Dear Angry Student,

I am so happy to hear from you! And so early in the quarter, too! Why, I have only given two lectures, and I have already deeply offended you. I couldn't be more pleased. Usually I only offend people at the end of the quarter, when I determine final grades.

Thank you for sharing your belief system with me, but I'm afraid I don't see its relevance to the scientific method, which was the topic of yesterday's lecture. Does the prospect of thinking frighten you? Do you anticipate having to objectively evaluate evidence that you would prefer to ignore? Does your particularly kooky world view forbid you from the free exchange of ideas or respecting dissenting viewpoints?

You ask that I take your feelings into account in future lectures. How do you propose that I do this? Must I, perhaps, reverse the objectives of the course? Should I teach all my students that it is appropriate to accept demonstrated fraud as fact, or that confused, credulous thinking is acceptable in scientific enterprise, because to do otherwise might hurt your feelings?

Finally, thank you so much for suggesting that I have no feelings. Surely someone as skeptical as myself has never really loved anyone, or experienced the death of someone I loved. Because if I had, as you point out, then I would be able to understand your point of view.

Sincerely,
Angry Professor, Instructor
ESP and Aliens

Attendance revisited.

We have had several discussions, here and elsewhere, on the value of requiring attendance vs. letting our students hang themselves. I think that attendance in my classes has been particularly low in past years because I make my overheads available online.

I had a frank discussion with my class about this today. I explained to (almost all 120 of) them that I had no desire to make attendance required, but that I recognized that my overheads are at times dense with material, and I would like to ease those note-taking stresses. The problems, as I saw them, were that (1) constructing note outlines would take as much time as making the overheads themselves, and I have trouble enough just keeping up with lecture prep (not a good excuse, but they seemed sympathetic), and (2) making the overheads universally available doesn't reward the students who come to class enough, in my opinion.

My students thought that making the overheads available but password protected, with the password changing with each lecture and only given out in lecture would perhaps be a reasonable solution. I think it's still too easy for no-shows to get the overheads from friends, and emailing the general announcement that the overheads were ready for those who had been to class seemed really petty and lame. But I'm going to give it a try.

Of course, not 20 minutes after I posted the overheads, someone wrote me to complain that the format was inconvenient. Sheesh.

A night in the bookshop.

Angry Baker and I were out on a date last night, and ended the evening at our local book/coffee shop. It was a lovely outing, except for the following two sightings:

At the front of the shop was a display of Catherine Crier's latest, Contempt. I glanced at a few pages and thought, Yikes! This is scary! I put the book down, reasoning that I don't like Crier anyway, sort of a preemptive ad hominem attack to rationalize my desire not to read it.

I eventually found myself at the back of the shop, where I found David Kupelian's The Marketing of Evil. I glanced through this one, too. While Crier's offering was disturbing, Kupelian made me want to run home and hide under the covers. He writes (lies) about the "myth" of church-state separation and the intentions of our "strongly Christian" founding fathers. Maybe he doesn't live in the U.S.?

So I slunk over to the "guilty pleasures" section of the shop to see if there was anything new from Amanda Cross. No such luck.

Bad chemistry in Ellesiouville, U.S.A.

I have written before of my neighbors. Generally speaking, our ideologies are more similar than dissimilar: our politics, child-rearing philosophies, and sociological concerns are the same. However, our positions on science and religion are so different that, unfortunately, we will never be able to be true friends.

Most recently, they have been discussing soap with Angry Baker. Angry Baker makes our soap. It is lovely stuff: usually superfatted, it is soft and lathers like a dream. It doesn't have the same perfectly formulated fragrance that a detergent bar has, but it is dirt cheap and not as harsh on the skin.

The making of soap requires the use of an alkali, usually NaOH (lye) for bar soaps. Here's where the problem comes in. Lye is, of course, a chemical, extraordinarily caustic even in low concentrations. According to my neighbors' logic, "chemicals" are bad, hence soap made with lye is bad.

Does soap have lye in it? Absolutely not. The process of saponification completely removes the alkali, leaving only fats and glycerin. But didn't Angry Baker just stir a whole can of lye into the soap? Yes. Then soap has lye in it. No. Such is the miracle of chemical reaction, which they can't (or refuse to?) understand.

They gave us a pamphlet, printed up by some local soapmaker, which proclaims loudly the fact that there are no "chemicals" in their soap. Well, of course there are chemicals in their soap: all substances are chemicals. But it's true that there is no lye in their soap, for the same reason that there is no lye in Angry Baker's soap. However, the pamphlet goes further, claiming that their soap was made without "chemicals," and this is just a lie. There is no way to make a bar of "soap" without an alkali or a detergent (which is worse, ecologically speaking, than the lye).

We had a similar argument a few months ago about bleached flour. Bleached flour is "bad," as we all have heard. But this is because most bleached flours are refined, not because they are bleached. We were sitting around a dinner table, and somehow the topic came up. Angry Baker had recently become interested in how flour was bleached, and attempted to explain that it was a benign process.^* In the middle of his description someone interrupted and exclaimed, derisively, that chlorine could not possibly be benign under any circumstances. It is, of course, a "chemical" that, when thrown about in large quantities, can make life miserable.

However, almost everything, in large enough quantities, can make life miserable. Water, for example, can kill in any number of ways. But life would not be possible without it, you argue? Well, life would be pretty tricky without chlorine, too. Chlorine is a component of common salt. Yes, chlorine is used to make mustard gas, but if we didn't have it, we wouldn't have salt. Among other minor functions, salt maintains the integrity of the cells of our bodies, keeps our hearts pumping, and makes our neurons fire. There would be no life on earth without chlorine.

This knee-jerk reaction to eschew any product whose manufacture was assisted by a "chemical" really bewilders me. There is a huge subculture devoted to consuming the all-natural, the organic, no-"chemical" product. Such products are marketed with lies, and cost twice as much as comparable products without the hype. I too try to purchase products that have a minimal impact on my environment, but this credulous bullshit makes me want to run to Walmart and buy a cartload of Raid Ant and Roach Killer. Doesn't anyone take chemistry in high school any more?

^*Benign with respect to the resulting flour. I have no idea if the process itself has any negative ecological impact. Edited to add: Bromate is the bleaching agent for flour, but my neighbor interjected his remark about chlorine anyway.

Congratulations, Dr. Angry Student!

Angry Student, my first "real" Ph.D. student, has just completed his oral defense with flying colors: an easy pass, no thesis revisions.

Angry Student, you were the best. You were the kind of student that every professor dreams of getting the opportunity to mentor. You actually thought about things. You had ideas. You didn't need me to tell you what was interesting. You solved problems. You taught me.

I don't care if you decide to teach, do research, or work in some private company. Go out there and make a difference. Shine. May the wind always be at your back.

A great way to procrastinate.

I just finished my academic genealogy, which I intend to present to my student who defends his dissertation tomorrow. I got back to before the Enlightenment for two branches, and the third got stuck at Gustav Fechner. I found Fechner's thesis and a nice librarian sent me the first few pages, but I can't read Latin. Any volunteers?

It was very time consuming, very educational, and very fun. Not only did I learn a lot of history of my own discipline, but I learned a lot about my library's databases. If you want to do it yourself, you should check out the Mathematics Genealogy Project, the Chemical Genealogy, Dissertation Abstracts Online, the Philosophy Family Tree, and (most important) WorldCat, the World Library Catalog from OCLC.

Random questions on a Friday morning.

How do you make the cast-on row for a sock as loose as the ribbing? I've been ripping out the cast-on row after the sock is finished (a blind cast-on), but that doesn't leave a neat edge.

For two positive continuous functions $f$ and $g$ with support $\bb{R}^+$, let $g$ be strictly increasing. For an arbitrary $f$, can I find a $g$ such that $f(g^{-1}(x)) \left| \frac{d}{dx} g^{-1}(x) \right|$ is strictly increasing when $f$ is strictly increasing and increasing-then-decreasing when $f$ is increasing-then-decreasing? If not, can I show that no such $g$ exists?

How can I convince Angry Toddler to wear panties to daycare if the Dora the Explorer panties aren't enough to make her want to?

Countdown.

I have 10 days to get all my revise/resubmits done and then I have to appear in a classroom again. Of course I won't get them done, because I have course prep to do too. And I just learned that 120+ butts are currently registered in my class and the room holds... (dramatic pause/drum roll) ...90 butts. Now this should make for interesting exam days.

Aaahhh!

My usual morning beverage, a frothy, sweet, decaffeinated concoction, was accidentally mixed with two shots of high-test caffeinated espresso. I haven't drunk caffeine for over ten years.

I'm climbing the walls. My hands are shaking, my head is pounding, and I think I really must claw my eyes out. How do all you "real" coffee drinkers handle this every day? This is one nasty dirty buzz.

On being the only one.

I don't usually feel that I have been penalized by being a female in my profession. There are very few women in my field -- there is only one other woman of senior rank in my professional society. My way up the ranks has therefore tended to be facilitated by my senior male colleagues, rather than hindered, in their desperate attempts not to appear sexist.

However, there are some things that fall to me to do because I am the only woman. These are things that I must do because my male colleagues, bless their little Y-chromosomes, simply can't see that they must be done. Today's case in point: a struggling graduate student.

This student's primary advisor is not in our department. Therefore it has been easy for her to do nothing at all without anyone taking notice. She is, after several long years of doing nothing at all, on probation, and she must submit a draft of her thesis within a few weeks or leave the program. She has been avoiding everyone, including her advisor, all summer long. We all thought that she was working on her thesis.

She came in last week from out of town. She made lots of noise in the hallway around our offices, talking about how she was in town for the sole purpose of meeting with her advisor to get the last details of her thesis ironed out. "No, I can't go to lunch with you all," she said when asked, "I have to go meet with Dr. Advisor about my thesis." She packed a huge bookbag with notes and papers and her draft. "I'm going now to meet with Dr. Advisor," she announced, and disappeared.

Well, she didn't meet with Dr. Advisor. She didn't even have an appointment with Dr. Advisor, who is pissed as hell and threatening to pull himself from her committee. She drove several hundred miles for the sole purpose of putting on a show. The rest of my colleagues are not worried at all about this behavior, chalking it up to laziness or procrastination. After all, this is not their problem, she is not their student. They are happy to boot her out of the program, weeks before she is to defend her thesis, knowing that they are doing the "right thing," that she had plenty of chances and ample warning.

All these things are true. However, no one has ever talked to her to find out if she's okay or to ask if she needs any help from us. Yes, she's a procrastinator, but she's also a sweet, smart woman, and the lying and posturing are so out of character that she must be seriously ill. So this is my task for tomorrow: I have to call her and find out what the hell is going on. I am dreading this conversation, and wishing I had a big, hard penis that could relieve me of this responsibility.

Update 9/7: I called. It wasn't so bad, so I don't know why I was dreading it. I didn't get too much information from her except that she is working very hard, and she seemed very grateful that I was concerned. If she's sick, she's hiding it well.

I expressed to her the importance of being visible and communicative, and explained how these deadlines we impose are usually meaningless when we have the impression (no matter how faulty) that progress is being made. She promised me she would call Dr. Advisor today. I hope Dr. Advisor will give her one last chance.

What would you do?

I cried when I read this story. Then I asked myself, what would I do in the same circumstances?

Would I loot a grocery store to get food for my family? Yes.

Would I loot a store to get new things like DVD players or microwave ovens? No.

Would I pick up a gun to protect my family from looters? Yes.

Would I pick up a gun to get food for my family? Maybe.

Would I pick up a gun to take food away from someone who needed it as much as my family did? No.

Would I try to take someone else's place on an evacuation vehicle? No.

Would I put my daughter in someone else's place on an evacuation vehicle? Yes.

Would I have put my family in this situation by staying in New Orleans when I had a chance to get them out? No. But, I am, compared to most of those souls trapped in the Superdome, unimaginably wealthy. My family would have had options that few of them had.