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My Obsession with the Flu
I’m still obsessed with the flu! You might be focused on gun control these days because 17 people were shot in a horrific event, but I have not forgotten that over 251 people have died of the flu so far just in the city of San Diego this flu season.
If I were in charge of setting national priorities, I would start a war on flu. Current estimates are that roughly 4000 people per week are dying of the flu. During a bad flu season, flu kills more people a week than guns. Whatever we are currently doing about terrorism seems really quite sufficient because approximately nobody in the United States is dying of terrorism.
There is no part of the constitution that guarantees your right to the flu. Or your right to transmit the flu to other people. Yes, there are all sorts of terrible things that are killing a lot of people, but we have a decent chance of battling the flu. We already have mediocre vaccines. Our nation has a vibrant biotch industry. There is no flu lobby.
Stop flu now!
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Quilt Update
I’ve put the finishing touches on the red quilt as well as two of the others. One more is nearly done, and I’m hoping to make progress on the other ones in the pipeline this weekend. I gave the red one and the green one away yesterday, and I’m hoping to get the striped one in the mail today.
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Things to Watch
One of the features of the phone game I’ve been playing doesn’t reset until 6am on Mondays, I have a few minutes to write a second post today (also, it might not be the most flattering look to have the first post on this page be about the sorts of things that people are arguing about on Facebook, so I don’t mind pushing the previous post down one slot) (but I do want all the friends-of-friends on Facebook to know that I read their arguments seriously and think carefully about the points they are making and the rhetorical techniques they are using). I guess this means that the quilt photos might be pushed ahead to tomorrow.
There was a fawning profile of WeWork in yesterday’s New York Times. One of the things mentioned in the article is that they are starting an elementary school from the ground up, including designing their own curriculum.
I am going to be watching this with fascination. First off, when we branched out from online-only education to in-person learning centers, we already had a full math curriculum and a supporting series of textbooks, and it took a lot of us (who already had experience in curriculum development) an awful lot of hours to put together the curriculum to be used on the ground.
I’m really curious about what they plan to do in their school. Sorry to drag Facebook back into things, but you have probably seen someone you know share some sort of terrible worksheet that their child brought home from elementary school. The major publishers of elementary school curricula put out enough bad worksheets for there to be a lot of justifiably annoyed Facebook posts. Many good curriculum developers have teaching experience, but not all good teachers are skilled at writing curriculum. This dynamic is what led to a lot of the bad worksheets that you see on Facebook.
Also, our society has done a really good job of building a collective mental model of the field of education being poorly compensated and lacking in respect. I’m wondering where they are going to find teachers who are going to do a good job. Especially if they really are going with a brand new curriculum that has not been classroom-tested.
Will their brand recognition for offering communal office space give them an edge in hiring excellent curriculum developers and elementary school teachers? Are they going to be upfront in their job ads about the compensation for these roles? (I should check, but it is fairly uncommon for job ads for professional-type roles to clearly signal what they are paying). This is the internet, I can go check now: ads for teachers are hazy on the details. Their “our team” page shows nine people, five of which seem to be handling the education side of things (the rest focused on operations). The claim is that this school will offer classes in a wide range of fields, including literacy, STEAM, social studies, foreign language (no details about which one(s)), yoga, meditation, spiritual studies, global citizenship and philanthropy, visual arts, dance, music, farm-to-table cooking, conscious eating, martial arts, sports, hands-on farming, and more. That is a lot of curriculum to be written.
School starts in just over six months. Lucky for them, no one agrees how to assess the quality of a school.
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Facebook Arguments and a Hunger Games Future
I’ve seen several Facebook arguments about gun control in which someone posits that we may end up living in some sort of Hunger Games-style dystopian future, and that I would want a gun so that I could become some sort of tragic symbol of the revolution by being totally obliterated while shooting (plink, plink, plink) at a tank.
No question that in this sort of movie-plot dystopia that there would be a breakdown of distribution services (unless the self-driving trucks were all on our side and continued to provide effective logistics solutions to the masses). Reliable access to food might be a problem. But I live in a city neighborhood, and I haven’t seen a deer or a wild sheep around here, so I’d probably be better off trapping rats than trying to shoot large game. There are a lot of rabbits around the office. I remember that scence from Roger and Me where the woman was raising rabbits for food. A long time ago Dziadek had a pigeon coop in his backyard (yes, for food).
But have they been watching the news for the past twenty years? Have they seen what has been causing trouble for our military in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever else the situation is stagnating due to an uncooperative local population? Lots of remote-controlled homemade bombs. In some sort of hypothetical future dystopia, I’d much rather have bombs than any gun currently on the market.
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Generate Your Own Nineteenth Century Polish Family
I always thought that it was a quirk of my own family that approximately everyone is named Frank or Ed or Helen. But as I was learning more about the exodus of my ancestor Wojciech Walkowiak and three generations of his family from Szamotuly, Poznań to Schenectady, NY, I found the Poznań Project and saw that there was a drop-down menu to choose your relative’s first name from! Apparently there was only a small collection of names in use at the time.
One quirk that I did find is that sometimes there would be two daughters named Maryanna in the same family. The second would be denoted Maryanna (druga), druga meaning, roughly, “another one.”
Now you can use R to generate your own 19th century Polish family.
# Given the number of children, returns a vector of names make_family <- function(num_children){ boy_names <- c("Wojchiech", "Adam", "Adolf", "Aleksander", "Andrzej", "Anton", "Augustyn", "Bartłomiej", "Karol", "Kazimierz", "Kacper", "Krystian", "Krzysztof", "Daniel", "Edward", "Ernst", "Ferdynand", "Franciszek", "Fryderyk", "Jerzy", "Gotfryd", "Bogumił", "Gustaw", "Henryk", "Hermann", "Ignatz", "Jakub", "Jan", "Józef", "Juliusz", "Wawrzyn", "Leopold", "Łukasz", "Ludwik", "Marcin", "Mateusz", "Michał", "Mikolaj", "Paweł", "Piotr", "Robert", "Rudolf", "Samuel", "Szymon", "Stanisław", "Szczepan", "Teodor", "Tomasz", "Walenty", "Wincenty", "Wilhelm") # Maryanna appears twice in this vector so we can have two daughters named Maryanna girl_names <- c("Maryanna", "Agnieszka", "Amalia", "Anastazja", "Anna", "Antonie", "Apollonia", "Augusta", "Barbara", "Beata", "Berta", "Karolina", "Katarzyna", "Krystyna", "Konstancja", "Dorota", "Elżbieta", "Emilia", "Ernestina", "Ewa", "Franciszka", "Fryderyka", "Jadwiga", "Helena", "Henryka", "Johanna", "Józefa", "Julia", "Justyna", "Łucja", "Ludwika", "Magdalena", "Małgorzata", "Maryanna", "Marcjanna", "Matylda", "Michalina", "Nepomucena", "Otylia", "Petronella", "Regina", "Rozalia", "Zofia", "Zuzanna", "Tekla", "Teofila", "Teresa", "Weronika", "Wiktoria", "Wilhelmina") # The number of boys in the family comes from a binomial distribution num_boys <- rbinom(1, num_children, 0.5) num_girls <- num_children - num_boys # Sample without replacement; the only name that can be doubled is Maryanna boy_children <- sample(boy_names, num_boys, replace=FALSE) girl_children <- sample(girl_names, num_girls, replace=FALSE) # Combine the boys with the girls children <- c(boy_children, girl_children) # Mix things up so we don't have all the boys first and girls second children <- sample(children, length(children), replace=FALSE) # If we have two Maryannas, the second one should be Maryanna (druga) if(sum(children == "Maryanna") == 2) { children[max(which(children=="Maryanna"))] <- "Maryanna (druga)" } return(children) } make_family(12)
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Migraines and Adjectives
Still in the headache phase, and I’m planning a really special migraine post for Thursday, so maybe it is time to state some definitions. It is such a comfortable mode of discourse for mathematicians. We know exactly where the story is going to go and instead of telling you what the point is, we start defining words. This is a terrible way of telling a story—with the exception of the Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavić. There are migraineurs who will fire their neurologists for the use of any term that does not have an ICD-10 code. I am not one of them.
Common Migraine: One-sided headache. Throbbing pain. You start to feel really confident that you should be saying numbers like 8 and 9 (probably 9) on that 10-point pain scale. If you are not saving the number 10 for something really special, then you might even say 10. Even a single photon of light causes searing pain deep inside your brain. The headache is so incapacitating that you can barely make your way from the bedroom to the bathroom. You barf. You sleep. You feel better several hours later. No aura. These are not the headaches that I have been writing about. I do get these headaches, but only once every few years.
Classic Migraine: Like above, but preceded by an aura. Almost always a visual aura that takes on a particular form (when I say the phrase “zig-zag rainbow snake” to my neurologist, he knows exactly what I mean) and lasts for a short while before the headache starts. I don’t really think of myself as having these headaches. I sort of wish that I did have these instead of the Common Migraines. These are some of the most prestigious migraines to have. It reminds me of when Michelle told me about the hierarchy of eating disorders. She didn’t think of herself as a purging anorexic (even though she was); she insisted that she was a pure restricting anorexic (the most prestigious type). Does the difference really matter? She’s been dead for almost 26 years. Don’t tell anyone, but I follow her sister-in-law on Twitter.
Migraine with Aura: This is the official name (with an ICD-10 code) for Classic Migraine. I have actually been diagnosed with this. Most recently on August 5, 2017. Once you have been diagnosed with any sort of migraines (and I do not question at all that I have had common migraines), any unexplained neurological symptom becomes “migraine aura,” and you now have migraine with aura. Code G43.1. The eclipse-spot? Migraine aura. The weird creepy-crawly pulsing sensation that I get every now and then? Migraine aura. The ringing in my ears that comes and goes? Migraine aura. The zig-zag rainbow snake and the flashing rainbow crystal? Migraine aura. The extra sun that I saw last week? Migraine aura. I wish that I could read my migraine auras like an oracle might read her visions and use them to make predictions and threats. Do old-timey oracles get to consult with compliance attorneys before making a threat?
Transformed migraine (chronic migraine): Welcome to my everyday life. If I did not have a history of those light-sensitive+barfing headaches and personal experience with the zig-zag rainbow snake, it would probably take me a lot of time and effort to convince a physician to prescribe me my beloved triptans. When I’m above a certain headache parameter (like I have been for the past 12 days), I spend a significant fraction of my days with headache pain around level 1 on the pain scale. Maybe a 2. Rarely as much as a 3. As much as I complain about these headaches, they are mostly an annoyance. They make me feel like a character from “Harrison Bergeron,” with these constant low-level headaches keeping me from doing truly amazing things. But then I remember that it is my fixed mindset holding me back, not my headaches. Unlike normal-people headaches, you can’t chase these away with stardard OTC painkillers, and you are not supposed to take too much medicine for these (or else you will also have Medication Overuse Headaches). If I take a triptan, the headache and all of its distractions disappear within an hour. It is a rule that one may only take nine doses of triptans per month. Why nine? Back in 1991, Pico Iyer wrote an essay entitled “The Many Lives and Tricks of Nine.” When the doctor in the emergency room was trying to decide if my headaches were really migraines or if they were seizures, she used the fact that my headaches respond really well to triptans to decide on migraine.
Status Migrainosus: Migraine symptoms that last over 72 hours. I was diagnosed with this was on August 11, 2017. One might reasonably claim that those symptoms lasted for 17 days. More about this on Thursday. Spoiler: this might explain why my GitHub profile shows no commits for several weeks in August.
Complex Migraine: This does not have an ICD-10 code. It means, “wow, that is weird, and we don’t know what is happening, and the patient has a history of migraine.” Again, more on Thursday. I’ll try really hard to scan the drawings that I made and include them in the post.
Weird back-of-the-head headache: This is a term of my own invention. When I wake up with a headache, it is probably one of these. They rarely localize to one side. They rarely progress to a bad headache, but they also don’t respond well to medication.
Dirty headache: Again, another one of my own descriptors. These headaches remind me of a cross between that, “wow, I could really use a cup of coffee” feeling and the, “wow, I have drunk way too much coffee” feeling. One cup is too much, and too much is never enough. They are not localized to a particular part of the head. They are never bad enough to be worth taking medication over. The dirty headache can progress to the disorganized headache. Sometimes I can have a dirty headache or a disorganized headache without any headache pain.
Disorganized headache: The last of my own descriptors. These are the worst of the headaches that I have on a regular basis, and they are capable of becoming common migraines. Usually they don’t, though. I am rather light-sensitive, but they are not localized to a particular part of my head. My mental model is that there are these static electricity fireflies flying around my brain, and they are headache particles. But if they all settle in once place and start blinking in unison, like the synchronous fireflies in the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, then I end up with a full-blown common migraine.
Migralepsy: A migraine followed by a seizure. The Wikipedia says that this is very rare. There is no evidence that I have ever had a seizure. (Several EEGs—including one performed when I was having symptoms—have shown no epileptiform activity.) Migraines can be misdiagnosed as seizures, and seizures can be misdiagnosed as migraines. One of the most effective medications for preventing migraines is an anti-seizure medication. Once you have a history of migraine, any unexplained neurological symptom is declared to be a migraine aura. No one understands anything about the brain.
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Dissolution
(I didn’t have time to post anything on Wednesday, so I’ll write a second post today.)
I’m on an email list that I’m not supposed to talk about. But I expect that if what I heard is real, you’ll be hearing about it in the education news at some point anyway. A state university that seems to have more students than prestige sent an email to the math department floating the idea of eliminating math as a stand-alone department.
Obviously this was very upsetting to the math department in question. People don’t like change, and here was the administration proposing a very big change. A very big change that would mean that lots and lots of people would need to find new jobs or make significant shifts in how they do their jobs.
My thoughts (in brief) (and thinking much more broadly than just the one department that inspired this post):
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As much as we exalt the fact that mathematics is the language of nature and that arithmetic and geometry make up half of the quadrivium, how many people do we really need to employ doing mediocre math research? Like, there is only so much that the world needs to know about the hexaflexagon. The Life of the Mind is great and all, but everything in moderation. Sorry not sorry. (Note that this applies to lots of fields, not just math.)
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Also, the only reason that we have so many people devoting their lives to the hexaflexagon is because it is traditional to inflict at least a semester or two of math upon incoming freshmen. I’m going to hazard a guess that at nothing-special state university that there are a lot of students who didn’t learn much algebra in high school and then who go on to be unsuccessful at a course called “college algebra.” There might even be a task force to address this issue. I have only met two people even who were really good at teaching college algebra (one of them, Jeneva, was outstanding). Is there a good reason for the math department to be teaching college algebra? I am not convinced.
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Well, that is not quite fair. There is a good reason for the math department to teach college algebra (as currently conceived), and I wonder if the administration of this university has thought things through. I don’t know about this university, but the University of Tennessee has a remarkable amount of student attrition from year to year. This means that there are lots and lots and lots and lots of students taking lower division classes and a smaller number of students taking upper division classes. I’m going to put out a guess that college algebra is one of the cheapest classes for the university to teach. All you need is a room with a blackboard and some chalk. For real, I have taught math in a room that did not have a single electrical outlet. The people who teach college algebra are among the most poorly compensated people at the university (many of them not benefits eligible). These courses that one demeans as drop-out machines? Cash cows. They subsidize the upper division courses.
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How will the other departments feel about having to do their own dirty work? I’ve taught calculus to a lot of students who took it because they wanted to major in a popular department, and admission to that major depended on getting a good grade in calculus. I guess it depends on how many faculty lines these other departments get as part of the exchange.
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If the students at this university were actually learning from the lower division courses in math department, then I take this all back. But I don’t think that it’s unreasonable to consider that some other academic disciplines could give students a meaningful quantitative experience. Or, at least, one that is no worse than what they are currently getting in the math department.
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