Technology Review, GG Style

OK, there are plans to actually post some things about earth science, but for now, some flippancy.

The country is being run by MAGA, and when America was great originally remains up in the air (1950s? 1920s? 1880s?). If you turn the clock back, what technological marvels would you have to do without? And what monsters since unleashed would go away? So, with some commentary, are GG’s notes of technologies that make an impact during GG’s lifetime on GG…Have fun and feel free to make your own list…

Welcome to Trump U, Big State edition

Congratulations on being hired here at Trump U-Big State edition. Your essay acknowledging the wisdom of our fearless leader, who was right about everything, placed you at the top of the applicant pool. We look forward to seeing additional laurels from you during our regular check-ins.

Your appointment in the Geoscience department carries certain responsibilities. We urge you to check in with your program minder regularly, sharing lesson plans and research topics so that you remain aligned with the administration’s priorities, such as avoiding measuring climate variables because, of course, there is no change in climate. Similarly, avoiding troublesome notions like radiometric dates older than 6000 years should be kept in mind when trying to use older educational materials.

Of course your adherence to the administration’s priorities should place you high on the list for the roughly one in twenty chance of scoring an NSF research grant. Your governmental minder should be able to help you identify the current most-desired answers to research questions, such as humans do not affect climate, people and dinosaurs did coexist, vaccines cause autism, etc.

As you have agreed to the terms of our gold-standard science protocols, you are of course aware that prior to submission for publication, you will have your minder check through your research work to be sure that any unintentional biases are stripped out and any inconsistencies with governmental mandates eliminated. Pay particular attention to any adjustments of figures made with a sharpie.

Again, welcome to Trump U-Big State edition, where tenure is a state of mind and not a legal protection.

Better TV ad?

Nothing like watching college basketball to get to see all the…different?… ads that universities make. Well, the specific shots are different, but if you have a dartboard with “athletic highlight”, “serious student in class”, “professor in lab”, “professor in class”, “loving campus photo”, “students in lab”, “school mascot prancing around”, “number of awards voiceover”, “years existing voiceover”, “national ranking voiceover”, “energetic band music” and start flinging darts at this, you too can make one of these distinctly unmemorable ads that broadcasters apparently are required by the NCAA to use as filler during timeouts.

Does anybody really choose a school from those ads? Can you even tell the difference between schools?

Well, Big State U, recognizing what prospective students really want and also seeing declining enrollments, has remade the mold…

Counting

Hard to believe that athletic leagues represent groupings of institutions of higher learning…

With the imminent demise of the Pac-12 conference (even if Oregon State and Washington State continue to use the name), we will be left with the uniformly, decidedly stupid naming of three of the remaining four “big” (er, sorry, “power”) athletic conferences. The Big Ten last had 10 members in 1989; it had 11 from 1990-2010, when it went to 12 (while at that same time the Big 12 went to 10 members); a couple years later (2014) it went to 14 and with the demise of the Pac-12, the Big Ten will go later this year to…18 members. Which is, GG supposes, what “10” represents in, um, base-18. Meanwhile, the Big 12, which grew from the Big 8 in 1996 (which had 8 teams) last had 12 members in 2011, when it dropped to 10 members, that number staying constant until last year, when it skipped 12 to get to 14, and later this year will approach the Big Ten with…16 members. Too bad they didn’t get to 18, as “12” in hexadecimal is 18 base-10. It isn’t just counting that seems to challenge these organizations; the Atlantic Coast Conference will be welcoming Stanford and Cal, neither of which is remotely close to the Atlantic coast (but they too will shortly have 18 members and so could score the Big 18 name if they really wanted to…or they could decide to acknowledge geography and drop “Atlantic” from the league name).

(Good luck dropping down to the next level of conferences and leagues where it seems to be musical chairs between leagues for many schools).

Probably the most shocking thing is the big conference that seems to understand both counting and geography is the Southeast Conference, whose school are all pretty much in the southeastern U.S.

You have to wonder if either numerically-named league has contemplated adding just a few more members to become…the Big Score!

Looking back at the Anthropocene

Hi, future geologists. Maybe you’ve stumbled across some million-year old writings that dismissed the idea of an Anthropocene Epoch. Yeah, you’re puzzled because that is a pretty solid division of time from your perspective…of course you also got rid of this Holocene/Pleistocene boundary too, because, really? The Holocene is hardly more than a small burp within the Pleistocene, at least that fragment not in the Anthropocene.

Those old writings focus on whether the line for the Anthropocene was when the first megafauna perished in Europe or Australia or North America. Or when forests were cleared for farming. Or when Roman smelters first led lead to waft into the Arctic. Or when carbon isotopes got really strange, or elements that should have been off the edge of the periodic table showed up. Or when calcite started dissolving at shallower depths in the ocean. From your end of the temporal telescope, this is all rounding error stuff. After all, the extinction event at this time was one of the biggest ever. Sure it took a few years; most of these sorts of things do, so those old arguments seem rather trivial disagreements.

Of course, the arguments in these old writings is about the Anthropocene Epoch, but you have the Anthropocene Era, a higher level distinction. Or maybe you prefer Anthropozoic, as after all, the big extinction events bounded the Mesozoic on each end and it seems these Eras like to be “-zoic”s. Of course your name is likely different. After all, the Cenozoic, the “Age of Mammals” is not the “Age of Chicxulub” or “Age of Deccan Traps”, so probably this Era shouldn’t be the “Age of Humans”…but from our end, it is hard to know who the winners will be.

So kind of just was well we didn’t adopt that Anthropocene title.

Remember when…?

Yeah, GG is old and feeling it these days. Maybe some of you remember:

• pay phones?
• asking directions in a strange town?
• when “tick tock” was spelled that way and meant “hurry up already!”?
• when phones were used for talking to people?
• when you’d worry about people talking to nobody near them? [Hmm, maybe that is coming back]
• states actually provided the bulk of financial support for state schools?
• when you could walk to an airport gate with your friend who was the one traveling?
• when you named something and then worried about an acronym?
• (LA special) when you’d say you’d drive on the Ventura Freeway, the Santa Ana Freeway, the San Diego Freeway, etc?
• camping in Yosemite without an advance reservation?
• test patterns after television sign-offs?
• er, sign-offs?
• moon landings? [hmm, maybe that is coming back, too]
• cash registers?
• cash?
• coins?

There’s plenty more (easy pickings: restaurants, hairstyles, clothing) but these just struck GG as he was walking around today and thought you might be cheered up if you don’t feel as old as you did before reading this list…

Top Ten Public University Fantasies

10. Professors get the summer off
11. Parents want a well-rounded education for their children
12. FAFSA forms are easy to fill out
13. It will be easy to transition to in-state residency
14. Education is the highest priority
15. Campus administration is lean
16. There are no legacy admissions!
17. All that matters is a degree
18. We’re supported by the state!
19. Student-athletes in revenue sports are students first.

Memo-ing COVID

August 1, 2020
From the office of the Dean
Big State U.

Dear students, it is my pleasure to welcome you back to Big State U for the fall semester. We have spared no expense in making campus safe for everybody, and we look forward to your arrival (and a check from your parents) in the coming weeks. Go BSU!

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September 2, 2020
From the office of the Chancellor
Big State U.

BSU students,
In these troubling times, we all need to work together so that BSU can continue to provide the educational experience you all have come here for. Of course, that means foregoing the social experience you were hoping for, but we all know that this is not going to be a major sacrifice while you pursue your dreams of a BSU diploma on the wall. So we expect you to obey all the COVID-19 rules, including wearing a facemask while walking on campus, indoors and outdoors, and for good measure when in your dorm room and probably too when you go swimming at the rec center–scratch that, we’ve closed the rec center. And of course stay socially distant from everybody–we suggest a 12′ diameter hula-hoop (with the BSU’s cartoon logo of a campus dean) that you can wear so as to avoid close contact.

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How to Write a Scientific Masterpiece

OK, so GG was asked about how to write a scientific paper after suggesting how you might read one. And, well, there are whole books and fully researched articles and stuff like that out there. But you know, that’s entry level scientific writing. Here’s the real advanced stuff!

• Don’t start writing until all the work is complete! Why waste your time scribbling down things while you are in the midst of career-defining research. Every second counts! Plenty of time to write once you know the outcome; this way you avoid writing something you ditch later on.
• Don’t keep notes. You don’t want some snooping competitor to find out what you’ve been doing. Best to just know in your heart all those algorithmic choices you’ve made. If you must write stuff down, be sure to use a code that isn’t described anywhere. No, Leonardo’s mirror writing tricks are passé now…
• Don’t give talks before submitting for publication. Again, no point in tipping your hand. And after all, are those ninnies who always snipe at you really going to give constructive criticism?
• Rely on the one computer script that rules them all. Sure, every time you want to adjust a parameter in your statistical analysis or simulation or what not, you overwrite that Python script while leaving plots and data files laying about from older versions of the script, but you are keeping track mentally, right?
• Delete intermediate results. Less clutter the better, so deleting all that intermediate stuff is a great way to retain organization on your computer drive. Also makes it far easier to ignore demands from reviewers down the road (oops! that stuff is gone).
• Ditch the background stuff. Blah blah blah, yeah, standing on the shoulders of giants. More like standing on the shoulders of gnats, rightly squished under your boot heel. Why waste the space in Nature or Science with drivel just meant to appease friends of old farts?
• Find the big story. Originally you were learning the age of some speciation event but you realized the data is predicting the next great earthquake, well, forget that trivia you started with, even though you don’t really know much about earthquakes, your speciation dataset will support you through this.
• Maximize surprises in the text. You’ve held this great work close to the vest so far–so you want the big reveal at the end, just as in all those murder mystery books. So throw in a few red herrings, make sure the abstract is misleading or obtuse so that the reader will be totally blinded by the brilliance at the end of the paper.
• Minimize figures. I mean who really can’t make their own figure by downloading the binary supplemental information from your website, whose URL somehow got changed after publication. Real scientists read and digest huge data tables for breakfast!
• The more jargon the better. Just who the hell do these readers think they are? Only true peers who know the particulars of your vocabulary of polysyllabic ultra-germanic mashups are worthy of receiving the wisdom of your work. Let’s keep the riff-raff out!
• Maximize inferences. Sure, you just studied one rock from some corner of your garage, but that rock–that rock–tells the entire history of the solar system. Your conclusions should take full advantage of these insights.
• Be a press master. Your college’s PR department loves to have click bait out there to prove that Big State U is really on top of the cutting edge of science. Feed their needs–why yes, this is revolutionary, and yes, it does show that Einstein was wrong and oh, of course this points the way to a cancer cure, too. No point in having this seminal work get overlooked.

And there you are, ready to take on the world. GG suggests having an off-shore bank account and maybe a spare passport just in case your brilliance attracts the attention of some authorities…

A Word from Big State U

From: Office of the President
To: Faculty and Staff

In these challenging times, where we have been so challenged, and you too have been challenged, we have risen to meet the challenge and in so doing have succeeded in not only identifying the challenge, but in rising to it. As with the nation, we will survive to meet more challenges.

While the pandemic has sown chaos across our university and town and state and nation, all of you have done your part to contribute to this effort. I particularly want to single out those who have sacrificed by accepting no more than their full salary while working at home under trying conditions. For those now blessed with cleaning unused bathrooms and unmarred floors, we look to your continued heroism when we ask you to accept some kind of pay cut so that those of us able to work at home can continue to contribute to the university’s mission of uplifting all who can afford tuition.

It is imperative at this time of crisis to update and expand our efforts to maintain Big State U’s position at the forefront of athletic excellence. So I am pleased to announce that we are promoting the athletic director to Senior Vice Chancellor of Physically Demanding Exercise. Each coach will now be a Special Assistant to the Senior Vice Chancellor. Our new Senior Vice Chancellor has announced his Vision 20/20 effort to put mannikins in all the seats of our stadium with cameras, speakers and wi-fi so that season ticket holders can go to the game and yell at the refs just as though they were really there! It is this kind of imaginative reaction to crisis that allows our people to make lemonade out of oranges.

Of course it is part of our mission to grace the airwaves with advertisements necessary to remind our state representatives that we are still a functioning university, complete with a diverse population photographed in perfect lighting and conducting obviously serious activities in photogenic parts of campus. In this, we cannot relax, and so we are filming special coronavirus-themed videos to show that we still have a diverse population of students and faculty doing serious activities from home. Kudos to our Special Assistant to the President for Advancing the University Through the Use Of Major Public Media for putting us at the forefront of COVID-related advertising.

One of the great lessons of the past few weeks is that we don’t really need to have all these professors and instructors on campus to provide a high quality education. I am proud to announce that I have just appointed a new Vice Provost for Migration to an Internet University, who will be reviewing our ability to capture the instruction already completed and reuse it time and time again in future years. This is a necessary part of our effort going forward to balance our budget in these trying times, and I particularly appreciate the efforts of the faculty who generated this easily recyclable material and look forward to congratulating them at their early retirement ceremony to be held on Zoom.

Of course we don’t want to be known as just another internet university, so it is important that our physical campus remain as beautiful as possible for those of us still present. I have therefore found in my estate’s personal gardiner the man who will now fill the role of Special Assistant to the President for Groundkeeping. He will work closely with the Special Assistant to the President for Advancing the University Through the Use Of Major Public Media to be sure that the proper locales remain available as well as the Vice President for Alumni Relations to be sure that all those memorable spots where alums used to make out or lose their lunch are still there for their future visits to Big State U.

Of course, to support the employment of our newly promoted or hired Associates to the President, Associate to the Chancellor, Associates to the Vice Chancellors, Interim Advisors to the Provost, Associate Provosts and the other members of the title salad gang, we are exploring cost-savings measures that should have a minimal impact on our main activities. These will need to be supplemented with savings that will offset our new expenditures on our coronavirus-aware athletic facilities and tele-education servers (not to mention the Virtual Professor effort being led by our campus IT department). Because we all love Big State U, I am sure that you faculty and staff will greet this news with gratitude for the opportunity to sacrifice once more for our great and storied university.

Remember, we are all in this together! Until, of course, we aren’t.