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Groundhog Day
As someone who grew up in upstate NY, I’ve never understood why everyone on the news has always been so deadpan serious about Groundhog Day and completely ignoring the “heads I win, tails you lose” nature of the groundhog’s choice.
“Six more weeks of winter” would take us to March 16.
That is the exact same thing as an early spring. Astronomical spring doesn’t start until the 20th (or 21st) (unless you are the Catholic church, in which case it is defined to always be the 21st). It doesn’t actually start to feel like spring until well into April.
If you live in Schenectady, no matter what the groundhog chooses, you can’t lose!
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Oddly Negative
The fact that a large fraction of these posts are stories taken from R-Ladies meetings or from the bug reports at work probably says that I am not spending enough time hanging around at the end of the runway waiting for planes to land. Also today I went to my doctor’s office (family medicine, not one of my neurologists) to catch her up on how things have been the past six months—and to get a hepatitis A vaccine because I am not interested in getting any more vaccine-preventable illnesses.
This post is both from R-Ladies and from the bug reports!
There is a problem in one of our prealgebra classes that asks the students to find the smallest positive integer such that something-or-other is true. The answer is, I dunno, let’s say 33. I get an awful lot of bug reports in which the student has tried the problem and then given up and then written in very angrily asserting that 33 is not positive!
A few weeks ago at the R-Ladies meeting, I was explaining why I don’t use a particular package in my code. The author of the package seems to have no respect for the concept of backwards compatibility (which is his choice). Sometimes I would accidentally update things, and then my code would break, and I would have to spend half a day searching stackexchange trying to figure out what went wrong. The organizer of the R-Ladies group is a big fan of this package, and she explained that the author only breaks things with every other release. She said that the even numbered versions are backwards compatible and that the (and here I’m quoting) “negative” versions could break things (of course she meant to say “odd”).
Isn’t it interesting that so many people have so fully internalized an isomorphism between the groups \(\mathbb{Z}_2\) under addition (a/k/a {0, 1} under
xor) and {-1, 1} under multiplication?
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Lunar Eclipse
Since I’m up anyway at this time of the morning, I decided to take some pictures of the lunar eclipse from my porch. Since the Earth and the Moon are traveling very quickly through space, by the time I found some decent camera settings, the moon was already getting quite close to the roofline of my building.
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The Distracting Thing about Hadley Wickham's Talk
I am up way past my bedtime because I went to go see talks by Jenny Bryan and Hadley Wickham at the local R-Ladies Meet-up. They were both entirely lovely talks, even if I do favor a different set of idiosyncratic tools than the ones that they prefer.
There was a component of Hadley Wickham’s talk that I found sort of distracting. It seemed to be there to bolster the argument that the thing is not its name, the map is not the territory, philosophy, yadda yadda, and all that. He was defining a sort of nested evaluation in terms of a tree, and it matched imperfectly with things that I had learned about long ago, and it was super-distracting for me to try to match my long-ago memories with what was happening at the talk.
The reason that this was an issue at all is that R is full of quirks, and some of them involve the way that objects are referenced (dereferenced?) by their names. Some functions expect unquoted strings as their argument. So you would use
f(string)to applyfto"string". And if you saidname <- "string", it’s sort of a pain to applyfwith respect toname. This might be an issue if you have a vector of strings and you want to applyfto all of your strings and you need to find some sort of work-around.As part of his talk, he associated each function call with the root of a tree, and each leaf was either the name of the function or one of its arguments. So
f(x, y)would have some nameless root, and there would be three leaves:f,x, andy. But then he noted thatxmight itself be the name for something. Maybex = a + bso you could hang the leaves+andaandboff ofx(he was using prefix notation) and continue building your tree by substituting back in for what all of the various things in your expression represented.But with all of these functions written in prefix notation and thrown into a data structure (no word on how one was expected to transverse this tree – I think this tree was built for humans and not for computers, as it seemed like one just read off the leaves from left to right without regard for their ancestry), I started having flashbacks to my liberal arts education. Of course, my past self was introduced to such functions with postfix notation, and things were thrown on a stack instead of into a tree. But during the talk, I couldn’t quite reconcile these things, and I kept having the sense that something is not quite right.
Maybe other people got something about all the talk of trees in the middle of the talk, but I was pretty distracted by how this reminded me just enough of the sorts of computer science that we learned back in the early 90s but wasn’t quite the same.
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I Don't Understand the Growth Mindset
I know that this makes me a terrible person in the ed biz, but there is just so much that I don’t understand about the growth mindset. The idea, from what I can tell, is that every person’s academic potential is unbounded and that one can do anything if one believes that it is possible to get limitlessly smarter through hard work. There has got to be something that I’m missing or some unstated assumptions that I don’t also unstatedly assume because there is so much that I just don’t get (and questions that I have not seen asked).
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First off, isn’t this super-offensive to people with disabilities? Especially those with intellectual, developmental, and learning disabilities (both those present since early childhood and those acquired later). Oh, student, the reason that you are not succeeding is because you have the wrong mindset. It is not because you have an extra chomosome or an uncommon balance of neurotransmitters or a bunch of brain cells that got injured in an accident; it is because you just don’t believe that you can be smarter and you are not trying hard enough. This can’t really be part of the growth mindset canon, can it?
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Or is there an asterisk saying that everyone can be smarter except for some people? How do we know which people are in which group?
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And isn’t this really a form of victim-blaming when students don’t succeed? My students failed calculus, so they must have fixed mindsets. Too bad so sad. They just need to get their attitude in order, and then they will succeed. I’ve seen way too much of this nonsense, especially when it came to blaming college algebra students for failing college algebra. There is plenty of blame to go around.
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But if all the mindset people are claiming is that a very large fraction of people have the intellectual capacity to learn the equivalent of what I think of as ninth-grade algebra, possibly with a lot of work and some remediation (cough fractions cough), then sure, I can buy into that. I totally believe that most people have the capacity to learn that sort of algebra. I also believe that adults who haven’t previously learned that material might have higher priorities in their life than getting their math skills to the point where they really understand algebra.
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Maybe I just feel personally threatened, and I want to make a #notallfixedmindset hashtag. Every time someone tries to explain mindset theory, they spin a tale about fixed mindset people that does not at all match with my lived experience as a fixed mindset person. Mindset canon says that I should give up—especially at STEM-type things—when something is hard. But that is not the case at all. I observe that lots of stupid people are successful at whatever the thing is, so it can’t really be that hard, and I should be able to figure it out.
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Likewise, the studies about how growth mindset students will continue to truck along when assigned a literally-impossible problem and fixed mindset students will give up after making no headway. Depending on the nature of the problem, I could realistically see myself proving to myself that there are no solutions, so I would stop looking for solutions.
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Also, since I am good at a lot of things, and I enjoy a lot of things (but not all things cough the French language cough), why shouldn’t I optimize and choose how to spend my time based on a utility function that depends both on how much I enjoy the thing and how much of my time spent doing it is productive?
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An aside, mostly about giving up at things, is that many times in my life I have been told that I should do something because I am good at it / it is prestigious and I could do it so I should do it. No one ever seemed to care about what I would enjoy doing. If I could support myself in the manner to which I have become acustomed by hacking vintage knitting machines to do new and fabulous things, I could really get into that. But my accumulated lifetime experiences have led me to value having a predictable way to make sure that the bills get paid.
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Stroke L (ł)
Today I was listening to A Way With Words in the car. (Aside: When I was in grad school, this show was insufferable, and I could only hate-listen to it, but now it is quite reasonable.)
One of the callers was asking about her mother’s pronunciation of the word “avocado” as “alvocado.” And the host explained that in some dialects, the “ah” sound at the beginning of avocado is more like an “awe” sound, and that an “awe” sound is starting to get suspiciously close to an l.
And now I am wondering if this explains the comparitive surprise vs. lack of surprise in my household about the spelling of the word gołąbki. I learned how to say the word from people who grew up speaking Polish, and I learned how to say it a really long time before I learned how to spell it. I was really surprised when I learned how to spell it because I would have sworn that there was a w. Apparently stroke-l (or, as my mother calls it, L z kreską ukośną) sounds like a w to me. But Jim was not surprised at all, based on having heard me say the word because in my pronunciation of gołąbki, the ł sounds sort of like an l.
But today, this difference of interpretation of the word became somewhat harmonized when it was revealed that there is only a short distance between “awe” and “oll.”
(Aside: If anyone kvetches to you about the terrible orthography in English and how there is no reasonable mapping between words and their spelling, French and Polish are both pretty bad, too. Did you know that an ą in the middle of a word typically contains an invisible m?)
(Aside 2: You can be pedantic when ordering Polish food. Gołąbki is plural; gołąbek is singular. Likewise, pierogi is plural, and pieróg is singular.)
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Sixteen Minutes at Lindbergh Field
I wasn’t out watching planes, but I got an email alert that the 747 diverted to LAX. It looked like a missed approach, but they diverted instead of going around. Once the LiveATC.net archive was posted, I listened. And I have transcribed it. (Note that getting accurate timestamps on LiveATC recordings is annoying, so there are none.) Here’s what happened in the 16 minutes after the FedEx plane was cleared to land.
Lindbergh Tower: FedEx nine-oh-six heavy, Lindbergh Tower, you’re number two. You’re going to be following a Cirrus that’s current crosswind is descending. Wind three four zero at eight. Runway two-seven cleared to land.
FDX906: Cleared to land runway two-seven, behind a Cirrus. FedEx nine-oh-six heavy.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, you can turn in tight now. There’s a MD… uh… eleven on a seven mile final. Wind three five zero five. Runway two-seven cleared to land.
N469CD: Cleared to land two-seven.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, landing clearance is canceled. You can just make tight right three-sixties there until I can get a hole for you.
N469CD: OK. Nine-Charlie-Delta.
Lindbergh Tower: FedEx nine-oh-six heavy, you’re number one now.
FDX906: Thank you.
Lindbergh Tower: American eleven-sixty, contact SoCal departure.
AAL1160: American eleven-sixty, departure, good day.
N714TA: [unintelligible] VFR [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: seven-one-four-Tango-Alpha, Lindbergh Tower, say again intentions?
N714TA: [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, you can turn northbound now.
N469CD: Northbound.
Lindbergh Tower: Thank you.
Lindbergh Tower: Bravo Four-Tango-Alpha, I didn’t understand that. Can you say again intensions.
N714TA: [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: [unintelligible], roger.
Lindbergh Tower: Cessna four-Tango-Alpha, Lindbergh Tower, cleared to enter class Bravo airspace. May right traffic runway two-seven. Report being in the pattern. Descend to pattern altitude, your discretion.
N714TA: OK, right [unintelligible] over to two-seven and [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, make that left three-sixties, now, tight left three-sixties. And I think I’ve got a hole for you.
N469CD: OK, left three-sixties, nine-Charlie-Delta.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, traffic to follow is on a five mile final, descending out of two thousand three hundred a heavy Boeing seven-forty-seven, report in effect.
N469CD: [unintelligible]
N469CD: I’ve got the traffic on [unintelligible]. Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, roger.
Lindbergh Tower: Speedbird four-four-November heavy, Lindbergh Tower.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, you can follow that traffic. Caution wake turbulence. Winds three three zero at eight. There is a Boeing seven-thirty-seven about a one-two mile final. Runway two-seven cleared to land. Number two.
N469CD: Cleared to land, Charlie-Delta.
Lindbergh Tower: FedEx nine-oh-six heavy, do you need assistance?
FDX906: Uh, apparently we have, uh, blown a tire. Standby. FedEx nine-oh-six heavy.
Lindbergh Tower: Speedbird four-four-November heavy, tower.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta turn northbound, northbound now.
N469CD: Southbound?
Lindbergh Tower: Cessna Four-Tango-Alpha, remain outside of Bravo airspace, now.
N714TA: OK, remain outside of airfield airspace now.
Lindbergh Tower: Speedbird four-four-November heavy, tower.
DAL2546: Tower, Delta twenty-five-forty-six is ten and a half [unintelligible] for runway two-seven
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta northbound, northbound now, please.
N469CD: Northbound [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: Speedbird four-four-November heavy, tower.
BAW44N: Tower, Speedbird four-four-November heavy is under three miles.
Lindbergh Tower: Speedbird four-four-November heavy, go around! Go around. Fly the published missed.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, I’m not going to get any a while. Montgomery might be the best bet for you.
N469CD: OK. Now [unintelligible] how do I get over there?
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, you’re not going to get in for a while. There’s a disabled aircraft on the runway. Uh, Montgomery is about a, about, zero one zero heading for about five miles.
N469CD: OK, I got it in sight. Charlie Delta.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus nine-Charlie-Delta, roger, you’re leaving San Diego class Bravo airspace… there. You can contact Montgomery tower, one-one-niner point two.
[No idea, but I think a truck on the ground]: [unintelligible]
[Probably another truck?]: [unintelligible] out of bravo four, I’d like a runway inspection.
N469CD: Montgomery tower, Cirrus four-six-nine-charlie-delta is about, uh, six to the south inbound. [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: Zebra two, Lindbergh Tower, proceed on two-seven.
Zebra 2: Zebra two, proceed on two-seven.
Lindbergh Tower: nine-Charlie-Delta, still on tower. One-one-niner point two is Montgomery.
Lindbergh Tower: Cessna four-tango-alpha, same to you. I’m not going to be able to get you in for about… for a long time. Montgomery is your best bet.
N714TA: OK [unintelligible] Montgomery [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: Thank you.
DAL2546: Tower, Delta twenty-five-forty-six on the visual for runway two-seven.
Lindbergh Tower: Delta twenty-five-forty-six, Lindbergh Tower, go around, fly heading two seven five. Maintain two thousand five hundred.
DAL2546: OK, go around heading two seven five and two thousand five hundred. Delta twenty-five-forty-six.
Lindbergh Tower: Speedbird four-four-November heavy, contact SoCal departure, one two five point one five.
BAW44N: One two five one five, Speedbird four-four-November heavy.
Lindbergh Tower: Cirrus, correction, Cessna four-tango-alpha, outside San Diego class Bravo airspace radar services terminated. Contact Montgomery tower, one one niner point two.
Zebra 2: Tower, Zebra two, I am clear of the runway and Zebra Three is still on the runway. I will be at Bravo ten [unintelligible]
Lindbergh Tower: Zebra two, roger.
Lindbergh Tower: Zebra two, tower.
Zebra 3: Zebra three, tower.
Zebra 2: Tower, Zebra two, do you have traffic [unintelligible]?
Lindbergh Tower: Zebra two, tower, negative. We just want to make sure that the runway’s open. Is the runway open yet?
Zebra 2: Zebra two, affirmative, shows the runway open at this time. And I will follow the aircraft on taxiway Bravo.
Lindbergh Tower: Zebra two, roger, thank you.
Lindbergh Tower: Southwest sixty-two-forty-four, tower, you ready to go?
SWA6244: We’re ready, six-two-forty-four
Lindbergh Tower: Southwest sixty-two-forty-four, one three five zero at eight. Runway two-seven, cleared for take-off.
SWA6244: Two-seven cleared to go, Southwest six-two-forty-four.
Lindbergh Tower: Southwest sixty-two-forty-four, cancel take-off clearance. Hold short two-seven.
SWA6244: We’re already past the hold short line, Southwest six-two-forty-four.
Lindbergh Tower: Southwest sixty-two-forty-four, roger, exit runway two-seven at Charlie two. Hold short of Charlie one.
SWA6244: Exit Charlie two, hold short Charlie one. Southwest sixty-two-forty-four.
Lindbergh Tower: Southwest sixty-two-forty-four, disregard that. Runway two-seven cleared for takeoff. Sorry for the confusion.
SWA6244: Two-seven, cleared for take-off. Southwest sixty-two-forty-four.
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