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In Which I Blame Apple for Things That Are Unquestionably My Fault
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I upgraded to the latest version of iOS, and ever since then the reminders on my phone haven’t been telling me about things that I told you that I would do. Or the plans that I made with you. Come to think of it, the update also removed your contact information from my phone. Weird, no?
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Ever since they patched High Sierra, I have to remember my password, so I couldn’t turn off the parental controls that make it absolutely impossible to do anything on the computer. That’s right. You can’t install any software, open any apps, view any web pages, write any files, or anything else without the password.
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Apple put out an update for the firmware for my Time Capsule router, and that made it so that Time Machine stopped working correctly. Every since then, I can not remember any of those things that you asked me to do. The past has become an arbitrary construct. I think that the update has tilted my plane of experience and altered the angle at which it intersects the cone of obliscence, so for now I can only remember the future.
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The new version of iTunes no longer empties the dishwasher or scoops the cat box.
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DIY Dream Act
According to an extensive genealogy site on the internet, my great-grandmother Frances (probably originally Franciszka) was born in Poznań, Poland in the late 1880s. Her parents were from Poznań, as were their parents and their parents’ parents, and so on and so forth, going back to at least the 1600s (via the Walkowiak family) and maybe earlier. Some time around 1890 Wojciech Walkowiak, his wife, their adult children, their spouses, and their children all decided to pick up and leave Poznań for Schenectady. Based on the number of children in all these families, I could easily have hundreds of fourth cousins living in Schenectady.
It is also possible that all of these relatives lived in villages located in a province or region referred to as Poznań, not in the city itself.
I couldn’t find my great-grandmother’s family in the 1900 US census. The 1910 census showed her parents and seven of her eight surviving siblings living on their family farm in Albany County. It’s not surprising that she wasn’t there: By that point she had married my great-grandfather, a man of such mystery that he hardly ever appears in any official documents.
By the time we get to 1920, the family has settled down in the house on Sunset St. that would remain in the family at least until Aunt Sophie died in 1993, maybe later, as I think that Uncle George might have inherited the house. According to the 1930 census, the house was worth $7000 at the time. Zillow shows that it sold earlier this year for $5000 (not a typo). Think twice before investing in Schenectady real estate.
The 1920 census shows that my great-grandfather had his first papers (coded PA for papers) and that my great-grandmother was an alien (AL). Both were born in Poland. Depending which dates and records you trust, my great-grandmother was somewhere between two and eight years old when she moved to the United States. She died before I was born, so I never met her. I’m told that she spoke pretty good English – but that she had an accent.
I’ve cut up the images of the census pages and pasted them back together to show the relevant details.
At the time she had five children; their mother is listed as being born in Poland.
This is also consistent with information from the 1915 New York State census (of which I do not have an image).
Things get interesting by the time we get to 1930. My great-grandfather has completed the process of becoming a naturalized citizen. My great-grandmother has decided that she was born in New York. She now has nine children (Uncle George wouldn’t be born until 1931). Now their mother is listed as being born in
PolandNY.
This information is echoed in the 1940 census. My great-grandmother continues to assert that she was born in New York. The 1940 census didn’t ask everyone where their parents were born, but Uncle Steve was one of the people who was asked; the form says that his mother was born in New York.
Based on the information that I’ve seen, this sounds like a do-it-yourself version of the DREAM Act. (It’s not entirely clear, as there is also family lore that says that my great-grandmother traveled from the US to Europe when she was very young – possibly with some fraction of her family – and then came back to the US some years later. Maybe she was born in the US but didn’t remember her early years here?)
As an aside, the 1940 census shows that both Aunt Anna and my grandfather had moved out of the house by then (both were married at the time), but the remaining eight siblings were still living with their parents. Uncle George, Aunt Aggie, Uncle Cas, and Uncle Steve were all students at the time, so that made sense. But Aunt Bernie (age 19), Aunt Helen (age 21), Uncle Ed (age 26), and Aunt Sophie (age 29) all had jobs. And they were all still living with their parents (in a 1500 square foot, 3-bedroom house). You might complain about Kids These Days living with their parents well into their 20s. My relatives were way ahead of the curve on this one.
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The General Public and Math
I have seen a lot of examples of people who are reasonably well educated (or on their way to being reasonably well educated) who are unable to calculate their way out of a paper bag.
But on the other hand, there was that article about street mathematics from several years ago that said that people could do much more sophisticated math in real life situations than they could in the artificial context of school.
Yet on the third hand (or as we say in this household, “on the gripping hand”), I am totally, completely, and 100% obsessed with a mobile game built on a freemimum model, and almost every post that I see on Facebook comes from members of the online community for this game. The game has various in-game currencies, but the general idea is that you can turn either time or US dollars into in-game diamonds, and then you can turn the diamonds into the things that you want in the game. There are published conversion rates for all of these. A very, very, very large number of posts are asking whether the player can accomplish some goal with the amount of diamonds that she currently has, and if not, how many dollars she would need to spend to achieve this goal.
Who talks about fourth hands? Insects in animated films? There seems to be some perception that when people buy houses that they know exactly how much the mortgage interest deduction saves them each month as well as the present value of that future stream of savings, and they use this information to adjust how much they are willing to pay for homes. Perhaps the fourth hand is the invisible hand?
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Tales from the BugMaster
The classes that we offer feature online homework, some of which is machine-graded. The parser tries as hard as it can to understand what students submit, even if they use a made-up pidgin of plain text and LaTeX. The humans try as hard as they can to make sure that the problems are correct. And some of the problems have dynamic hints: If you submit a wrong answer that we anticipated, then the problem give targeted advice.
Of the thousands and thousands of students who take our classes, only a small fraction of them submit bug reports. And I can only conclude that some of the bug-reporting students do not read. Or perhaps they have lived their entire lives in a world where Google search can tell what you meant, and they can not fathom an environment in which one must make submissions in a specific form.
One problem asked the students to find the smallest positive integer not relatively prime to some particular value and that also satisfied some other condition. Many students submit a number that is relatively prime to that value and then complain that their answer is marked wrong. Even after a modal pops up reminding them that they are looking for a number that is not relatively prime to that value.
Others have a lot of trouble with mathematical notation. The order of operations is deadly. They have trouble understanding the difference between
1/2xand1/(2x).And then there are the parents. It is always awkward when a parent submits a bug report via the student’s account asserting that the parent has an advanced degree in a STEM field from a prestigious university. And the parent has made a sign error. Appeal to authority does not change sign errors. Sign errors come for everyone.
And sometimes a student has something embarrassing in their computer clipboard and accidentally pastes it into the homework system and submits it as an answer. For example, think about the sorts of search terms that might be on the mind of a middle schooler. We’ve seen these submitted as homework responses. These students are very eager to have a site administrator reset the problem before their parents check their homework.
But my favorite bug report of the year came in response to a straightforward word problem about fraction arithmetic.
The student’s complaint: “its not lit enough”.
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Conversations with the Past
1990s: Excuse me. Excuse me! I think you’re wearing my party clothes.
me: Reputable fashion sources tell me that you’re back! I can wear your clothes!
1990s: I think they mean that you can buy new clothes that remind you of me. I don’t think they meant that you were supposed to raid your closet for that $20 party dress that you bought at the Marshalls in La Jolla in 1996 and ironically wore to teach in layered with that black t-shirt that your mom bought mail-order in 1987 and also wore to your brother’s wedding in 2001.
me: SHUT UP! SHUT UP! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
1990s: Is that the barrette that you bought at that street fair in Hanover in 1993?
me: I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!
1990s: Clinique Black Honey Almost lipstick?
me: They still make it! I bought it new at Sephora very recently!
1990s: What happened to the Mary Janes? Are you going to wear the Mary Janes?
me: The ones with the lugged soles? They fell apart. I’m going to wear the red shoes with the ribbon laces. The ones that I wore to Supercomputing when it was in Seattle.
1990s: You’re not going to wear the pearls?
me: I’m wearing the pearls.
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Holiday Parties
It’s been quite a week of me staying up past my bedtime. Tuesday I gave a talk up in Escondido and did not get home until late-for-me. Wednesday was the Academy’s holiday party, and tonight is my office’s holiday party.
Highlights
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The party on Wednesday was a bonfire on the beach in Coronado. I ask: “Too soon?” Of course, Coronado is almost entirely surrounded by water, and beaches tend not to catch on fire. Also, the fire was pretty small, even by fire-on-the-beach standards.
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I put the clothes that I wore on Wednesday evening in my laundry basket. Sophie took a nap in the laundry basket and then came to sit on my lap. She smelled like she had been smoking. It’s not clear to me which cat would be more likely to be a smoker. Sophie is more uptight. Gwen is anorexic.
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It is a good thing that I am an early riser. (Although, this morning I was able to sleep in until 5am, waking up after having some sort of weird academic anxiety dream in which I had to go to UCSD to get my advisor’s signature for some sort of meaningless academic formality.) Our end-of-year party is tonight in La Jolla, and it starts at 7pm. The office is Rancho Bernardo, and I live in North Park. So I need to go home and change and then get to La Jolla. Will there be traffic? Of course there will be traffic. But since I got to the office before 7am, I am going to leave early and miss some of the traffic.
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I had accidentally skipped two doses (Wednesday evening and Thursday morning) of a medication that I had recently started taking again (after being off it for a few months), but then I took my doses for last night and this morning. The internet says one should “avoid or limit the use of alcohol” while taking this medication. I’m thinking that maybe I should have just stayed off it until after the holiday party. Some time in the next few hours I need to decide if I will forgo the free drinks and drive myself to the party or whether I should get a ride and go with the internet’s advice of “limit” (rather than “avoid”). NB: One of my neurologists refers to my dose as “pediatric,” and he said that he would be surprised if this medication was actually doing anything at all for me at such a low dose.
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Do I even have anything to wear? I’m betting there is something in my closet that will work. It’s days like today when I wish I owned a tiara.
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Workplace Threats
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I am going to move my desk over next to the storage closet by the kitchen.
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I am going to reprogram the thermostat.
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If things stay broken, I am going to start googling the error messages and then type all sorts of things that start with “sudo” that I find on Stack Exchange.
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