Tea, Anyone?

The tea I'm most familiar with is cut black tea.  This is often put into tea bags, and you can make either hot tea with it, or iced tea.  Hot tea is lightened with a little milk, or just drunk plain, sometimes with sugar (or sweetener); it's the same with ice tea.

When I was in high school, I was introduced to tea.  I drank gallons of the stuff--- not all at one sitting, but over the years.  I gave up tea in favor of coffee while at university, and even while I taught, because that's what was available.  But every once in a while, I get a hankering for tea. Not just any tea, but good tea. 

Tea has four aspects: fragrance, taste, tartness, and color.  Fragrance and taste are self explanatory.  Tartness is, too; but I think it might be different than the tartness of an apple, for instance, which is related to sourness as well.

Color is the least important, but for those who drink tea with milk, it becomes important as a means for judging the milk/ tea balance.  (I'm sure there are those who will ascribe a mystical flavor element to color as well, and I'm not going to argue with that.)

Teas that are grown in the highlands of Sri Lanka, India, Nepal and Kenya, at higher than two thousand feet (I'm not sure of the exact altitude) is fragrant, but lacking in color, taste and tartness.  Tea grown at lower altitudes are considered to have a more robust fragrance, and more color and tartness.  Connoisseurs don't like the robust fragrance.  Tea grown at a few hundred feet has an even coarser fragrance and color and tartness, but they are favored in places where the tea is spiced with coriander and cardamom.

Most tea drinkers, especially in Britain, like consistent cups of tea, which have a fair fragrance, tartness, taste and color, consistently cup after cup.  This is achieved by blending tea; high- grown and mid- grown, and with teas from different plantations together.  Tea from Lipton's and other old firms, are made this way.  The bulk of tea sold in the US is blended tea.

Recently, I'm having difficulty finding a variety of tea that tastes right to me.  In one sense, being a (mostly) natural product, we can't expect it to be absolutely consistent from one cup of tea to the next.  Further, I'm getting older, and my taste-buds don't seem to know what they're doing!

While I was living with my parents, I seldom drank tea; then at my ɓoarding school, we drank tea every day in the morning (if we wanted to), and it was sort of unremarkable stuff.  Then, once I got taken out of that school and made to attend a school in the hills, in 11th grade, we were allowed to leave the school compound during free periods.  My friends, as part of my cultural education, took me to Hotel Silverdale, a restaurant on Brownrigg Street. As a law-abiding citizen, I was extremely anxious.  We went upstairs, and they ordered a pot of tea.  (This seemed quite harmless, and my heartbeat slowed down.)

A pot of tea, and a small pitcher of warmed fresh milk was brought out; everyone served themselves, and–with some help–I began sipping my very first cup of tea that I was drinking voluntarily.  I needed six spoonfuls of sugar (I know, I know; my health deteriorated as you would expect), but the tea was heavenly.  I frequented Hotel Silverdale so much that I was in fear of being sold shares in the ownership!  Jk.

To explain to an expert what kind of tea I would like, I will have to get into the subject of tea in greater depth.  But I'm retired, and unwilling to exert myself so much.  I have three types of tea I drink in rotation, and the one that satisfies me most is PG Tips (the fine print says Unilever.)

In the USA, unfortunately, the common drink—in these parts, anyway; in the south it might be different—is coffee.  By the time I had left university, and was becoming curious about what sort of tea I could get, it was 1983, and I was fearsome about returning to the motherland, especially since no post was waiting for me, and many of my friends who had returned to Ceylon were re-returning here.  When I finally visited Sri Lanka, it was 1997.  Nobody there could steer me towards a reliably good brand of tea, while I was in Colombo.  When I returned, I brought with me some Lipton's yellow- label tea.  The next visit to Sri Lanka, I discovered Bogawantalawa tea, which I really like, and brought back several bags of the stuff to distribute among my tea-deprived ex-pats.  I drank tea from that bag until it was over, and asked my daughter to return the bag I had given her (which she hadn't used, but she's an American, despite her parentage) and drank that until it was gone.  A friend, a Trinitian, brought me Loolecondera tea, which was excellent.  This time, when I was flying back, the young lady at the duty-free tea store listened to my story, and insisted that that Loolecondera tea (what an outlandish name!  Certainly not Sinhala) was too strong.  "Too strong, sir!"  So I bought the type she recommended, but, to cover my bases, also bought a tiny tin of Lool… that thing.  It is too strong, though I had been enjoying it for a year. 

I feel a lot better now, having complained to you chaps.  Any advice will be cheerfully read and appreciated, but bear in mind that Sri Lankan tea is about $5 an ounce in the USA, I think, which does not encourage experimentation.

Anyway, there's always PG Tips to fall back on, though some importer is probably making a killing at the cost of some Sri Lankan exporter.

Arch

John Lennon's Eternal Christmas Anthem

I have been a staunch Beatles fan for close to 57 years!  (I initially wrote '67 years,' but I was off by a decade.) I have been an ardent fan of each of the Beatles for most of these years, but most definitely a John Lennon fan since he was denied immigration into the USA.

Most Beatles fans, early on, took a strong dislike to Yoko Ono; no doubt they felt that she was at least partly responsible for the breakup of the group.  I'll say what I think about that another time, but, you know, people can't go on being the same as they always were (ask David Byrne!) ... sooner or later you have to accept that, if you had to choose between what you want, and what the fans want, you can't choose the fans every time.

Yoko certainly had a huge influence on John Lennon.  She was probably instrumental in urging him to stand up for himself, and not to succumb to the group---thing.  In addition to that, she made John Lennon aware of what was happening in Vietnam---things that many of us have come to accept as being wrong-headed.  The US military and the US congress was determined to stop the spread of communism.  It wasn't our job to halt this spread, just as much as it isn't the job of the Christian Church to stop the spread of alternate lifestyles.  Thoughts and prayers will have to do.  It was the military might of the USA that prevented the Vietnamese nation from prosecuting the illegality of the war in an international court.  On a personal basis, many Americans have made their peace with Vietnamese citizens whom they have come to know as individuals, but as a nation, we have taken the principle of "Never say sorry!" too far.

Given the confluence of Christmas, the (imminent) end of the Vietnam War, and John Lennon's immigration status, I feel that the song (two songs, really: So this is Christmas, and Give Peace a Chance!) is an amazingly gentle piece of persuasion.  You can see the influence of Yoko, in the strong rhetorical points, and the gentleness, which comes from nowhere: whose is it?---that moderates the severity of the tone of the lyrics:

[John Lennon, Yoko Ono]
So this is Christmas!
And what have you done?
Another year over,
A new one just begun.

Most of my readers very likely know these words.  They're essentially an introduction to the rest of the song.  ('And what have you done?' probably comes across as a bit sanctimonious.)

And so this is Christmas,
I hope you have fun;
The near and the dear ones
The old and the young.

This verse captures an important characteristic of the feast, namely the gathering of the tribe, the old and the young!  During Covid, of course, we couldn't do the traditional thing, but in the mid seventies, we did, and Lennon / Ono embrace the full spirits of the festival.

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear

And so this is Christmas
For weak and for strong
For rich and the poor ones
The world is so wrong

...

[chanting]
War is over over
If you want it
War is over

 

Israel

Recently, Hamas, an organization that is constituted of the most anti-Israel members of the Palestinian population, launched an attack on Israeli civilians—on October 7th—which involved killing many Israeli civilians, and kidnapping hundreds more, and taking them into Gaza.

Immediately, Israeli forces retaliated by launching massive counter-attacks, which killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including hospitals. 

While responding to these attacks, Americans—people living in the USA—have condemned the Israeli military, and those who have condemned the Israeli military action are being labeled "antisemites", and those who condemn the Hamas attack are being labeled "anti-palastinian", and so on and so forth.  The anger of all parties is increasing, and it's all exacerbated by the vagueness of the terms antisemite, zionist, accusations wanting to eliminate Israel, wanting to eliminate the Palestinian people, and similar motives.

Responding to each accusation is difficult, because as outsiders, with little knowledge of the facts, shooting from the hip we're more than likely to say the wrong thing.  Confusion helps Hamas, who clearly hoped that the world population would take one side or another, and thus infuriate either moslems worldwide, or jews worldwide, and certainly US jews, who are powerful in the US.  The Hamas attack was clearly planned to cause anger everywhere.  But Hamas, though it consists of Palestinians, does not speak for all Palestinians, nor do Palestinians have a means of controlling Hamas.

I urge my readers not to take sides on the issue of who is at fault in this conflict, except that Hamas—but not the entire Palestinian population!—is culpable for triggering off the hostilities. 

There's plenty of blame to go around. Palestinians are continually singer to Jewish homesteaders driving them off their properties and setting up their own farms in their places.  Palestinians are forced to live in poverty, in ghettos.  No doubt, Palestinians would have briefly rejoiced in the Hamas attack, but would have known that it would only result in massive retaliation.  But Hamas does not care; they want all out war, and they want the entire middle east to be involved.  (I don't know this; I'm just guessing.)  But taking sides does not help the situation.  I don't think taking sides is required here.  The only intelligent thing to do is to say that it's too complicated to take a side. 

Arch

Lights!

Well, today Katie decided it was the best day to put up decorative Christmas-type lights!  Two of my close friends died, but I guess these sorts of decorations should not be left undone for the sake of mourning. 

It hasn't been long since holiday decoration lights ate up a lot of electricity over the holiday season, and I cringed every year, thinking about the waste of energy.  But the tiny LED lights we have draw a fraction of the power their predecessors did, so I make sure I'm not being watched by the energy police, and help Katie hang up the lights.

Even when I was still teaching, I encouraged the student club to decorate a large lobby with an artificial tree that was visible from outside the school building, so students who have known me have cause to class me with the decorative light maniacs on our street.  (Whatever the season: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, the lights blast out.  Of course Spring Lane in South Williamsport has us all beaten.)

The time will come, though, when we shall have to desist from unrestrained electrical splurging.  There will probably be multi-national pacts to say that we're going to cut down inessential use of energy by a specified amount each year, and using fewer Christmas lights will be a painless way to do it. 

Arch

I'm Going to Write a Cookbook!

This isn't a new idea for me; over the years I've made numerous starts on one, but never continued with them. 

I want to write a cookbook for people—mainly guys—who have never cooked before.  (I know there are a whole lot of lazy bums out there who want to steal my idea—which isn't even original—but I'm going to hire a witch doctor to put a charm on the thing, so that any plagiarism will get sores on their butts, and will never be able to sit down.)  Incidentally, there is a website that specializes in instruction about how to do numerous things you've never tried before; it's called wikihow.  Unfortunately, every time someone writes in a new post, a team of improvers jumps on the thing and ruins the article.  I used to be on there, so I know. 😞

Intelligence, and Schooling

Have you noticed how bright people are often easily bored?

Well, there are lots of problems with this statement, one of which is that there really isn't an (1) objective, (2) reliable and consistent, and (3) useful way of measuring intelligence; until such a thing is discovered, we're going to have arguments about what it is.

That doesn't mean we can't make statements about intelligence.  It just means that these statements are going to be challenged by lots of people, simply because their own intuitive understanding of intelligence is at odds with say, my understanding of it. 

One thing it could mean is the ability to absorb ideas.  For years we've come across people who can't conceive that we've succeeded in putting people on the moon.  There are lots of problems here; their concept of what the moon is, their understanding of basic science, their fear of the consequences of admitting that they (now) believe that it happened, and so on.  Of course, absorbing ideas is one thing; organizing them in one's mind to form a useful structure is quite another. 

Another concept that is often called intelligence is the ability to solve problems.  This is a very reasonable understanding of the word, related to the first idea. 

OK, my theory is that, because intelligent people often get bored, one of the things we have to do—the family, their social group, society as a whole—is to teach them some options for how to keep themselves amused and entertained.  And I believe the function of education is exactly this.

Now, seeing how education has to be a communal activity, and seeing how communal activity is usually organized politically, nobody who suggest a connection between education and entertainment is going to get any sort of approval.  In fact, judging from how hard school districts across the country are coming down on Art and Music, you can readily believe that the ordinary man in the street takes a completely Keep Art and Music Out of our Schools attitude about the matter.

But we need smart kids to be educated.  They need to be taught all the math and computer science and engineering they will need to join engineering companies, and airlines, and city planners, in order that our complicated lives will continue to function smoothly.  And we need them to be amused and entertained while they're doing it. 

While the country was mostly in shut- down mode during the pandemic, there were scores of citizens being bored out of their minds, and some of them taking it out on their children.  This is so sad; if only they knew ways of keeping their kids amused!  And why not amuse them in some educational way?  Sure, it isn't easy, but it is important.  Unfortunately many parents think that it wasn't their job to deal with the problem.  Well, of course it isn't, in some definitions of 'job'.  But we mustn't think of children as just some tiny nuisances that have very little to do with us, you know.  A kid who has been taught well in school and at home, can quickly snap into 'this sounds interesting' mode if dad or mom makes them sit down and listen. 

To be honest, though, it would have been a challenge to keep this up over weeks and months.  In future epidemics, city and state planners will, we hope, have ideas about how to manage being closed down without going crazy, but that's not something we can depend upon. 

Arch

Toys

There are all sorts of people reading these blogs, and it's quite possible that some of them might feel picked on by this particular post.  On the other hand, some of them might feel a little validated. 

The main idea is that kids can—and I'm not saying they actually will—improvise toys with anything they find lying around the house.  A pile of sand; a dandelion, old broken equipment in the garage.  Your pets.  The furniture.  Clearly, some of this should not be accessible, being dangerous.  (But you can't protect them from every conceivable danger; one does one's best, and a clever infant can always find something that isn't safe to play with!)

This is not to say that you should never get them Legos, or building blocks, or little battery-powered keyboards.  The fact of the matter is you can never predict which sort of toy will grab the imagination of the kid.  Given that, just go with the flow. 

I'm known for being a pacifist.  I've never even been put in the position of having to make a decision about whether to bear arms.  When I was about 9 years old, I was given the gift of a toy machine gun for Christmas.  It just made a fake Tommy gun sound, and lights flashed inside.  My parents were confirmed pacifists also, but for some reason they let me play with this fake machine gun, until its batteries ran out.  But my favorite present that Christmas was a fountain-pen that wrote in purple, and not the machine-gun!  And so it goes.  I don't think any particular talent I have was sparked by any toy I was given. 

One toy I really wanted was a construction set.  My cousin had an advanced Meccano set, Meccano being a construction set company based in France.  But I never got one.  I just visited my cousin, and watched him make cranes, and elevators, and all sorts of amazing things with that Meccano set.  He did become a doctor.  But how did that toy influence his creativity?  Did it influence him at all?  We can't know.  There are so- called experts that will tell you that certain toys are great for certain things, but I doubt that they can say these things with certainty.  The only thing that I think really does have a bearing on encouraging the mental development of young children is the amount of time their adults (parents, cousins, uncles, aunts, older siblings) spend playing with them, up to a point.  Children who are left strictly alone all the time are less likely to develop as fast.  This opinion is just based on anecdotal evidence. 

Arch

Roger Penrose Nails it Again

The James Webb Space Telescope

There's recently been a lot of excitement about the images coming in from the so-called JWST, the latest telescope sent out by NASA and the JPL, and commentators and geeky influencers are getting themselves excited with the possibility that the Big Bang Theory might be wrong!!  "Please, please, let it not be so!"  Don't panic; all future cosmological theories will (probably) incorporate some version of the Big Bang.

As I was watching, at long last, Roger Penrose on YouTube, I was startled for one big reason.  In grad school, where I studied all sorts of things (in contrast to a lot of my fellow-students, who were already focused on getting to the research stage ASAP,) my research group---OK, it was just me and my advisor---but he loosely belonged to the group that had collaborated with Roger Penrose and Ezra (Ted) Newman, Paul Todd, John Porter and co, to develop a technique based on complexification of Einstein's theory.

I never could see the point of complexification of spacetime.  I loved and was quite at home with Complex Analysis, the mathematics of complex numbers; they are an elegant and unifying approach to various aspects of math, but I had learned physics from a completely non-complex point of view, and I merely endured the idea of complexification, because I did not want to be rude, and I did not want to spend an age before I graduated.

A central idea with complex analysis is that of conformal transformation.  This term refers to transforming graphs (bear in mind that a lot of mathematics is about graphs) in such a way that lengths and distances may be distorted, but angles are preserved.  Einstein's equations can be transformed conformally as well.  (If you transform the geometry of a problem, you can transform the equations as well.  Sometimes the equations don't look anything like they used to; sometimes they are hardly changed at all.  In this case, the equations were the same except for a non-zero formula that could be divided out from both sides of each equation; what a stroke of luck.)

There is sure to be a print explanation of Penrose's idea on the Web somewhere, but here is the gist of it.

The Boundary of Spacetime

A favorite thing for Penrose and Newman---principally the latter---to do, was to reduce the infinite part of space into a surface.  This sort of thing has been done in many cases.  For instance, the Number Line (or the Real Line, as it is known to its friends) can be reduced to just a line segment with two endpoints.  The whole infinite part of the number line is collapsed---very carefully, obviously---to the two dots at the end of the line segment: minus infinity and plus infinity.

In the case of Spacetime, every point (or event) has to lie on a set of what are called null geodesics, that is, paths of light rays.  Now, in principle, light rays will leave every point in every direction.  We say that there is a sphere's worth of light rays emanating from each point.  Each of these, like the number line, can be reduced to a line segment, with two endpoints.  The clever part of the method is that all these endpoints can be formed into a surface.  Two surfaces, actually; one in the (infinite) past, and one in the infinite future.  The shrinking of spacetime is done conformally, so that the equations are transformed nicely.  So this was the basis of my dissertation, and for obvious reasons, I tried to keep it under wraps, because I was vaguely embarrassed by the whole thing.

Heat and Cold under Conformal Transformation

This is where matters stood, until I happened to watch Penrose explain his theory on YT.  The first point to note is that if a portion of space is compressed conformally, it becomes hot.  Secondly, if a portion of space is expanded, or stretched, it becomes cold.  Thirdly, Penrose pointed out, that if the physics of the so-called Big Bang Singularity is stretched out, it becomes quite smooth, and not a singularity at all.  (All this has to be proved, but Penrose has apparently demonstrated all this to the satisfaction of those who are interested.) 

Now here's the punchline.  Penrose says, if you take some sort of catastrophic event, like a supernova for instance, and follow its matter and its light rays all the way out to infinity---in our model, that means chasing it down until it hits the future boundary---we will see how it will appear from the distant future of the entire universe.  In fact, Penrose says, it will look very much like the images observed by the JWST as emanating from inside the Big Bang!  These sorts of phenomena, the reverse of a Big Bang, have been called a Big Slurp!

To join the dots, it's beginning to look like we're just one of a sequence of spacetimes, and the end of each spacetime is in fact the Big Bang of the next one in the sequence.

This is not a new idea; the model of a cyclic cosmology was one of those shown us in college, in baby relativity class.  I never dreamed that that theoretical concept would turn out to be something that astronomical observations would someday nudge us towards!

Apparently Some People Hate Education

The picture some analysts paint of those who have followed Trump ardently for the last decade or so, is of hardworking, conservative people, mostly rural, who do not like the educated elite.  They point out that college- educated people are everywhere, taking all the jobs, including the army and the police, everything. 

Well, this is true.  Businesses tend to hire college graduates, just to filter down their applications.  Then again, everything is getting more digital: even talking to your doctor goes through a computer, so having a college man or woman dealing with phone calls sort of makes a tiny bit of sense. 

Non college citizens are naturally resentful that they can hardly do anything easily, unlike in years gone by, and it looks like a plot just to make life harder for Trump followers. 

What's going to happen?  Are businesses going to stop investing in computer solutions to everything, just to make Trumpies happy?  I don't think so.  Many business owners are Trump conservatives, but they're not going to give up on the advantages of advanced technology.  And they're going to need techies to work the systems for them.  They might not be college- educated techies, though; they may have gone to 2- year colleges, where they can pick up the basics of what they need, to run the software and the hardware.  (Unfortunately, half- baked techies can really screw up big time.)

The population of anti- tech luddites has sort of leveled, but for some obscure reason, some immigrants and Latinos are joining their ranks, and we can only guess why.  (Perhaps they feel that the little education they have can go a long way with those who have no education at all.)

Arch

Indiana Jones and The Dial

Yeah, we watched it.  We thought it was good, but we're not mainstream types, and we tend to like oddball things.  We both like Harrison Ford, after all, he invented the motor car.  We both like Phoebe Walls and Bridges, just because.  So we had fun.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, the endless chases are boring, and the caves and booby traps are all getting to look the same.  But in spite of all that, it was a fun movie!

The Greatest Composer of All Time!!!

There's no such person.  Let me explain.

Suppose we have a collection of points on a line, and we had a direction on that line that corresponded to "better", and the opposite direction corresponded to "worse".  Then it's possible that one of the points might be The Best point of all. 

But composers can't be put on a line that way.  It is impossible to compare two composers and say, this composer is better than that composer.  It is just not possible.  We say that the set of composers is not linearly ordered.  The subject that we're getting into is topology.  Given two points on the XY plane, can we say which point is more?  Given two books, can we say which book is better?  There is usually a matter of judgement involved; any comparison involving a matter of judgement cannot yield a 'best' that cannot be questioned.

I don't mind confessing that, in my personal view, Bach is the best musician.  But there are really great pieces that Haydn wrote, pieces that Mozart wrote, Beethoven wrote, Mendelssohn wrote, Brahms wrote, Schumann wrote, Wagner wrote, and so on, which Bach may not have been capable of writing!

Even beauty pageants, in which they compare the beauty of women, really make no sense; women can't be ordered linearly either.  Deciding a "greatest" in these sorts of cases is always arbitrary.  There is a lot of 'celebrating the best' in American society, but in my humble opinion, it is not the best feature of it. 

There's always some joker who wants to establish that Paul McCartney was the greatest bass player in history, or that the Beatles were the greatest group, or that Barack Obama was the greatest president.  We must just smile, and think to ourselves that the fellows who set up these rankings are idiots. 

Arch

A Mystery Post that Ended Up in Archie's Archives!!!

Yes, that's right; the post I intended to put here went into Archie's Archives.  Please pop over there and get it.  I should move it over, but it's 8:32 at night, and it has been a long day. 

Arch

Methodist Church Troubles

I'm reading in the news, and seeing on YouTube, etc, that the United Methodist Church (UMC for short) is undergoing great organizational disruption.

It's been decades since I left the church, so the present problems the UMC organization is facing does not affect me personally.

What is happening, to oversimplify, is that the UMC is tearing itself apart over how various clergy, and various parishes, handle the problems of same-sex marriage: officiating them, and tolerating same-sex couples in their congregations.

Every denomination has to have rules that govern the behavior of the members, the leaders, and how the property of the church is to be managed; after all, every Sunday a certain amount of money is collected in each church, and the members contribute financially to the church, and there are rules as to how much is sent to the central state or regional church office from each of its churches.

The members of the UMC are, like Americans generally, a diverse lot.  They vary from extremely liberal members---and clergy---who are impelled to welcome all descriptions of members; and members---and clergy---who are very strict in their attitudes towards LGBT++ folks; how much time must be given to congregations that vote to leave the denomination, and so on.

It is impossible to imagine that the members of any congregation could be united in their attitudes towards anything, let alone their attitudes towards people of alternate preference.  There could be extremely religious individuals seeking to continue their church membership, surrounded by quite intolerant members regarding them with hostility.  This is a tragic situation, because church is so often regarded as a spiritual refuge from an intolerant society.

In certain states, the central organization of the UMC (of that state) has been extremely impatient towards congregations that have become unable to make their payments to the mother ship.  This is unsurprising, especially if the majority of members are senior citizens, or poor people, and they have been closed down, which means that the church is shuttered, and the members have no place to meet on a Sunday.

To some extent, church real estate is becoming a major stumbling-block to the denomination holding together.  In situations like this, legal minds within the church leadership have to take control, to enforce church rules, and they are often draconian in how they do this.  Cruelty is inevitable, because legal action must proceed according to a schedule, which is difficult for a congregation that might be accustomed to only meeting on Sundays, and most of whom are elderly, and unaccustomed to fraught situations where quick decisions are expected.

So, despite my disinterest in the denomination from a philosophical point of view, thinking of Methodists in the abstract, it really appears that they are sheep without a shepherd.  The same goes for all the protestant denominations.  The exception is these mega-churches, each of which is a single congregation, where I expect that the çhurch is not at all run in a democratic way, which of course makes it easier on the leadership!  It is a sad time for Christians.

Arch.

Major Repair

I just noticed today that the post on 'Kim's Game' had been left incomplete, and terminated abruptly in the middle of a sentence.  I fixed this.

Gene Sprechini

Gene Sprechini, 1952--2023, was one of my closest friends.  He died last week, after a painful illness.  He leaves behind a wonderful family: a loving and beautiful wife, at least two sisters, and brothers, and nephews and nieces, and a score of grateful and adoring friends and students.

Before I was hired at Lycoming College, in Williamsport Pennsylvania, I had come up for an interview, and met some of the faculty.  My daughter (who was just six) was pleased with the place, because--as she said--"They have a mall!!"  (The mall is now in extreme decline, and has been bought by a real estate developer.  Where would we be without them?)  As we were preparing to leave, the chair of the department was talking to me, and was saying he wished that we could stay longer.  I asked why.  Because, he said, there was a colleague he wanted me to meet, namely a new hire from the previous year, called Gene Sprechini, who had gone out of town for some reason--meet with his advisor, or for a family event.  I wondered what could be so important about meeting someone, since I had met the most senior faculty already.  It wasn't until a year or so after I had been teaching here that I got to know Gene, because his area was statistics, and my area was analysis (OK, calculus, and that sort of thing), and I had been stashed on the third floor with the English department, while Gene was on the first floor with all the other math guys--there were only guys in our department back then.

When I returned the following year, Gene helped me find a place to stay, my temporary home having been reclaimed by the music professor who had let us stay for a year while he was on sabbatical.  It was in those days that I discovered how funny Gene was.  In addition, he was intimately knowledgeable about all matters having to do with popular culture of the fifties, sixties and seventies: TV, radio, most of which I had gotten familiar with through reruns.  Shortly after, while I was getting my feet wet teaching nurses computer science (don't ask), it became necessary for Gene to take up some analysis, such as Calculus 2, and Calculus 3.  There must have been some complaints about my teaching these courses; in retrospect, I was probably being too hard on our students.

Once Gene moved into teaching calculus, he wanted to bounce some of his ideas off me, and we got very close.  Then he took up the chairmanship, and he could take a greater control over what he taught, and soon we were making changes in the middle-level curriculum, to bring it in line with the degree of difficulty that was tolerable to our students.  Gradually, all of us in the department were teaching a huge variety of courses, for various reasons, and I got the impression that most of us were happy, eventually, with our course-loads.

Gene was a wonderful guy, loved alike by faculty and students.  I don't have an insight for why, but he just was.  He was the one to whom anyone would go if there was a problem, and he would discover a creative solution to it.  The faculty in our department were probably the most creative problem-solvers in the nation, and I hope our graduates realize just how lucky they are to have known Gene, and David, and Charlie, and Eileen; and Chris and Jason, and Andrew.  Some of our beloved faculty have left: Ed Wallace, Melissa Sutherland, and Joanne Schweinsberg.

Gene's passing is a huge blow to many; he was a great resource for the school, and for many of his colleagues, and certainly for his students.  His departure, more than the departure of anyone else, be it through retirement or through death, is likely to change the nature of the school itself, and certainly the nature of the mathematics major; and the school will have to work very hard to recover.  It has managed to bounce back from the loss of Charlie Getchell, and David Haley, and it will bounce back from this loss.  But it will be painful.

Arch

Our Horrible Little Dog!

[Updated today, 2023/06/2.]

Presently we have two dogs: a 90-pound 'boxador', a boxer crossed with a Chocolate Lab; and a 30-pound sort of terrier mutt.  The larger dog is a perfect gentleman: he doesn't go through any doors until he has been given an explicit invitation.  The smaller dog does what he pretty well pleases.  This report is about the smaller dog, a sort of canine hooligan.

They both unfortunately beg at the dining table.  We're not sure who introduced them to the concept, but at every meal, there they are, looking as though they haven't eaten for months.  Once we've taken our empty plates to the sink, the larger dog may look sadly at whatever is still in the dishes on the table.  The smaller dog gets up on his hindlegs, and strains towards the dishes.  If one of them is within his reach, I would guess that he would drag it off the table and have his way with it.

The older dog, now about 12 years old, is prone to urinary accidents, so we urge him to go out and do his business every few hours.  The little rascal is happy to fly out with his bigger comrade, but he goes to the back gates and barks.  He barks at everything: people walking by, a dog in a yard a quarter mile away, passing cars, the dog next door, and even stationary, inanimate objects, like cars, or the house across the street.  The older boy rarely ever barks.  But if junior barks in a particularly urgent way, he is tricked into joining him in a bark.

I get the impression that their eyesight is not very good.  But nor is their hearing fantastic.  My stepson has a pickup to whose engine sound they are particularly attuned.  Even before he's turned into our alley on his way back from some errand, they're seated at the back door, tails wagging.  At least, they used to; nowadays, they get excited even if another pickup goes along the street.  Conclusion: their discrimination of sounds is getting worse.

We used to take them, at one time, to this nice local park, located in a little island, where they could run around off their leashes, chasing imaginary rabbits and squirrels.  But as their barking hobby has grown in importance, we're not inclined to make the effort to take them out; all it will do is make a public nuisance for everyone who lives in the vicinity of that park.  The senior (larger) dog is not a huge problem, but the little one most definitely is.  Mind you, he is really, really cute, and we often can't resist letting him do what he wants.  But our civic responsibility comes first, and we find ourselves depriving both dogs from having much fun.

Arch

Music That I'm Rediscovering

[I will provide links for these that point to recordings on YouTube later; I'm writing this on my phone, which isn't  'smart' enough to make it easy to paste URLs.]

The first is the finale of Bach's A minor solo violin concerto, BWV 1041.  This is a lovely piece of music, which is a favorite of violinists; all of its movements are at least excellent.  I heard the final movement recently, on the radio or somewhere, and now I'm obsessed with it!  It is sort of a jig, though it is in (compound) triple time.  I think other finales in Bach are also in compound triple time, though I could be wrong.  Some years ago, I bought a record of a couple of Bach violin concertos played by Viktoria Mullova, who was a Russian violinist touring Europe with her own little string ensemble at that time.  Now she is settled somewhere in Europe, and was married to a prominent conductor, until he died.  She was a pioneer of the 'One instrument per part' movement of the late Eighties and Nineties, and which is the dominant paradigm now.

Another favorite of mine, of which I have been reminded recently, is the Dance of the Cygnets (or ducklings) from Swan Lake, by Tchaikovsky.  If you ever saw it danced, with four dancers with linked arms, it is an unforgettable sight, and the music will remind you of it every time!  My Dad got us a Little Golden Record of it when I was just about 5 or 6 (which was a very long time ago), and at that time I had seen no ballets at all, but I loved the music anyway!  The instrumentation is mostly woodwinds, with the double-reeds prominent (oboes and bassoons).  The strings enter in the middle section, with flutes adding a little shine.

Back to Bach for the next one: the opening chorus of the Cantata "What God has done is rightly done," BWV 26.  This piece was transcribed by William Walton for his ballet The Wise Virgins, where he orchestrates it far more richly.  Just as in the finale I described at the top, this piece also has a wonderful bass line that dances all by itself!  In the clips available on YouTube, if you watch the cellists and the double-bassist (usually only one), you see them practically dancing with their instruments.

Finally, a Waltz in C Sharp minor, by Chopin.  I don't know the opus numbers of the little Chopin I'm familiar with, so I'll have to make clear which Valse I mean by providing a link later.  (This is how Art Linkletter got his name.)

Did I Love Teaching?

A lot of the time, I found myself teaching topics I loved, to a mix of (1) students who did not want to learn the stuff---or did not want to have it presented the way I was presenting it, and (2) students who were happy with the material, and mostly OK with the presentation.  Some of the time I tried to 'sell' the material to the entire class; some of the time I focused on those who were enjoying the lesson, basically writing off the dissatisfied ones.

I tried to be creative with the exams I gave; I made sure that they believed that I wanted to know what they knew, as opposed to what they didn't know.  I worked hard to make sure that all of them could answer a core of questions correctly, so that I did not have to grade out of, say, 40 points, and then add sixty to their score!  (There are teachers who do that.). I think this was the most creative contribution I made for all my years of teaching---it shows just how much testing was emphasized in my classrooms, in contrast to the present-day departure from that philosophy.  But in my book, taking an interesting test is a learning experience.

One course that I enjoyed teaching---for the most part---with every sort of student, people who hated the subject, and those who loved it, was Geometry.  Only students who were pre-service (going into the teaching profession) were expected to take this course, but word got around that it was an easy course, and other sorts of (non-teacher) types got onto my roster, and I let them, hoping they would learn to love mathematics.  You might not expect this, but I was weak in what we call synthetic geometry, which is building up geometric proofs by constructing additional lines and circles, in contrast to analytical geometry, which I had concentrated on everyone I had graduated from high school, where you calculate properties using Cartesian coordinates.  So we were all discovering the logical structure of geometry together, in the early years of my teaching.

So, to summarize: with a topic that I liked, with eager students, and where I had some latitude regarding the curriculum, I was in heaven.  In all other cases, teaching was somewhat of a chore.

Arch.

Anne Frank, her Impact

Recently, on Facebook, someone remembered Anne Frank, and how she affected some, and right away, others were quick to criticize those who chose either side of the discussion.

I read A. F.'s diary long ago, and I can't remember most of what she wrote.  But what really grabbed me were the photos of her, and that brilliant smile.  Some FB posters were saying that mankind had failed to learn from her story, and others contradicted them, and on and on, and I didn't read closely what people had written.  I'm not under the impression that I'm too wise to read these posts, but it seemed to me that there was very little to hate about Anne Frank, but there seemed to be no scarcity of those who were unhappy with Anne Frank for one reason or another.

I don't know why anyone would hate anyone, though living in the US, encountering haters of the despised Yankees (Americans, not the athletes) was not uncommon.  But being critical or annoyed with a group is different from hating their guts, isn't it?  There are groups that I intensely dislike, I must confess; if pressed I will reveal who they are.  But I'm seeing people who hate people of certain other categories with overwhelming passion.  The Jews.  The Russians.  The Ukrainians.  The Mexicans.  The Catholics.  The Palestinians.  The Blacks. Whites.  Politicians ... Now wait; I don't like career politicians, either; they seem to be 'in it to win it' to a pathological degree.

All this hate is tiring, and I have to take a nap ...