Fun fact: Decades from now, with school a distant memory, you’ll still be having this dream.
It is true for me: I left grad school in 1976. Allowing for trivial variations, this is still one of my two most frequent nightmares.
A note in one of jeff_duntemann‘s Odd Lots led me to Look Who’s Irrational Now, reporting on a study by Baylor University and the Gallup organization. with some surprising conclusions
A transcript of Severn Darden’s “Metaphysics Lecture”, which I heard many times on WFMT’s Midnight Special, is on-line.
Continue reading
(Especially for rhymeswithghoti)
Two recent incidents at Midwestern universities, actually quite similar IMHO:
From If you reject a teaching job applicant because he believes a crazy conspiracy theory…:
[….] the University of Wisconsin has not rehired 9/11 conspiracy believer Kevin Barrett to teach a course on the history of Islam. […] if we know a person believes something truly nutty, are we not entitled to use that as evidence of his intelligence, judgment, and trustworthiness?
From Silly creationists, Universities are for scientists:
….Iowa State University denied tenure to astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez. As it happens, Gonzalez is an advocate of Intelligent Design, which has been legally ruled to be not only religion, but actually just warmed-over creationism.
I believe both Universities acted correctly.
From Cosmic Variance
The spheroidal distribution of stars in the centers of rotating disk galaxies is called the “bulge”. Now, introduce a bunch of bored and horny 19 year olds into the mix, and you have a dangerous cocktail. One of my colleagues lost complete control of a 250 person lecture class when she had two male students hold up pictures of different galaxies, while she expounded on how “This guy over here has a small bulge, but the bulge of this guy is quite prominent.” The titters started as she forged ahead unknowing, until the entire class collapsed in hysterics. At that point, you just have to put down your laser pointer, send the class home, and head for the bar. Learning is over.
This reminded me of how my classes in quantum mechanics taught me about the mathematics of bras.
This is a German academic term that my father taught me several decades ago. It is the ability to sit for hours and hours at some tedious task. Some things just cannot done by a sudden stroke of genius. You just have to sit down and work through them. My parents had plenty of Sitzfleisch and their academic success shows the importance of it.
I was thinking of this lately because I had to muster a considerable amount of Sitzfleisch this past week. My Carleton College class is having its 35 year reunion next June, and I am on the committee. One of things we are working on is a class web site. Somebody thought it be cool to have our pictures from the New Student Book of 1968 (everybody’s high school graduation photo) on the website. I am not sure of the exact title, since everybody referred to it simply as the Zoobook. So one of the committee members scanned the whole book in, carefully labelling each picture. Then I had to upload and label these pictures, all 480 JPEGS, to the website. As a veteran computer worker I thought there ought to be some clever way to script this and do it in bulk. But I did not have quite the access to the site to manage this. So I settled down and in my copious (hah!) spare time uploaded and labeled them all. Hence Sitzfleisch. Chris, who actually scanned all the pictures needed even more Sitzfleisch. I shudder just thinking about how long that took.
A little googling showed that Sitzfleisch is also used in some non-academic contexts. It is considered an essential quality for success in chess and poker, and in listening to Wagner’s operas.
From Hilbert Space to Dilbert Space, and beyond 