Crowdblogging

A bit of meta-blogging here. I was thinking about suggesting to some of my students that they read my blog if they thought that I had anything interesting to say. And it occurred to me that even though I think I do have interesting things to say, it's not really up to me, is it? That inspired me to start thinking about crowdsourced feedback. 

There's a lot of talk about the wisdom of the crowds on one hand and on the other hand, on review sites, there tend to be lots of fictitious reviews placed by people paid to give positive reviews to the company. Yelp, for example uses an algorithm to determine whether a review is real or phony, and apparently it works reasonably well. Somebody did some research.

So it occurred to me that whether or not I am funny, for example, has nothing to do with whether I think I'm funny. What makes it funny whether other people, at least on some level, find it funny. So therefore, it would seem as if my sense of humor is entirely crowdsourced. 

Maybe my entire personality is crowdsourced. I always judge whether a group of people were really my friends are not by whether or not I like the way I act when I was with them. I think this is what people often do when they have no native social skills. Isn't that an external determining my internals?

Anyway, that got me wondering whether anybody has their own personality. I think they do. Some kids definitely come out into the world different than other kids. But the way you develop as a person you have just as much to do with you spend your time with as anything else. I was talking with someone the other day who said that even though they technically weren't, they always considered themselves to be an only child. And I replied that even though I am by no standard an only child, I really felt like I was. I had limited engagement with my brother and almost none with my 10 years younger sister, and on a gut level very little engagement with my parents. That I guess makes me different from a lot of children. Nobody doted on me, except maybe my dear grandmother. She loved me and used to torture my brother. So we put her in a home. Not because she doted on me.

Anyway, I was a pretty self-sufficient kid and my parents are happy to have it that way. They were busy and though they did all the basic parents stuff, meals, clothing, school, etc., they weren't exactly of major emotional support system.

All that just came from something about what I was going to talk my precalculus class about. Welcome to my world.

Florida afterthoughts

 I already wrote lots about my trip to Florida last weekend. But I didn't get too deeply into what it is like to spend that much time with my 22-year-old daughter.

Let me start by saying we had a really good time. This is the third time we've done this and it was by far the easiest and most pleasant. Still, spending that much concentrated time with an adult kid you don't see very often can be kind of intense.

I'm lucky to work in a school and be around young people all the time. I'm not completely clueless about what being younger is all about. But there were generational differences that I just find fascinating.

The biggest small thing that I noticed was turning the radio. We had a car with satellite radio, and it displayed the title and artist of every song. My daughter, somehow, can you give the dial quick twist and see every song that flashes by and pick one out. I'm a smart guy and my mind works really fast, but there's something about the skill of picking out information from these flashes that I think is a young person thing. I don't think there's anything I could do to acquire that, at least not at this stage of my life.

Not that I want to. Momentary focus, if you can call it that, is part of the whole multitasking thing that I'm still not sure is good for you. And I don't think that flashing on information without engaging with it, which I think is what's happening here, is always a good thing either. It does come in handy for picking a good song.

The other, bigger thing, is the two close, too much family thing. Parent – child relationships are inherently manipulative. The kid manipulates the parent to get what they want, a natural survival skill. And the parents manipulate the kids to get them to act in a certain way. So even though nothing bad really happened during the entire trip, by a the last day we were pretty sick of each other. We somehow managed to get in the near-argument over nothing at all.

So we decided, as we parted, that we probably would make this trip again, but that we would schedule some solo time.

More from Spring Training

The trip has been kind of a whirlwind, to be honest. We arrived Thursday night and then headed to games on Friday, with a three hour trip to a shopping mall in between. The first game was at the Phillies park and the second was that the Yankees. Both places are nice enough in their own way, but have a real major-league feel about them. The facilities are good and the atmosphere is light, but they have an almost corporate feel about them, the Yankees in particular (not much of a surprise there). They play in pleasant but sterile park across the street from where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play, which give you an idea of how not small-timey it is. The kind of spring training I experienced years back is gone.

 We didn't have to do any meals out, because we were eating at ballparks all day. By the time we're done, I will have consumed almost anything you can put between two slices of bread or on a roll. There's a lot of variety of things you can put on bread, but eventually becomes tiresome.

Saturday's game was at the Pittsburgh Pirates spring home, McKechnie Field in Bradenton, Florida. I have very vague memories of this place from my mostly inebriated trip in 1976. Back then, I was supposed to come to spring training with a friend who came down with the flu the day before and had to cancel, so I was down here by myself. I stayed at a friend of my friend's, which was completely awkward and sort of unpleasant. That wasn't his fault, it was mine.

Anyway, the McKechnie is the oldest facility left in Florida, built in the 30s I believe. It's been renovated now, so there are at least seats in it as opposed to benches. The one thing I remember is still in place- the third-baseline stands are right on a busy street, so any foul ball that carries out of the park in that direction has a more than decent chance of hitting a passing car. This idea is reinforced the stadium's PA system, which plays a screech and crunch noise every time a ball goes out. And the whole game played out like a minor league game, with raffle winners in between every inning and lots of announcements to keep the crowd busy.

The parking was catch as catch can. We parked in a small dirt lot with a dozen other cars, shepherded in by 4 kids of a combined age of maybe 30. I swear there was a 4 year-old directing traffic. It cost 5 bucks and was fine.

Honestly, I found this the most appealing of the bunch. I go to major league games in real major-league ballparks all the time. The only downside was, Bradenton is about an hour away, and with traffic it took about an hour and a half. By the time we came back, even though we decided to go to the workout room together, it was coming noticeable that we are getting a little bit sick of each other.

We've been with each other all day long and all night the whole time, and we get along pretty well for the most part, but really. When I contemplate whether I would do something like this again, what I'm going to suggest to my daughter is that, yes we do it again, and yes we make sure we have some separate time instead of being together constantly.

So today we go to an hour or so of one last game and then it's home again. Not too bad on the whole, if I must say so myself.

Joy to the world

Of the things that occurred to me during this trip, the importance of finding joy in what you do has been frequently reinforced. I'm fortunate, because I genuinely love teaching and get great joy out of that. And I feel that joy often enough that I'm cognizant of when someone seems joyless.

I hate to see joyless, first of all because I like seeing people happy, but on a larger level it's because what's the point of anything anyway? We don't know why we're here, how we're here, or what's going to happen five minutes from now. Especially if my semi advanced age, I could wake up tomorrow dead. This doesn't tremendously upset me, and I wouldn't put it in my blog if it did. It's just a fact. Life is finite, everybody dies. So if everybody dies, and we don't know if there's any point to any of it, why not try to extract the maximum pleasure you can out of whatever it is you doing?

I don't know if birds experience something like joy from flight and I don't know if other animals experience joy either. It certainly seems like a happy dog is enjoying itself, and cats seem to be enjoying themselves when they're killing something for acting ridiculous. But I don't know. It may be correct to say that life is an unpleasant interlude in up for eternity, but I don't know that for sure and what the hell? I've got to be here, so why not have fun? So yeah, I'm the one over there grinning like an idiot. And I have no embarrassment about it whatsoever.

First morning in Clearwater

As much as I love my daughter, as much as I love baseball, probably my favorite part about being in Clearwater is walking along the Gulf of Mexico in the morning. I just can't help myself. I come out for a walk and I think to myself, this is the best part of my day. This really has almost nothing to do with my daughter or the baseball or anything else were doing down here. It's just incredibly pretty and peaceful here. The sand is gorgeous the golf is placid and it's just really nice.

I know that sounds silly, because nice has turned into word that you use when you can't come up with any other compliment. That's too bad because nice is, well nice. It's especially pleasant right now, because of the circumstances of the last 12 hours or so. Not that anything bad happen, it just wasn't what I was hoping for or expecting.

Our flights went well, aside from my daughters having some difficulty getting to the airport. We arrived at the airport at almost exactly the same time, picked up the rental car with ease, and headed out towards the beach. The problem arose, because our hotel reservation had gotten somewhat messed up. This is partly my fault for changing it at the last minute, but somehow the hotel changed the reservation for two rooms into a reservation for one room.

After a few minutes of futile search for a hotel with two rooms, we decided that camping in together was our best plan. Both of us I believe had some serious hesitation about doing this. We've never done anything like that before, every time we've done this trip, and this is our third, we had our rooms. I like it that way. She likes it that way. Not an option in this case.

For a less than ideal situation, this one worked out fine. There was lots of college basketball on TV, we ate dinner in the room and found a mutually agreeable bedtime and wake up time. Although, since I'm incapable of sleeping past 7:30 or so, that involves my getting up and leaving at 7:30 then coming back at 9:15. So that's what I'm doing now, being out until I come back at the appointed hour.

Here's where I am now. I have three choices of walking from the hotel, South North or East. West takes me into the Gulf of Mexico. Today I opted for south which leads to a short bridge over to an island called Sand Key. I did a similar walk once before, when I was here by myself and was recuperating from a torn muscle. I remember how freeing it was to be able to walk that kind of distance.

Here's the view from the bridge. In the distance to the right of the 2 hotels on the left of the photo you can see pinkish building and then a medium-size building and a large whitish building we are staying in the medium-size one in between the two behemoths. 

By the time the day was over, according to my phone, I had walked 11.9 miles. Not bad for the first day.

This one goes to 11

Been a pretty tough week. I caught a cold, probably as a result of entering the ultimate breeding ground, and airplane. Kind of amazing that I could spend all my time in breeding ground 1A, a school, and suddenly catch something somewhere else.

In any event, the cold itself was pretty ordinary. The problem was that somehow, while I was in Boston, somebody turned the intensity level of my life up to 11. I got completely crunched at work at a time that I felt sick and unable to keep up. I actually yelled at someone in my office this week (I did apologize, if "I'm sorry I yelled at you, even though you deserved it" constitutes an actual apology), andI did the best I could, but by the time the week ended I was completely wrung out and wasn't really able to recover over the weekend.

So I took today off, hoping to recoup. I think I'm okay, I guess we'll find out tomorrow.

Just in case you were wondering...

Yes, sometimes teachers need a pen and if there's nobody looking, they use a whiteboard marker.

Father/daughter texting

I was watching rat mating for 40 minutes
yesterday AND saw rat surgery/sacrifice.
It was so cool.

Was that for a class?

Neurology lab

Whew! I was concerned there for a second.

hahaha
yes it was all a lab. If I just saw that on the
fly I'd freak out too.

I would hope so. You never know what you'll
see in the street.

Or the subway. Ugh.

Lots of Walking in Boston

I've spent a fair amount of my time lately doing travel planning. At one point I (figuratively) looked up and realized that we were going someplace almost every weekend for the next month and a half. Right now, we're in Boston, where we came to visit our daughter who's in school here. Boston is a pretty easy trip either by train or plane, and this particular weekend the airfare was too good to pass up ($165 round trip). We visited my daughter, who was singing in a choir performance, and spent the night.

Sunday morning, I walked from the hotel over to Cambridge. We had heard this was an easy and pleasant walk and it was in fact so. Even in a state of not feeling particularly well, it was very nice out. The sky was clear and a still, cold breeze was blowing, but this was Boston, after all. I resigned myself to my feet being cold (I had only sneakers for walking) and looked briefly at MIT, stopping in the student center to warm up and go to the bathroom. It's a nice-looking campus, I must say.

On my way back, a couple of things made it nicer than the average walk. First, as I was walking across the bridge, someone was walking in the other direction. There were lots of people out jogging, but not that many just walking around. I also noticed that the person was looking at me. I'm not used to that. Most of the time people ignore me (and everyone else) unless I'm in the way. But this person was looking at my face.

I realized it was a woman, youngish, I think (she was bundled up) and as we passed each other she smiled at me, and I smiled back. That was it, a little moment. I try to savor the moments that I have every day, but this one was totally unexpected, and it made me happy for no reason beyond the pleasure of an unexpected moment.

Once I got off the bridge, I wandered around a bit, passing the local bike shop. The photo speaks for itself, I think.


Whatever you want to say about the sign, it seems to have been effective.

The rest of the day consisted of brunch at Trident Bookshop and Cafe, our favorite breakfast place in the area. It's about 50-50 bookstore and restaurant and always bustling and the food is good. The waiter kept calling me "Boss," as in, "More coffee, boss?" I kind of liked that, and somehow it seemed at least somewhat unaffected coming from him.

After that, my daughter had too much work to hang out, so we wandered around in search of a place to sit and read, eventually landing in the so-called lobby of the Westin Hotel (it's on the 2nd floor and further shields itself from the street-ruffians by having all the bathrooms, even those in the lobby, require a room key for entrance. Ronnie and I did some intrepid exploring and eventually found one that didn't require credentials.

The Westin is a nice hotel, for a huge hotel. Our own hotel, the Marriott Copley Place, was too huge to be manageable, even for the hotel itself. It just felt like a mob scene throughout and was very unpleasant for hanging out. I didn't care for our stay particularly anyway, the room was okay but incredibly noisy.

I spent much of our time at the Westin helping students prepare for a test on my cell phone. Ridiculous technology. Eventually, we headed to the airport and home. According to my cell phone pedometer, I walked 8.1 miles all told. Not too shabby.

Linguistics follow-up

That title makes this sound more serious than it is. Someone mentioned to me today that there was not really any need for my newly coined word, backlimate, because there was already another word that meant the same thing.

Now first of all, English is full of extraneous words, like, how about extraneous? Why do we need that word? So what's the problem with another word?

The other thing is re-acclimate is not really a word- it's acclimate with a hyphened re stuck on the front. That's because you can't put re right in front of a vowel, because if you did that here you'd get reacclimate, which clearly should be pronounced "Reeklimate," which isn't suitable for polite company.

Stand up straight!

As a way of trying to help my back heal, I am trying out something called (I think) a Posturepedic t-shirt. (I just looked this up, it's called Intelliskin, which makes less sense to me). This is a tight-fitting elaskticky thing that is supposed to help my posture and take pressure off my back by keeping my shoulders from drifting forward and up while I'm sitting and doing my ADL's. It costs $90 and its bright white and comes in two versions for men, what's called a foundation shirt, which fells kind of like the material in bike shorts, and the v-neck tee, which is thinner.

Let me say one thing. Not that I didn't already respect all y'all, but I have even greater regard for womenfolk who having to wear those bra things all day.

I can't say I enjoyed it, but it seemed like it helped. It was kind of odd feeling like someone was pulling on my shoulders all the time, but I didn't have any pain while I was wearing it. I'm only supposed to wear it 30-60 minutes the first day. We'll see what happens when I wear it for longer

Lingo-istics

Today's new word is backlimate. It's the state of returning somewhere after an absence and getting comfortable again. My daughter just spent a weekend in California visiting a friend and now has to backlimate to school in Boston.

Making up words is fun and is certainly easier than using the correct words in many contexts. The trick is to make up something that will make sense even if there's no definition available. The Internet encourages this, because you can crowdsource acceptance of words pretty quickly, as happened with selfie or twerk. Of course, making up a word requires associated usage rules, like you can't get backlimated back to something because it's redundant, as it would be to take a selfie of yourself or to twerk....I'm not sure where to go with that one.

I was also pleased to discover a new word for things like iPads, which are generally called by the unsatisfying name tablet. Or in the case of the smaller ones with phones, the even worse phablet. The term I saw in a British article about touchscreens in cars is fondleslab. I checked, it's in the Urban Dictionary and seems to be more prevalent in England. From what I can tell, not every tablet is a fondleslab- for it to be deemed so requires an over-involved owner. I did not see any associated name for said owner, which is probably just as well.

This fits in nicely with my discovery of the Boston abbreviation fad of the late 1830's, which spawned OK and included other purposeful misspellings as KG (Know Go) for "no go" or "it's no use," abbreviated IKY.

Funny that this kind of playfulness disappeared then until texting gave some necessity to abbreviating all the different ways that someone can show amusement or interject that they can no longer continue to converse. I for one am glad it's back and I hope that phone with superior keyboards or voice recognition don't destroy it.

Another 10 days or so according to the Groundhog

The latest I've heard is that for the remainder of the school year we will get an automated phone call at 5AM if there is going to be school on a given day. I love cold weather. I could absolutely live in the Adirondacks (where BTW there is a 0% chance this storm would cancel or even delay school), but for Philadelphia, this is getting to be a little much of so-called winter.

This has been a very peculiar school year. It's a credit to the stubbornness and downright stickiness of the education system that there's still school at this point. Any rational outfit would have packed up and left town weeks ago. And yet in we go, trying to get what we call "done." In most cases, in reality, 'done' refers to as much as you complete during the school year. There are some instances where you actually need to get through a prescribed curriculum, AP classes in particular. But most of the time, nobody's really going to notice if the students don't know the difference between the Factor Theorem and Remainder Theorem, or if they're not totally fluent in how to find rational roots.

This is a hard thing to impress up on people, and not just in math. We're trying to help the students develop a skill set, a problem-solving toolbox of sort. Almost everything we teach is a means, not an end, and it should be valued in the context of how its contributes to the student's future success. I have no interest in teaching things that are of no use, tools without a job. Almost everything we do in math beyond arithmetic is like that, so it's important to understand that the most important thing the students can learn in our classes is to solve problems on their own.

More on this later.