, too. Ultimately, though, the end is an unholy mess and ends up in a thematic place that’s just wrong.

Tuesday night I was in the DC suburbs for reasons I’ll talk about at another time, and at one point I found myself sitting on the tiny balcony outside my hotel room, eating Korean take-out, drinking beer out of the water glasses that came in the room, and watching streaming video on my Chromebook, which was propped up on top of the ice bucket holding the can with the half-a-beer that wouldn’t fit in the glass. It struck me that, last year at this time, this would’ve been an establishing shot used in a prestige TV show to illustrate how pathetic my character was, but under the current circumstances this very well may have counted as living my best life.

I went back and forth a bunch about whether to make this trip or not (and another round of back-and-forth about whether to talk about having done it), but ultimately decided it was worth the risk, which was pretty minimal. There were probably ten times during the whole three-day trip when I was within 20 feet of another person with neither of us wearing a mask, and eight of those were outdoors.

In normal circumstances, this trip would’ve involved a flight from Albany probably to BWI, but we’re a good long way from me being willing to get on a plane, so I drove down. The drive, segments of which I’ve done A LOT over the years, featured probably the lightest traffic I have ever seen on the New Jersey Turnpike during daylight hours. It was a refreshing glimpse of normality, though, to see that the Outer Loop of the DC Beltway still managed to produce backed-up traffic at the Mormon Temple as I was leaving Wednesday morning. Way to go, DC.

I normally really enjoy travel, but this was kind of freaky. Lots of businesses are still closed (including most of the food service at rest areas on the various major roads), and what’s open was pretty empty. The hotel I was in was an absolute Overlook-Hotel-style ghost town: I interacted briefly with the desk clerk at check-in and check-out, and otherwise never laid eyes on another human. I left the “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door, but I’m not sure they would’ve had housekeeping clean the room until after I checked out, anyway. (I left them double the tip I usually would’ve.)

I brought beer and breakfast food from home, and got take-out for the two other meals I had in the DC area. One of those, I ate in a park, the other was the aforementioned balcony dinner (for the record, the Korean food was pretty good). I ended up binge-watching WATCHMEN on streaming video because my usual go-to activity during hotel stays is to watch random sporting events, preferably in a bar, but there are no live sports and I wouldn’t’ve been willing to sit in a random bar even if one were open. The two meals I had on the road were drive-thru fast food (I actually got off the Thruway to get mediocre chain drive-thru because there was no way I was standing in line to get Roy Rogers…).

So, you know, not the most pleasant trip, but not completely horrible. Just… weird. Not remotely a normal travel experience, and little sign that people are rushing back out to “re-open the economy,” at least in the handful of mid-Atlantic states I passed through.

Any discussion of going outside these days has to meet a compulsory “Judging the behavior of strangers” component, so I’ll say that where I was, mask-wearing was pretty much universal. It helps that all the businesses I went to had signs up saying masks were required by law. I tend to think these assessments are mostly a glass-half-full sort of thing, though, telling you more about the person doing the judging than anything else. When I say it was pretty much universal, I mean I didn’t see anybody pointedly not wearing a mask indoors in public spaces. There were lots of maskless people walking in parks, or putting on/taking off masks right outside the doors of businesses, but neither of those particularly bother me. In fact, I’m moderately certain I was the “OMG, that guy doesn’t have a mask on!” for somebody else in one of those parks or parking lots.

Anyway, it was a weird experience, and not one I’m in a huge hurry to repeat. I was actually worried before I left that it would feel more risky than it did in the moment. The little contact I had with people was very limited, and everybody involved was acting responsibly. The specific reason for this trip isn’t going to recur for a good while, but if I had a need to make another overnight trip in the general Northeast/ Mid-Atlantic region in the next week or two, I don’t think I’d be all that concerned. Past that, it’s harder to say, because every forecast these days has an implicit two-week horizon.

Sunday morning, there was a bit of activity in Chateau Steelypips to get SteelyKid set up to play a long-neglected game on the Nintendo Switch with a classmate online. At lunch, SteelyKid mentioned in passing “Hey, [Name] says he’s going to the Black Lives Matter rally at the town hall this afternoon. Can we go?”

This was the first I’d heard of any such rally, and Google didn’t turn anything up, either. Searching just “Niskayuna” on Twitter finally turned up one photo of a flier announcing a rally to be held at the Town Hall at 2:30 that afternoon. That’s not a long walk from our house, so SteelyKid and I hoofed it over there a bit past 2.

The total lack of information about this in local papers, etc. left me not knowing what to expect, but as you can see from the photo above, they got a pretty good turnout despite only advertising via word-of-mouth (according to a colleague who’s on one of the mailing lists they used). I counted about 50 people in the immediate area where we were, and trying to estimate the number of such blocks needed to tile the lawn area where people were sitting would put the crowd at 500-ish. Essentially everyone was wearing a mask of one sort or another, and people were making some effort to maintain separation between groups.

I am not, as a general rule, a political rally person; I strongly dislike being in crowds, and I can’t turn off the part of my brain that automatically critiques the content and technique of speeches. I also prefer to keep moving around (my back starts to give me trouble if I stand in one place for too long), so I spent a lot of the rally pacing back and forth along the edge of the crowd. I suspect there were probably a few people who had me pegged as an undercover cop. (There were no visible police present, though the police station is right there, so I’m sure they had eyes on it from inside.)

While this isn’t a thing I’m going to take up doing every weekend, I’m glad we went. It was important for us to show support for the general cause of supporting communities who are too often victimized by authority (though it remains mildly appalling that such an obvious cause is at all controversial). It was also encouraging to see so much support from the general community. It was especially encouraging to see the active role of the younger generation– the organizers were high-school students, as were a lot of the attendees, and SteelyKid’s age cohort was similarly well represented. The kids, as they say, are all right.

I could quibble with some of the speeches– as noted above, I can’t turn that off– but that would be poor form given the cause and the youth of the organizers. There was a lot of passion from the speakers, and generally positive energy from the crowd, and that’s what matters. I hope that both of those can be carried forward and channeled to make meaningful change for the better, so that when SteelyKid is my age, this is no longer an issue that requires street protests.

There’s a chance conversation I had several years ago that keeps coming back to mind recently. The college rents space in the summer to a number of camps, which for a long time included a weight-loss camp. We used to see those campers sort of grudgingly shuffling through various activities in the Field House when we went there to play our regular pick-up basketball game.

One day while we were waiting for enough people to show up to get our game going, I remarked on the weight-loss campers to another player, a guy who, like me, has on more than one occasion lost tens of pounds only to find them again a few years later. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was basically noting that they seemed to give up on whatever thing they were supposed to be doing really easily.

I do remember his reply, though, which was “The thing to keep in mind is that you and me, we’ve been in good shape, and we remember what that felt like. And we remember what it took to get there. So we know that it sucks, but the payoff is worth it. These kids have never been in shape in their lives, so they don’t really understand that it gets better on the other side.”

This came to mind most recently on a bike ride on Thursday, which has been my main form of exercise during the lockdown. Thursday’s route was the one that involves going up some very substantial hills, and I was congratulating myself for making it up the last and steepest of those with less down-shifting than usual. I was also sweating profusely and gasping for breath, and realized that that level of exertion probably seems like a weird thing to celebrate to the people whose houses I pass along that route (especially since there’s a longer but less steep route to the top of the same hill a few blocks away…).

But of course, the point is not just to get to the top of the hill, in which case I would’ve used more of the gears. The point is to be gasping and sweating at the top of that hill, because I know that gets me in better shape than I am now, and that’s worth the effort. And if I can do that hill with minimal downshifting, then I can ride some other, more interesting routes that involve going down big hills I’ll have to get back up to get home. But I only know that because I’ve been through the process before.

(Sadly, this is not the sort of hill where reaching the top means that you get to go down a big hill on the other side; such are the problems of living on high ground…)

I also thought of that conversation while out biking with The Pip, who decided out of the blue to learn to ride a bike in early March, just before the schools closed. I actually made a run to Target to get him the very last bike they had in stock in his size about a week after the state orders that shut most things down. This was well worth it, as it turns out…

We went out on a ride that required coming back up a bit of a hill, and I was urging him on to keep going and not stop pedalling and walk. When we got to the top, he grumpily asked “Why are we doing this?!?!”

And, you know, the answer is pretty much the same as why I go up the steep hill on one of my bike routes: because if you push yourself to do that, it will be easier later to do other things that are too hard right now. I want him to be able to easily bike up the fairly gentle hill he was complaining about so that later we can bike up a steeper hill with difficulty, which will become easier, and then we can start riding more interesting places. It’s sort of hard to explain that to an eight-year-old, though, for more or less the same reason it’s hard to explain to the weight-loss campers why they needed to do whatever it was that they were quitting on.

(To be fair to The Pip, he actually does have some idea of this, because he’s a persistent Little Dude, and will latch on to specific physical goals and doggedly pursue them. He actually asked for a pull-up bar to put in his room, which is now installed in the doorway to his room (at forehead height on me, in case you want proof of how much I love my son). And while he could barely hang on it when I first put it there, six or so months later, he’s done more honest chin-ups than I have in my entire life.)

I also think it’s a useful concept to keep in mind for teaching, through Rhett Allain’s great analogy about confusion as the sweat of learning. A lot of students struggling with problems are inclined to give up, because they don’t realize that the struggle is part of the point. And since they’ve never been good at solving those kinds of problems, they don’t see the benefit.

The trick with all these things is getting the person who needs to do the work to want to do the work. And the paradox of that is that it’s often easier to see the benefits of doing the hard thing after you’ve already been on the other side, and seen how things get better over there.

Well, it’s certainly been a weird year to this point… It has, at least, included a bit of physics blogging, three months of which I’ll collect here for your convenience:

— Why Should Non-Physicists Learn About Quantum Mechanics?: I get this question fairly often, so here’s an answer.

— In Praise Of “Normal Science”: This one got me a lot of angry tweets from philosophers, but it’s not really about them.

— Coronavirus And the Future Of Physics Conferences: Written very hastily after the last-minute cancellation of the American Physical Society’s March Meeting, a move which looks a lot better now than it did in the moment…

— Social Distancing During The Coronavirus Outbreak Is The Perfect Time To Do Some Science: A pitch for at-home experiments, at a time when I was hastily developing at-home activities to assign students in my Spring term class.

This is a shorter list than usual because I took the month of February off from blogging, for a bunch of reasons. I’ve put up a lot of stuff already in April, though, as working from home makes blogging more attractive…