A little bonus seasonal musical content:
Thanks to our trimester calendar, I have December off from teaching, which means a lot of blogging. January will start up with me doing two classes a day, so expect a precipitous drop in posting rate, but for now, a lot of material…
Me on Substack:
— The Kids Are… All Right-er?: In which my limited exposure to first-term students in the Fall term makes me cautiously optimistic.
— Assessment Needs to Be Worth the Hassle: On the trade-offs inherent in trying to evaluate teaching performance.
— My Moment as a Concert Promoter: In which YouTube Music reminds me of a silly episode from my involvement with a big student life initiative.
— Deans and Lawyers and Congress, Oh My: On my least favorite faculty meetings and That Congressional Hearing.
— “Mandatory Interesting Discussion” Is an Oxymoron: Why the need for scale means workplace trainings will always be insulting to your intelligence.
— On Working Alone: How not being in an office around people can be a real drag.
— On Academic Misery: Against the practice of slogging through activities you don’t enjoy in hopes of achieving some incremental boost in college admissions.
— A Scientific Life, Minus the Science: A negative-ish review of the book that inspired Oppenheimer.
— Spacetime Santa Dynamics: Some holiday silliness, using General Relativity to explain the distribution of gifts.
— The Angst of Low Demand: A bit of “There but for the grace of God…” looking at the fate of some low-enrollment departments at a nearby institution.
Me Elsewhere:
— Radiant Chills: The Revolutionary Science of Laser Cooling: A podcast with Physics World about the pieces I wrote for them.
— How the Ancient Greeks Measured Time Shows What they Valued: I honestly don’t remember when this interview was done, but these are definitely the kinds of things I say about time and timekeeping.
Links Dump:
— You Could Not Pay Me Enough to Be a College Administrator, by Dan Drezner: I basically agree with this (though, really, you probably could, it would just be a lot of money for not-that-many years…).
— Why Does Taylor Swift Want More, by Freddie de Boer: I think this mistakes a kind of driven personality for greed, at least to some degree, but never got around to writing a full post about that.
— A Child of Many Mothers: Sequels, Asterisks, and the Expanding MCU by Harry Connolly: A fairly perceptive take on why Marvel is where it is; the difference is that Harry is a comics guy and I am very much not, so we end up with different feelings about this.
— How Many Hobbits: A Demographic Analysis of Middle Earth by Lyman Stone: Gloriously dorky.
— The Humanities Have Sown the Seeds of Their Own Destruction by Tyler Austin Harper: I don’t entirely agree with this, but explaining why and how requires a tricky bit of needle-threading that often isn’t worth the effort in terms of engagement with the final product. So I may never get around to writing a response.
— Should Math Class be Hard? by Ben Orlin: An interesting bit of reflection on different pictures of education.
— We've Survived Another Year! Make It Count. by Jason Pargin: This is old, but I don’t think I had seen it before, and anyway it’s lovely in its way.
Pseudo-Random Photo of the Month:
There’s a very real sense in which this ought to be the photo of the (end of the) month:
That’s my left hand with the splint they gave me at urgent care after I dislocated my little finger in a pick-up basketball game. It hurt like a sonofabitch, and when I looked down the tip was pointing in a different direction than the rest of the finger, so I popped it back in place and subbed out. The PA who treated me said “You really did a number on that little bone…” but it’s the smallest finger of my non-dominant hand, so hardly a debilitating injury now that the pain has subsided.
So, really, the actual photo of the month is this:
Whatever Winter Solstice-ish holiday you choose to observe, I hope you had a great one, and I hope your 2024 exceeds your most optimistic expectations for the year to come.
Pseudo-Random Song of the Week:
Even more seasonal musical content.
And that’s a wrap-up of recent substantive blogging, and also pretty much a wrap for substantive blogging in 2023. It’s possible that I might do a Movie Night recap tomorrow, but since Monday is also a holiday, probably not. If you want to find out, here’s a button:
And if you feel moved to remark on any of this, or 2023 in general, the comments will be open: