First Exam Day Spring 2009

Workout notes 4000 yard swim; 500 easy, 1500 worth of 25 drill, 75 swim, 10 x (fly/free/back/free) on 2 (barely), 400 IM (8:31), 400 fins (drill/swim), 100 paddle.

Then I did my yoga/ab/therapy routines. These things ARE helping my piriformis tingles.

No, today’s wasn’t much; I hope to have a special workout tomorrow. We’ll see.

Academia and math teaching: Exams in Linear Algebra and in Differential Equations. I am being reminded that students often find the level of abstraction in linear algebra to be very difficult; to me the idea of linear independence, spanning sets and basis is the most natural thing in the world. But that is far from true for many.

As a result, I’ll have my nose in my papers most all weekend long; I’ll also have to prepare my seminar talk (which I am giving Thursday).

Academia: professors share their pain at having classes of students who wear very little clothing. Here is a sample:

I teach at a commuter school in a subtropical clime whose students are as likely to work at a strip club as they are to work at an Arby’s. I’ve never had a student come into class in pasties, but that’s about all I haven’t seen. Spangled bikini tops with an open button-front shirt thrown over, daisy dukes with 5-inch platforms, thigh-high patent leathers with necklines so low you see the UNDER-cleavage, and girls whose idea of “professional dress” is to show off their their DD boob-job with a wonder bra under a camisole and painted-on jeans. I’ve been flashed by the pantiless more times than I can count, and I’m a hetero female prof — I’ve asked my male colleagues how they handle this stuff and “by din and disciplinary committee, DON’T LOOK!” is the universal answer… which must be very hard, because, well, how do you NOT look when she’s sitting in the back row in a miniskirt opening and closing her knees like the mini-golf queen? Halfway through my lecture, I’m mentally lining up my putt.

I have to admit that the brutal Illinois winters have mostly solved that problem. But, I do have some memories from my days as a graduate student at the University of Texas.

Politics Nate Silver suggests that having “open primaries” (that is, one primary election in which all candidates from every party runs with the top two going on for a run off) might be a way of reducing the partisan differences between parties. He backs up his conjecture with a simulation.

Stimulus and Home owner Bailout: Robert Reich’s ideas:

On the mortgage bailout:

Expect the usual grousing about “moral hazard,” especially from Republicans who normally grouse about normal hazard. And under normal circumstances, they have a point. The government should not be bailing out mortgage lenders who should never have lent money to people unlikely to be able to repay, or borrowers who should never have taken out a mortage loan. Under normal circumstances, government shouldn’t be bailing out bankers, either. But these aren’t normal circumstances. We’re in an economic crisis. And a failure to put millions of homeowners on a firmer footing would send more shock waves throughout the economy. Not only will more people lose their homes. Surrounding homes will lose value as well, as neighborhoods become blighted with more empty houses. And lenders, worried that even more borrowers can’t repay loans, will stop making additional ones.

Stimulus:

One of the oddest of right-wing claims is that FDR’s New Deal didn’t pull America out of the Great Depression, so Barack Obama’s “New New Deal” won’t, either. While it’s true that the New Deal didn’t end the Great Depression, three points need to be impressed on the hard-pressed conservative mind:

1. The New Deal relieved a great deal of suffering by establishing social safety nets —

2. FDR’s public works spending did help the economy somewhat. By 1936, U.S. the economy was showing some life. Unemployment was declining and consumers were beginning to buy. [...]

3. The Second World War pulled the nation out of the Great Depression because it required that government spend on such a huge scale as to restart the nation’s factories, put Americans back to work, and push the nation toward its productive capacty. [...]

See the post for details. Just remember that when you hear the Republicans whine, that they are Republicans! It was their ineptitude that got us into this mess to begin with and there is absolutely no reason to listen to them now.

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