Be a rainbow in someone else’s cloud. Maya Angelou A thought (from Pinterest, where else?) on a snowy May day in Colorado.
Sunny Side of the Street
The other day it occurred to me that I live on the sunny side of the street. But only literally. Our house faces south. In the suburban wilds of California where I grew up, we had no need for the compass. Here in Colorado, I can north-south-east-west with the best of them (or at least […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Bureaucracy (Feynman Part 3)
This post is the third and final in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The first posts covered two different reactions I had to the book: indignation and inspiration. In this post, I describe a third reaction, empathetic amusement—on the topic […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Research (Feynman Part 2)
This post is the second in a series of reflections on Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. In the previous post, I had my dander up about Professor Feynman’s ogling of the co-eds. I can see that his creepiness was a distraction—for him and for me—from […]
No Joking Matter: Feynman on Women (Feynman Part 1)
I recently read Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. The book is a collection of vignettes by the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. The title of the book refers to an awkward reaction he got at a prim Princeton social event, where he said yes to both lemon AND cream in his tea. But the phrase has […]
Birthday Present
Tomorrow is a big birthday. A BIG one. I’ve been thinking about what I want the day to be like. I came up with this: This post is dedicated to Jenny the Genie. 🙂
No One Was Listening
I read Steal Like an Artist recently. There is a poetic justice that my favorite bit of it was this quote, attributed to Andre Gide: Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, it needs to be said again. This sums up a key challenge of raising […]
Chair Evaluation of Teaching (vs. SET)
It’s my third annual evaluation season as chair. I’ve progressed, or at least improved my attitude, since the first year. Our school has a reasonable system in place for the annual evaluation of research, one that addresses a big pain point—consistency across disciplines. But that system is not the focus of this post. (If you […]
Airline Armrest: A Message to My Male Readers
Dear Men:You do not own the armrest between our seats on the plane.With irritation, LK I find this inconvenience maddening. It’s worse because of the larger things it represents. The poet Lily Myers selects the perfect word. Accommodation. I have been taught accommodation. The whole video is here: