Quick Hits: Grades, Quantum Nonsense, Wholesome Americana

Brief(-ish) thoughts on some stuff

It’s another crazy-busy week here, but I find myself with a bit of time, so will attempt to bang out some quick reactions to a few recent-ish items:

— Over at Inside Higher Ed they did some sort of update that broke the RSS feed I used to keep track of Matt “Dean Dad” Reed, so he built up a bit of an unread backlog for me. Among those posts was this reflection on failing and failing-adjacent grades, which links to an older post wondering about what a “D” grade means.

This is a case that is strongly inflected by our differing institutional contexts. Reed is (famously) at a community college, and so is deeply concerned with which credits transfer to the schools their students will go on to in the future, in which case a “D” really is pretty mysterious and useless. For me, in the four-year-college context, a “D” grade doesn’t have the same level of confusion: it means “Major in something else.”

That’s deliberately a little harsh, for rhetorical effect, but I think gets at the essence: it’s a grade for students who have put in enough work that they shouldn’t be made to re-take a given class, but really should not proceed any further in any course of study that would require that class as a pre-requisite for future work. In our context, where transfer to another school isn’t anything we concern ourselves with, that’s a sensible thing: a course with a “D” grade generally counts toward things like Gen Ed requirements, so is not a bar to on-time graduation, but it can close off a major track, particularly in the more hierarchical STEM disciplines.

And that’s sometimes a thing that needs to happen. We get students who just don’t have the level of comfort with mathematics that is required to complete a major in physical sciences or engineering, but are otherwise perfectly fine. They do the work and hand it in, they just don’t have the tools to do it well, and usually are perfectly aware of that. Unlike an “F,” which would require taking another course to replace the failure, a “D” doesn’t hold them back from majoring in a subject that better suits their skills and interests and still graduating in four years. It sends the same “you’re on the wrong track” message, but in a somewhat gentler way.

— Speaking of people who are on the wrong track, Michio Kaku went on the Joe Rogan podcast to promote his new book about quantum computing, and said a bunch of, um, stuff. Some… highlights? can be found in this Twitter thread from someone at a UK company that’s actually in the field. It’s not a terribly surprising performance from Kaku, who’s been badly misunderstanding quantum things for well over a decade— see, for example, the time I ranted about him back in 2010.

(Amusingly, this was before I went on his radio show to promote my talking-dog relativity book, which was a singularly odd experience, but not super relevant here…)

This was, however, pretty disappointing, because it’s another example of nonsense displacing real science. As I noted on Twitter, I would be more than willing to go on Rogan’s show and say things about quantum physics that are 99.44% less nonsensical than what Kaku says in those clips. But in a lot of ways that unwillingness to spout gibberish is a near-complete bar to getting that level of publicity.

(Still, the offer is open. Have your people call me, Joe Rogan…)

What’s really annoying is that “Write a book about quantum computing” was a thing I specifically rejected as a Next Project when A Brief History of Timekeeping wrapped up. Mostly because I couldn’t think of a really good “hook” for it that would carry it past my unwillingness to be a hype machine. And now I’m kicking myself a little, because it doesn’t seem like anybody else has stepped into the role of writing a general-audience book about the field that isn’t full of arrant nonsense, but it’s likely too late to jump in there.

— One of the things keeping me horrendously busy this week is Wholesome Americana, in the form of kid baseball:

Last night was The Pip’s third game of the extended weekend (rec baseball Saturday afternoon, travel Sunday morning, rec again Monday night), a 14-9 win that was more tense than the score might suggest. Watching the two rec games this weekend, though, was a real “The kids are all right…” moment.

The Saturday and Monday games were both in the town rec league, which even at the “Majors” level (mostly sixth and seventh graders) includes a number of kids who are… not good, to put it bluntly. A couple of them have developmental issues, others are just profoundly unathletic.

This was striking to me because back in my day, when dust from, the Chicxulub impactor was still settling on the field during games, you would not have seen those kids still playing baseball at this stage, even in a local rec league. They would’ve been mercilessly hounded out, derided as an “easy out” and the like every time they came up, by the adults associated with the teams. The kids would’ve been even worse. At best they would’ve been grudgingly accepted as a necessary body to get to the threshold number needed to play: “OK, fine, we’ll take the girl, you get the fat kid.”

Now, though… When those kids came up to bat, their teammates are actively rooting for them, in a positive way. In some cases, they’re being cheered on by both teams, which is absolutely mind-boggling to somebody of my generation.

This is a bit of a recurring theme for me: that kids these days are just vastly better as people than we were back in the day. There was a level of casual brutality back in the 70’s and 80’s that I think goes unappreciated nowadays— standards have changed to a point where you can’t even put it in TV shows that are set in that era, because modern audiences wouldn’t stand for it (it’s one of the weakest points of Stranger Things).

It’s probably worth keeping that in mind as you read the umpteenth thinkpiece of the week about the various crises facing Kids These Days.

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So, yeah, that’s some stuff. I probably won’t have time to blog again this week, but if you want to see what drags me back in, here’s a button:

And if you feel moved to respond to any of this, the comments will be open: