Back from China

I got back from China around a week and a half ago. It was a good trip. The workshop went well and I had a good time with workshop participants and exploring Beijing. As usual, the weather was hot and humid, the food was excellent, and Beijing was dynamic and crazy and fun. A few highlights and memorable scenes:

• It is not uncommon to see t-shirts with random English phrases on them. Often the phrase is a little garbled but the meaning is still somewhat clear, or at least one could imagine why one might want to put such a phrase on a t-shirt. But not always. I twice saw people selling T-shirts with the following words: "Buying food at a cafeteria." The "i"s were dotted with hearts.
  
  
• Near where I saw these t-shirts there was a book vendor on the street. His cart was mostly filled with English-language books, including quite a few business books. I noted that he had a copy of Capital, by Marx. I picked up the book and thumbed through it. The vendor noticed what I was doing and handed me another book to look at. The book he handed me? Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
  
  
• I heard an incredible set mixed by Sander van Doorn at the GT Banana club. Sander was awesome and the crowd fantastic. Everybody was really into it. A great evening. Returning home at dawn my cab drove by the CCTV building and the large, burned out husk of the CCTV luxury hotel. In the early morning mist it was surreal.
  

Beijing now feels a tiny bit like a home away from home, especially the neighborhood around Wudaodou and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. I've been fortunate to be able to spend parts of the last six(!) summers in Beijing, and I hope to have to opportunity to spend more time there the next few years.

At the Supermarket in Bar Harbor

Just got back from some shopping at the local supermarket in Bar Harbor. Mayhem and amusement.

• A family of four in the produce section acting kinda like they've never been in a produce section before. Barking questions and commands at each other from across the aisles while the oldest son talks loudly on a cell phone.
  
  
• Some disturbingly non-local items: avocados from Chile, oranges from South Africa, other oranges from Peru.
  
  
• A man asked a supermarket worker if they had nail polish remover. Worker doesn't speak great English and doesn't really understand. The questioner explains: "nail polish remover is, ya know, like if you put nail polish on your nails, and then you wanted to take it off, nail polish remover would help you take it off." The questioner's wife came by and asked about the worker about make-up and told her husband to go get trail mix. I didn't stick around to see how it ended. The worker was cheerfully going to get assistance.
  
  
• I don't think my checkout person had ever seen tomatillos before. But she was very nice about it.
  
  
• In fairness to the checkout person, it appears that my spell-checker hasn't heard of tomatillos, either.
  
  
• The person behind me in the checkout line seemed a little alarmed at my purchase. I got three jalapeno peppers and she asserted that I must be about to cook something really spicy. It's all relative, I guess.
  
  

Year in Review

July has started and so the last academic year is officially in the past. A few weeks ago I completed my annual workload report, and I thought it might be interesting to use some of the data I gathered while preparing it to make a year-in-review post. Some bloggers I know do this at the end of the calendar year, but it seems that the end of the academic year is also a good time.

• Courses Taught: Calculus I, Theory and Application of Complex Networks, Introduction to Chaos and Fractals, and Calculus II. In a usual year I teach five courses. I only taught four this year because I had a one-trimester sabbatical this spring.
  
  
• Average Class Size: 20. This is small for most schools, but very high for COA. In most years there are only one or two faculty with a larger average class size.
  
  
• Number of Advisees: 14, although I lost a few and gained a few over the year.
  
  
• Independent Studies, Tutorials, Senior Projects: I taught one (very fun) tutorial this year and supervised one senior project. I also assisted on two other senior projects.
  
  
• Committee Work: Anthropology Search Committee (Search Canceled), Admission Committee, Academic Priorities Group of the Academic Program Review. I also coordinated the Maine Space Grant Consortium Student Research Fellowships and am COA's liaison to the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellowship.
  
  
• Scholarly Presentations. 2, although one of the two is a series of five lectures that I gave in China.
  
  
• Peer-Reviewed Publications. 1. Feldman, McTague, and Crutchfield, The organization of intrinsic computation: Complexity-entropy diagrams and the diversity of natural information processing. Chaos. 18:043106. 2008.
  
  
• Book Review: 1. Review of Complex and Adaptive Dynamical Systems: A Primer by Claudius Gros. Physics Today. July 2009.
  
  
• Book in Progress: My proposal for an introductory textbook on Chaos and Fractals was accepted by Oxford University Press. Deadline is October 15. Current draft is around 275 and I expect the final version to be around 375. Most of the draft was written a few years ago. This year I've written around 75 pages. I have a lot of work to do the next few months.
  
  
• Papers in Progress: 1. Hopefully it will be submitted in a few weeks.
  
  
• Papers and Proposals Refereed: 7.
  
  
• Grants Written: 3. One has been funded ($5000), two are pending ($956,000) and ($150,000).
  
  
• Countries Traveled to: 5. (China, Germany, Poland, The Netherlands, Canada)
  
  
• Letters of Recommendation: 47 total letters for 16 different students.
  
  
• Emails Sent: At least 2418. A little under seven a day. This is just the email from my coa.edu account. This doesn't include email from any of my other accounts.
  
  
• Emails Received and Saved: At least 2016. I don't know an easy way of figuring out how many emails I received and deleted. I'd guess I only end up saving 1 in 10 emails. If so, then I received around 20,000 emails, or an average of around 55 a day. Again this is only for my coa.edu account.
  
  
• Tweets Tweeted: 363.
  
  
• Blog Entries: 35. This is a lot less than the last few years. Twitter has been distracting me from blogging. My interest in blogging has waned somewhat.
  
  

All in all, I guess it's been a pretty productive year. It doesn't quite feel that way, but looking back, it wasn't that bad. I had hoped to have one more paper submitted by now and be a little farther along on the textbook.

Graduation

Today was COA's graduation. And yesterday was our honors/awards ceremony. Both were very nice, as usual. And as usual, it is a time of joy, melancholy, and mixed emotions.

It is, of course, wonderful beyond words to see students graduate, meet families, and offer congratulations. This year there is an especially strong cohort of math and physics students, many of whom I have done independent studies and small research projects with, and who have served as TAs in my classes. So in some ways it seems as if I am losing some colleagues and comrades.

The weather the entire week has been fantastic: warm and green and sunny. Aside from the bugs, it's almost paradise. Today was especially nice. The afternoon was perfect and after the sun set there was a breathtaking moonrise over the mountains.

It is sad to see students go, but it is time. New students will arrive in the fall, and the cycle begins anew. Academic life is cyclical, but it is as if the seasons are backwards. Fall seems like spring, as the academic year begins again with promises of renewal. The summer is more like winter, a dormant and restful time. The quiet on campus is striking the first week after graduation, as if the leaves have just fallen from the trees.

So another year has passed, my eleventh at COA. Another group of students has graduated. The summer now opens up before us, lonely but filled with warmth and quiet promise.

Windpower at COA

Here is link to a nice news story about a wind turbine that College of the Atlantic just installed at Beech Hill Farm. I had nothing to do with the class, but helped with some of the fund raising for the turbine this winter. We received several generous individual contributions and also support through the Higher Education Program of the Maine Space Grant Consortium.

It's exciting that the turbine is up and running. I hope that one day soon wind turbines will be a common sight in Maine and elsewhere.

Mid Sabbatical

It's hard to believe, but I'm a little past the halfway point of my spring-term sabbatical. Although it's not really the half-way point, since I have the summer off from teaching as well. Perhaps because of this I haven't quite been able to kick into high gear. I've been productive, I guess, but not spectacularly so. Many days I get a good amount of writing and research done. Other days I just want to cook or organize or work in the garden or around the house. This is a form of productivity, I suppose, but it's not the way to get a lot of research done, which is one of my goals for this sabbatical.

I spent almost three weeks in April in Davis, California. It was an excellent visit. I also spent time in the Bay Area visiting family. Also excellent. All in all, it was great to be someplace different for a while.

Here in Maine, I've been enjoying watching spring unfold in slow motion. There are leaves on many trees now, our tulips are in full blossom, and yesterday a hummingbird returned to our backyard. I've done a lot of yard work and planted a bunch of plants in the garden. Spring in Maine seems like magic. It's hard to imagine that plants come back to life despite having been buried in snow and ice for months. I suppose it's biology, and not magic. But it's still quite impressive.

Just as spring has been in slow motion, I've kinda felt in slow motion too. I leave for another trip to California on Wednesday, and I've got lots that I want to get done before I split. So hopefully the next few days will be productive and fun. I've got much writing and coding and planning to do.

Early spring thoughts

Our two-week spring break is almost over. Classes start tomorrow, although this doesn't really apply to me, since I'm on sabbatical spring term. (More about that later.)

I've realized that there are a bunch of things I associate with spring break. The most obvious is lots of grading and evaluation writing. This is true for any period right after a term, but it seems especially daunting after winter term, because there are only two weeks before classes start up again. Also, I think I've always taught two classes winter term, so I always have had a lot of evaluations to write.

But in addition to this, there's something distinctive that sticks in my memory about the last two weeks in March. The light is brighter, but it's still cold. I resume running outside, and enjoy the air, even though it's a little colder than I want it to be. The trails are still wet, and often snowy, so I run on gravelly asphalt. A few years ago I tripped while running and cut up my knees and one of my hands. Piles of snow defy the odds and eventually melt.

There is a big rainstorm right now, which is actually quite wonderful. For although it's cold and wet and miserable outside right now, the rain is needed to help melt snow and wash away dirt and grime. When it finally stops I expect the world to look pleasant and cleansed. Flowers and leaves are still a long ways off. But at least the rain will get rid of some of the gritty snow.

I've not given up on this blog entirely. With some more flexible time coming up on my sabbatical I suspect I'll be able to go back to writing at least semi-regularly. I'm also considering retiring this blog and starting a new one. Perhaps a different name/theme/look/whatever will jump start my writing.

I've been twittering a bunch lately, but I feel like writing in actual sentences. Not sure I'm up for paragraphs, but we'll see what happens.

Driving to campus today I wasn't sure what music to listen to. I ended up choosing a Chinese disco/house CD that I got a few years ago and which I've barely listened to. The lyrics, to the extent that there are any, are mostly in English or Spanish. The mix is kinda hyper and treble-ey, but it actually seemed to fit the day somehow. While driving in, I saw an eagle soaring high above the road. Always an impressive sight.

The reality of the financial slump/recession/depression is gradually becoming more real. I hear and read more and more stories of difficult times. Things aren't so terrible at COA, but nevertheless, times are tight. We're short faculty, and it looks like we'll continue to be short faculty for next year and maybe even the year after that. There's not much to be done, although maybe there are at least a few things that can be done, but I'm not sure anybody is doing them.

I had some skull-crushingly frustrating meetings today. But I had a good class and some good student meetings. And I'm working on a grant proposal that is feeling a little unwieldy at the moment. I really wish I were a faster writer.

Tomorrow we are supposed to get 4-8 inches of snow, followed by a bunch of rain. Splendid.

Random Bullets of Stuff

Minimally motivated to post a blog update, but not motivated to write paragraphs. So, random bullets:

• I did a fair amount of grading this weekend, but I should have done more.
  
• All three of our cats have had colds. Apple and Monster are mostly over theirs. Ancho is still in the midst of his. His sneezes are quite impressive.
  
• For some reason my eyes are goopy and very itchy right now. It's pretty annoying. I hope I don't have the cats' cold.
  
• Today was a mini-thaw. It got up to 42 degrees, and it almost smelled like spring for a little bit. Lots of slush.
  
• The birds at our feeder must have smelled spring, too, since they were chirping much more than usual.
  
• But now the slush has frozen and there are many slippery, icy spots on roads and sidewalks.
  
• The extra light in the afternoon is very noticable. Spring is still months away, but at least it's getting light later.
  
• The moonrise this evening was amazing.
  
• I'm drinking a Fin du Monde. Delicious. A nice change from Dogfish Head.
  
• We've eaten well this weekend. On Saturday I made a tasty spinach salad and a pasta dish with roasted onions and chard. Today Doreen made a slightly weird but excellent minestrone-like thing.
  
• I'm not quite ready for the week. Hard to believe we're at the half-way point of the term.
  

Miscellaneous Musings

• I've been writing lots of letters of recommendation for students applying to do summer research somewhere. I often go to the web page of the deparment or institute that will be hosting the students. There are usually a few pictures to go with the website, designed, presumably, to encourage good students to apply. The pictures for field biology programs are usually from some scene outdoors, often quite scenic, and most of the time with some animals being studies: perhaps birds of lizards or something. The biomedical program's pictures involve some combination of lab coats, microscopes, beakers, and pipettes. The math department pictures? Well ... not so hot. Sometimes it's a few people sitting at a table. Other times it is a posed shot of last year's students, usually taken in front of a blackboard.
  
  
• My spell-checker wants to turn the word "combinatorics" into "dominatrix." Accepting this change would surely make my letter more interesting, but probably not in a way that would help the student who is applying.
  
  
• Speaking of spell checking, there is one undergrad research program web page on which the city in which the university resides is spelled wrong.
  
  
• And finally, a non-letter-of-recommendation-writing observation. Last night I was reading a quite interesting research paper by, I would guess, a non-native English speaker. The author meant, I assume, to say "manipulating the parameters, we obtain ..." Instead, he wrote, "mangling the parameters, we obtain." Awesome.