Four Things

Pivot to Remote

Colleges are starting their classes and just as quickly shutting down their campuses.  First was UNC - Chapel Hill.  Today there was news from Notre Dame and Michigan State.  Carnegie Mellon emailed today to tell us that instead of starting on campus on August 31st we will be starting 100% online.  That start will only last one week though and as of today our students will be back in their classrooms the following Tuesday.  I guess it is possible that the schools that have had outbreaks are the exception and not the rule, but every day that goes by it seems less likely that in person residential college is possible under these circumstances.  Two weeks ago I shifted my classes from hybrid to remote.  I am still trying to decide if either of the Technical Direction classes will have shop based projects.  There's a perceptible desire from the students to get in and get their hands dirty, but I can't decide whether I want to be the one that puts them in that position.  Lately it seems like taking a breath makes some of these decisions for us.  I'll see what the next week brings.

Different Interests

I don't understand why we're not getting more action out of the Senate.  There's this established concept that people in government don't understand what the people they represent go through; that leaders don't know the price of milk.  The median net worth of a US household is $93k.  The median net worth in Congress is $500k and the Senate is probably significantly higher than that (a quick search failed to find the specific number).  There's just no way the average Congressperson can really relate to the average person.  It'll never happen, but it seems like there ought to be some wealth caps on Congress (and the President & Vice President).  Maybe something along the lines of if you are worth more than 10 times the median worth of your constituency you are ineligible to run.  That would mean that someone with a net worth of a million dollars could not be President.  That would certainly disqualify a lot of people, but the ones that were available would likely have a better connection to the people they represent.  (I also think you should only be paid the median annual income of your constituency too, but that's another story.)

Tales From the Loop

I finished watching Tales From the Loop on Amazon.  It wasn't what I was expecting.  The promos they run seem to cast it in the mold of the SyFy show Eureka.  They show lots of scientists and a robot that looks like a scout walker and high tech gear and families and you get the vibe that it is a fun science fiction show like we've seen before.  It really isn't.  In some ways I thought it was a lot more like The Twilight Zone.  It has a series of loosely connected, very small stories with fantastical elements, but it is anything but zany like Eureka.  It is slow and deliberate and... sad.  The soundtrack is often just a single cello and that absolutely meets the mood, expresses the tone of the storytelling.  I didn't notice until the end that the composer is Philip Glass.  Toward the end there's a scene where one of the schoolteachers asks one of the kids about a book she'd given him and he says he thought it was "sad, but beautiful."  The writers were almost certainly talking about their work as much as the book in the story.  Is it worth watching, sure.  Is it what you're expecting, no.  If you do watch it, reach out and tell me.  I'd love to talk about it, but I don't want to give anything away.

To Do List

The first day of class - remote or not - is coming up quickly.  This year has been sneakier than in the past as there is still a part of me that is sitting, waiting in March of this year.  I know we ended the Spring semester and then moved on to an abbreviated Summer program and that the Fall is bearing down on us right soon.  I know that, but I don't really feel it.  We had an opening faculty/staff meeting this week.  Usually the year kicks off with a cocktail of some sort that would normally still be a week and a half off.  This year is obviously different.  So the clock is ticking and I need to make my list.  I've got schedules to do for three classes and then a mountain of PowerPoint decks to compose.  I did 8 or 9 as part of the summer but I could be looking at more like 40 for the fall (that's the first time I did that math - that is a big number).  I'm behind because all the work time I have had so far has gotten applied to COVID and RJ and BONUS CURRICULUM tasks.  All the extra stuff has made it hard to dig down to the regular stuff.  Time to get to that part of the list (I need a project checklist I guess).