Off to college

Our older greatgranddaughter plans to attend college in the fall.  She is intelligent, imaginative and energetic.  I wouldn't be too surprised if she shines there.  

When I was her age, I thought plenty about the war going on.  I didn't feel I had shown any special ability for military service.  Both my homeroom teacher and my guidance counselor went out of their way to advise me to go to college.  I had thought I might be destined to be a psychotherapist and public school teaching seemed similar and within my budget.  I hadn't planned on the largely female group of students.  There were pretty, intelligent, attractive women everywhere.

I can recall the instant my daughter drove off in our car to investigate college.  It was an emotional moment for me.  I have learned that college can be a doorway into adult life.  It certainly was for me.

Can you feel it?

I was ready to write today about spring beginning tomorrow.  I went to look up the time of the equinox and was surprised to read that it was just an hour or so away. Spring began today at 9:46 CDT.  You may be on some other time that US central daylight but here it is spring.  Feels that way, too.  Despite deep snow outside, it is reported to be 53°. 

Poetry

From an ad, I was reminded of the poetry and word gymnastics of Ogden Nash.  I spent quite a bit of time enjoying his silly poems like "The Strange Case of Mr. Donnybrooks's Boredom".  One of his poems I liked so much, I memorized it:

If called by a panther,

Don't anther!

Now, aren't you glad you read that?  Just a moment of reading and it may have saved you a serious injury or worse.

It is Daisy Goodwin whose books "101 Poems that Could Save Your Life" and "Poems to Get You Through the Day (and the Night)" got me into poetry memories.

Interface interference

Somebody designs a handy web page with handy buttons here and there which can be clicked on to produce handy results.  I learn to use it and I am delighted.  What a fine product that company produces!

Then Smarty in the back office does a study.  Is the color of the page improveable?  Do fewer errors occur when the diddling-do switch button is moved to the other side?  Can we fit more helpful buttons up in that corner if we make all the buttons half size?  Results of the study come in and they imply that a few changes to the design of the page will result in faster production of the product and 20% more adoptions.

Result: Smarty gets a bonus but I get frustrations and more errors.  I had enough errors before but now I get more.

Note to Smarty,

Hands off the interface!

St Urho's day

I had trouble setting up Lynn's photos showing our snowfall yesterday and never found a good way to insert her name and credit to her photography skills.  Thanks, Lynn!

Today is St. Patrick's Day.  That means yesterday was St. Urho's day.  You may not have heard that some immigrants from Finland felt they wanted a little attention, as the Irish managed to get for their patron saint. So they invented the legend of St. Urho, whose day came one day before St.Patrick's.  The blessed Urho was credited with driving all the grasshoppers out of Finland.  

We had our DNA analyzed several times and I found that my wife has a more complicated set of ancestral genetic lines than I have.  They include Finland and Cuba and Spain.  See my blog Fear, Fun and Filoz entry for March 18, 2020.

Fwd: We have snow

our mailbox

Out the garage door (note the bottom of the doorway)

Door to the deck.

Snowed in 

15th of March

I am feeling normal today, I am very happy to report.

Today is the famous Ides of March, the day that Julius Caesar was stabbed by close associates who feared for the future of their country if he retained political power.  As I have written, my Latin class read Caesar's "Gallic Wars".  What I remember from that is that the writings could be honestly titled "Macho Misbehavior with Other Nations".  Have an experienced troop of soldiers show up at a leader's house and announce that the leader's children would accompany the soldiers back to Rome where they would be cared for and returned IF the people of that group had delivered the specified "tribute" of this many bushels of wheat and maybe a few other things at the specified times.

Nausea

I have an upset stomach.  I don't like it.

Paraskevidekatriaphobia

Paraskevidekatriaphobia:

Firefox browser led me to this word as a name for being afraid of bad luck and woeful events that might happen on a Friday that falls of the 13th of a month.

From AI and Chrome:

• Calendar Mechanics: Any month that begins on a Sunday will have a Friday the 13th.

• Frequency: In 2026, there are three occurrences (February, March, and November). Generally, there is at least one, and up to three, in a calendar year.

• Mathematical Cycle: The Gregorian calendar repeats its day-of-the-week pattern exactly every 400 years (146,097 days, which is exactly 20,871 weeks).

• Origins of Superstition:

• Biblical/Religious: Associated with the Last Supper, where Judas Iscariot—the 13th guest—betrayed Jesus, leading to his crucifixion on a Friday.

• Norse Mythology: The mischievous god Loki was the 13th guest at a banquet in Valhalla, breaking a 12-god, peaceful, and "complete" set, according to Britannica and Youtube.

• Historical: The arrest of the Knights Templar on Friday, October 13, 1307, is often cited as a source of the, according to Cleveland.com and EBSCO.

• Cultural Impact: The combination of "unlucky" Friday and the "unlucky" number 13 creates a "double whammy" of superstition that has been reinforced by pop culture, such as the Friday the 13th film series, note Wicked Local and Cleveland.com. 

They could ask me anything!

A friend of mine said that the day of her doctoral oral exam, she thought "They could ask me anything!".   That might be correct.  Some clown or provocateur might ask for some outlandish knowledge.  What was Mozart's mother's maiden name?  Other members of the orals committee or the candidate herself might counter with Why do you ask that?  Or What is the relevance of that question?

As I age and think, I find more and more subjects that I don't know about.  New subjects are invented, including those that I have never heard of. Items I did know include many that I have forgotten.  Most of several courses I used to teach and some science and social studies units even for 5th graders I could not teach now without a serious review of lessons and facts.

By the way, if a candidate for a doctor's degree, like a PhD, gets asked something he can't answer, he will just calmly say "I don't know".  Doing so is much more acceptable than guessing or bluffing.

Mrs. Banner

A couple of years ago, I noticed that when I read CNN Five Things, I found information about the news but without too many ads, without other documents than what I was reading appearing in the middle of the page.  I found language that was more simply informative and less provocative, slanted or emotional.  I looked to see who had written such reports and the answer was Mrs. Banner.  

When my wife first introduced me to creating web pages, the World Wide Web seemed a politer, more civil place.  Later, the first time an ad for less expensive vacuum cleaners appeared over the text of a news item, I couldn't believe anyone with consideration for a reader would interrupt that way.  Does another human being really believe that such an interruption will be accepted quietly?

Miss Honey

So you have a child with exceptionally high intelligence but this child has dunderheads for parents.  She begins going to school now but the principal of the school is a physically dangerous child hater.  Where can this little girl turn?  To her classroom teacher, of course: Miss Honey.  You can see this situation and its unfolding on Amazon, Netflix and Apple TV.  They all show "Matilda". 

As you may have gathered from previous posts, I am an admirer of women.  I actually came from a woman's body and I have been told most if not 100% of us did.  One of several stats supporting the notion of the superiority of women is their greater longevity than those of my sex.  You can refer to Dr. Ashley Montagu's 1952 book "The Natural Superiority of Women" for more information.  I admit that if you focus just on combat ability and the lust for blood, women are probably #2.

I was impressed when I mentioned Miss Honey in talking with my wife and that intelligent woman volunteered that she too thought Matilda's teacher had a perfect name.  The warmth and acceptance that women can radiate helps us all

Number 1 in what?

You may already know that I taught a course on testing and grading.  The rather silly stuff I wrote yesterday was motivated by trying to think of ways that I was No. 1.  Of course, we could list the weakest, lowest first and move to the highest, best last.  But if I am the best speller in the class, I typically have to state the size of the class to establish how good I am, writing "I am the best speller in the entire third grade of 114 students!"  It is easier and faster to rank them best first, so that Number 1 is the best and number 2 is second-best.  With a spreadsheet or some other software, it is easy to sort various columns quickly and accurately. OpenAI says that 2 billion people use the free Google Sheets and 1.2 billion use Microsoft Excel for handling and analyzing numbers.

Because each human is unique and our situations are always changing, I think it can be fun to toy with the criteria for ranking.  It may be easy for students to think that the teacher knows the "correct" answer to test questions but as we get more knowledge, sometimes we find that what was taken to be the "right" answer isn't correct.  More often, I think as we proceed through our lives, we find that skills and abilities that were not called upon in school turn out to be valuable.

Am I number 1?

1. Who has the best credentials for identifying as me?  Me!

2. Who has been me the longest?  Me!

3. Who is the first person they think of when they think of me?  Me!

4. Who would I rather be: Ralph Waldo Emerson or me?  Me!

5. Who knows more about computers?  Betty Grable or me?  Me!

Clocks and watches tonight

At 2 AM, Central Standard Time will change to Central Daylight Savings Time.  So, if you live in the US, official time may Spring-forward.  The official web site "time.gov" says the time change occurs at 2 AM tonight but it will probably work out to change clocks and watches just before going to bed.

Look!

We took a bus trip from London to Edinburgh for a short visit.  That evening, we ate in the hotel dining room.  Lighting above the ceiling showed a rat running about here and there, in the ceiling.  As you can see, I still remember that critter from back in 1974.

The day of the week

My watch tells me the day of the week and the current time.  It can deal with something about the tides, too, but I don't need that and I don't use it.  When the month of March began, it began to tell the day of week incorrectly.  The last time, it was wrong, I went to a local jewelry shop and a woman got the watch corrected quickly.  But this time, two different women said they didn't know how to fix it.  One of them advised me to use the numbers on the back of the watch, find the right manual and follow instructions to correct the watch.  I had no faith that such a procedure would work but I was wrong.  

I had time last night and used the numbers to find the appropriate instructions, followed them and now my watch says it is Thursday!

March forth!

Some humorist I read said that "March 4" is the only date that is a sentence.  I haven't checked all the dates but I think the idea is to consider the date to be "March forth!" instead of "March fourth".  The search software Duckduckgo says "there are approximately 40 calendars in use around the world".  Of course, they have histories, some being in their present form way back and some recently formed or modified.

Matilda

The book "On Repeat" by Margules introduced me to the fact that many people naturally listen to the same music repeatedly but go out of their way to avoid reading a book they have read.  The book by C. S. Lewis "An Experiment in Criticism" emphasizes that serious readers often return to a book.  I have had little experience with film studies but someone told me that a film course they took required watching a movie three times over: once for a general introduction, once with an eye to the acting and directing emphases and once for concentration on camera angles and lighting.

Last night we watched the movie "Matilda" and I was surprised to find that previous viewing came back to me at moments expectedly.  The movie is about a young child, maybe first grade age, with an unusual mind.  It is the story told in the children's book by Roald Dahl.  This little girl is the daughter of Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman, a father and mother who are unable to see they have an unusually intelligent child.

The whole experience of watching the smug, certain parents and the child's experience attending the school headed by actually dangerous Principal Trunchbull who despises children is a delight.

Consequences

My friend is a historian, especially the history of science.  He and I were interested in the book "The Limits to Growth" in 1972.  It was about coming problems on earth and among its humans.  From that, we moved to the idea of having a college course at UWSP on aspects of the future and on the question of how well people had predicted their futures.

From preparing, teaching and reading for that course, I concluded that basically humans have been poor at predicting the future. As I thought about why, I came to the idea that things we do have consequences that we can foretell.  Factors such as your actions and my actions have consequences that combine in ways that we could not have foretold.

When my daughter gave me a year's worth of Storyworth's questions, the power of unforeseen consequences came up.  I remembered several decisions and actions in my life that I could see how consequences that affected me that I could not have seen beforehand.  When I was in the 8th grade, I was asked to choose a foreign language to study for 2 years.  The choices I was given were French, German, Latin and Spanish.  I thought that decision might be my only chance to study an old and influential language so I picked Latin.  

I had no idea of the string of events that decision led to.  I found I had to go to a particular all boys high school, way across the city, for the 2nd year of Latin.  No other public high school offered a 2nd year.  That high school was male only at the time, which led, temporarily, to meeting few datable girls.  My homeroom teacher and my guidance counselor both explicitly advised me to go to college.  I told my mother about their advice and she suggested I check out going to the nearby teachers' college.  I did, I could afford the fees and I went there.  Something like 75% of the students were women, one of whom has been my wife for 65 years.  The fees were very low because of state support but I have to agree to teaching for at least two years.  I taught for four years and enjoyed it.  My school system required me to work for a master's degree and shortly after beginning, my grad advisor told me about a PhD scholarship that seemed made for me.  I applied, was accepted and studied fulltime.  When I graduated, I applied to a school of education and taught there as a faculty member for 37 years.  

If you are like me, and you probably aren't since I am weird, I say "Choose Latin."

By 13th century

This paragraph caught my eye.  It is from the book A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders

By the 13th century, knowing how to search through a book for a particular piece of information, rather than reading it from start to finish, had become commonplace for clergy and scholars. How to search for a book, however, was something that had yet to be addressed. Until this date, it had been a question that had barely needed a solution.

"A place for everything" p. 133 by Judith Flanders

"A Place for Everything" is subtitled "a history of alphabetical order".  You might think that such a history would be boring.  But I am married to a professor of school librarianship and I am a former library page, a lowly employee that replaces books that have been left out back where they belong.  It was from this book that I learned that

Your best hope for finding a particular book at one time was to ask the librarian where to find it.

It took years to move from arranging books by the first letter of their last name to also using the 2nd letter, so that "Kaplan" came before "Kirby".