infryq

RIP Maurice Sendak. I'll always remember Ida, sly, and half the time I put milk on the shopping list it becomes an exuberant shout for morning cake.

The world was a better place for having you in it!

Following Olin faculty on Twitter is fun because you get access to a slow but manageable trickle of interesting undergrads, one of whom is @browley20, who wrote the following:

http://brettrowley.blogspot.com/2012/03/importance-of-language.html

... which is awesome, and which I will proceed to agree with and rebut simultaneously, eventually fading into a bit of a rant about approaching creativity from an analytical mindset.

Some primers:

• UOCD is User-Oriented Collaborative Design. It started as Olin students' first contact with the creative process (needfinding, prototyping, evaluation, iteration), is team-based, and uses a combination of design reviews and journaling to effect evaluation.
  
• Olin is a tiny, tiny college (68 were in my graduating class) that only offers engineering degrees. It strives for curriculum innovation and to ground students in entrepreneurship, humanities, philanthropy, and design as well as technical topics. Graduates tend towards project management, startups, or graduate school: anywhere requiring interdisciplinary prowess.
  
• Early on, Olin students had a huge hand in the design and running of the school. This has tapered off since the inaugural class graduated in 2006, but since our 5-yr reunion last year there's been some rekindling of the urge to college-build among current students.
  
• Since Olin I have dropped out of a robotics PhD program, worked for a few different labs at CMU, and am slowly working through CMU's MHCI (Human-Computer Interaction) program part-time, where I've been focusing on design, creativity, and education.
  

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Creative people have to push the boundaries of society's comfort zone. If we knew what it felt like, someone would've been there before, and it wouldn't be outside our comfort zone. There's no way to tell someone how to get there, aside from having them try over and over again, each time a little harder, each time in a different direction. What's hard enough? You tell me. I don't know. You're the first person who will ever have been there.

It's like trying to argue with a Zen monk. Sometimes you have to just say "Yes" to everything with joy and enthusiasm and see what happens.

Dear practical probstats fans,

( A sampling challenge... )

My much-beloved undergrad, Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, is working on its next strategic plan. One of the principles they have proposed is:

Attract the best; Produce the exceptional

...and I'm not sure I agree.

If we want graduates to be exceptional, they must be exceptions. They must be surprising. Unexpected. Certainly, Olin is entitled to use whatever definition of "best" they choose -- my class, the inaugural class, was not made up of folks with 4.0 high school records, it was made up of people who moved and shaked and had their own companies or invented a new variety of baseball that leveraged quantum physics. Some of us also had very good grades, but I thought it was fairly well-understood among us that the grades were not particularly good evidence of the kind of student we were looking for; they were evidence that a particular instance of the kind of student we were looking for also just happened to be curious about the same sorts of things that were being graded. Most teachers aren't idiots; if there's a way you can give a brilliant kid credit for something amazing she did in earnest of her own volition, you make it happen.

As Olin develops its reputation however, we're gaining public awareness, and the attention of people who see things the opposite way: that grades are the point, and if you can also be an Eagle Scout or start a community garden run by the neighborhood kids then that's just a good way to stand out.

I'm afraid that if we publicize ourselves as seeking to select the "best" students for admission, we will get more of the latter students, and fewer of the former students. More box-tickers. Fewer lifelong learners. More obedient queuers. Fewer spontaneous beekeepers. More people aiming to graduate and be named "exceptional" for doing so. Fewer people aiming to shape the school that will (sometimes just barely) graduate them, and who actually do all the revolutionary rule-breaking that "exceptional" implies.

I'm afraid we will lose our ability to tell the difference. Or if not the ability, then the opportunity: if a student who should be at Olin chooses not to apply because their GPA and SAT clearly indicate they are not the sort of "best" that we are looking for... then Olin simply loses.

So what is a better way for Olin to frame its desires? How should we describe the sort of student we want to see, and the sort of person we hope to effectuate? ('cause man, "produce" gives me the willies)

I read this: http://blog.richmond.edu/physicsbunn/2011/10/11/a-scientist-teaching-writing/

And then thought: Has anyone experimented, in today's multimedia extravaganza of a future, with giving students back thinkaloud camtasia recordings in lieu of comments? Then you don't have to write anything, you can use the cursor to direct attention to the text that you're talking about, you can talk through difficult parts, and it all gives the student the benefit of observing the analysis and evaluation process in addition to the actual conclusions. Yea/nea?

On my winter vacation I:

• Read about 900 pages on the 14 hour train trip to West Hartford
  
• Spent a lot of time reading, sleeping, and wandering through shopping centers
  
• Helped make a pretty epic oxtail stew with figs, roasted vegetables, and some red wine from Chile I didn't recognize, to go over cheese and polenta for Christmas dinner
  
• Put together a collection of sweets for stockings, since P's family typically doesn't do them and stockings are awesome.
  
• Read about 600 pages on the 14 hour train trip back to Pittsburgh (and if you know 5+-th graders who like reading bechdel-approved fantasy let me know; this series is nifty and I'm happy to offload my copies)
  
• Made cardamom shortbreads, half of which I rolled in chopped almonds instead, which was a fantastic idea
  
• Learned to temper chocolate. What a pain in the ass.
  
• Made mushroom meringues, using the ingredients and mixing method from the America's Test Kitchen (which uses cornstarch and goes much quicker) and aesthetics and assembly from Maida Heatter (because chocolate beats frosting any day). I wound up baking them on very low for another six hours and then letting them cool overnight; I think next time I'll use Maida's baking instructions which use a slightly higher heat.
  
• Made a mitten! and have most of the cuff done for its twin. Thank you, How I Met Your Mother, for not really requiring much attention at all.
  
• Started rereading Brust. Going back to Jhereg after having read the romantics is very educational.

And I have plans for tiramisu, there are 4 more egg whites in the fridge if I want to make more meringues (come eat these meringues, we have so many meringues) (...maybe I'll make a pavlova), P has plans for bread (we got some really lovely cheese yesterday) and for a panetonne, which I've almost certainly misspelled. At some point this winter I want to make marmelade, too. And a duck. Oh gosh and we're out of beer and should make more.

Not bad, I think.

I've started playing IFComp 11 games. Tracking notes here. The cut is probably spoilery, but not interestingly so.

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I just took a jam jar, filled it with sour cherries from the yard, threw in some fragments of cinnamon and a tablespoon of vanilla sugar, then filled 2/3 with cherry wine and topped up with almond liqueur.

We'll see what they're like in a week or a month.

Dear world, stop praising my body by hating yours. Even setting aside discussion of society's hyperconflation of female form and female value, the logic is all wrong. Just because I am thin does not mean I have an easy time finding clothes that fit, or that I don't have to pay any attention to what I eat, or that I can sit on my ass without exercising all week and still feel good, or that every shape and line I make on the dance floor makes me look glamorous and sexy. Every body has a unique set of requirements. Nobody ignores their body without facing unpleasant consequences. Nobody.

I think it would be awesome if more people learned to sew. It needn't go even to the point of making a single successful garment. I just think the act of taking flat fabric and shaping it to fit a curved body based on checkpoint measurements highlights how impossibly complex and varied 3D shapes are. It's a miracle that RTW clothing fits as many people as well as it does. (if it didn't, more people would make their own stuff, or give up and go without. Not a lot of nudists-in-clothing-protest on the streets these days)

I don't mean suck it up. I mean more personal care and attention and gratefulness. There are all sorts of people in the Pittsburgh dance community who have really amazing, gorgeous movement, but bitch all the time about how much they hate their curves. WOMAN. WAKE UP. I mean, be healthy, I want you to be around and dancing with us for a long, long time, but there ain't no way your hips could move like that if you weren't shaped that way. I can understand that it might be difficult to tell the difference between your body's basic shape and whether or not you're carrying "extra" pounds, but I think a lot of women place their dissatisfaction squarely on the former, and that's just not right.

Love your body. Learn what it likes. Revel in what makes you you. Experiment and find out.

This year's thanksgiving was the best ever. It could have been better by the addition of more family; we'll make up for it at christmas.

Wednesday most of the office went home early; I stayed until 5 or 6 to finish building a dataset that was being ornery. We've been trying to find a sustainable way of collecting and organizing this data since February, and have finally decided to punt and hand-pick each part of each schema of each data source. Augh. Maybe we'll try again when there's less time pressure from our grant.

Thursday morning we went out for milk. Milk and eggs. Milk, eggs, and oranges. Milk, eggs, oranges, and ice cream. And coolant for the car. But no currants. Then we went home and sat on the couch watching other people make turkeys on the Create channel. Paul made some bread. I made a layout for a christmas card and located photos of us from the year. Around 7 we collected the bread, some sauerkraut, hot pepper relish, and beer and went over to Rapier's on the north side. It was full of people, booze, cheese, and many strange and delicious things(todo list: make miso-pickled garlic. Make miso, even). There were two turkeys, a ham, a leg of smoked roast lamb, at least two kinds of stuffing, homemade mac&cheese, two kinds of cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, roast squash, and of course P and I mostly sat by the fireplace in the kitchen making bruschetta on a toasting fork and handing it to people as they floated through. It was nice to see Charlotte and Derrick there; it was nice to see Gwen and Shadow there, it was nice to see that one girl there who is always suspiciously familiar; it was hilarious to see someone explain Rope Pride to Chris' mom. Home around 11.

Friday we didn't buy anything. I cut up a chuck roast that had been sitting in the fridge waiting for a free day, seared it, stewed it with onions and mushrooms and a head of peeled garlic cloves, 1/4c roux, half a bottle of wine, a little baggie of dried rosemary, and the last quart of the lamb bone stock for 3 hours. For the 4th hour I took it out onto the stovetop on low, cranked the oven, and roasted two big carrots, two truly enormous parsnips, and a couple of potatoes. Mixed everything together once the veggies were caramelized. It's... intense.

Saturday we went to squirrel hill and walked from Allegro (great bakery) to Te Cafe, where I replenished my loose tea supply and chatted with the dude about oolong and milk-fermented teas, to the crazy gift shop by murray grill that I'd never actually been in before (did you know they sell some rudimentary hardware supplies there? Pliers and things! Seriously!), to CTR for coffee. Te gave me a free morrocan mint tea. Nice guys. Then I sat under blankets at home with a heating pad and the video recordings from Neil's Graveyard Book reading tour, and finished sewing all the buttons on the duvet cover I started back in the spring.

Sunday I reorganized the pantry, finding homes for the little bits of ingredients that tend to hang around in bags and, thus, get pwned by moths. There are a lot more containers than I thought there were, which is cool. And now we can find things. It's like you open the door and there's an array of food. Then in the afternoon we watched the game and had Dani over for craftiness. I'm still thinking about what sorts of decorations I want to put up for the holidays; we're not going to have a tree, but I do like greenery. We'll see.

P and I still need to finish the huge table in the basement. A little sandpaper, some beeswax and mineral oil, and then find somebody burly to help us move it up to the dining room... freeing up two craft tables for use elsewhere in the house (exciting). I have to wait until that's done before I start disassembling the painted-over hardware in the kitchen and taking all of that back down to the metal. Hate paint. I don't know what possesses people to paint over hinges and drawer pulls and the like. It's ridiculous.