amha

Recent Deep Springs faculty member here. The article isn't exaggerating---as a teacher, the place really is as great as it seems.

There's a simple differential equation often taught in intro calc courses, "Newton's Law of Cooling/Heating," which basically says that the rate of heat loss is proportional to the difference in temperature between a substance and its environment. I'm curious what that'd look like here. It's a very simple model, of course, not taking into account all the variables that Dynomight points out, but if a simple model can be nearly as predictive as more complex models...

I'm also curious to see the details of the models that Dynomight's LLMs produced!

Mmmm it's something I've done for a long time; I've been at the same school for seven years; it's a ton of fun but also gets repetitive... I want more challenges!

* Get less scared about applying to do stuff! I'm leaving my longtime job---I've taught advanced math to super-smart high schoolers; I'm quitting to be a visiting professor at Deep Springs College for a semester and then ???---and in the past, fear of applying to things (jobs, grad schools, writing residencies) has been a major blocker.

* Learn complex analysis!

* Get a better workflow for writing my notes to myself (e.g., Obsidian) and for publishing my blog/website (have a marginally-functional Hugo instance right now). Small thing, but the kind of important-but-not-urgent thing that it's easy to put off!

I've used Sage for years to run the backend (calculations/computations/graphics/prototyping) for a multivariable calculus class I teach. It's not perfect, but as a lightweight, Python-style CAS to do all sorts of "standard" calculations, it's very easy to use!

I teach math to smart nerdy high schoolers. I do this. It's great! Fun for everyone :)

books, math, and mountains: http://www.andrusia.com

http://www.andrusia.com

People also hit cars with their cars.

http://www.andrusia.com

All hand-written HTML and CSS!!!

Elite private high school in SFBay (not tech, but all of our families are tech/VC). Everyone is getting raises of max(8%, $6700), working out to an average per-employee raise of 8.6%. Inflation is the main stated reason.

(FWIW this means that my salary, teaching undergrad-level math classes to high schoolers, is going from $74K to $81K.)

I teach high school math. My kids use it all the time! This isn't entirely a bad thing. It's a very, very useful (and natural language) symbolic integrator for them.

My direct supervisor has 75 direct reports. (Not a tech company––an elite private school in the Bay––but still...)

Teacher at an elite SFBay private high school. Can confirm!

I teach at an elite private school in the Bay. We're a much better place than the school described here, with kids who like learning, and administrators who are well-intentioned. But many of the author's frustrations are, directionally, exactly the same as what I experience, namely:

.. The emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments. This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. ... my direct supervisor repeatedly demanded that I pace my classes for the benefit of the single student in each section who was struggling the most, which quite literally would have meant putting students who had signed up for Advanced Placement into a remedial course

Thank you for posting this! I also have a 2009-era iPod nano that I've been using for the last decade, and am still using a flipphone, so can't listen to podcasts on that. My iPod still holds a few hours of charge, so it's still usable, but I've definitely been having the same succession planning thoughts as you!

I've really, really enjoyed pg's tweets on parenting and his kids. It's obvious he loves his kids and he loves being a dad.

Given how much of parenting advice/writing is written by and for moms (rather than dads), and given how much of it is (separately) written by and for people who are both extremely anxious and not very analytical, reading pg's thoughtful and joyous takes on being a parent makes me want to be a parent, too.

I heard him speak in 2004, when I was 17. Here's what I wrote in my LiveJournal at the time:

On Thursday, I saw Freeman Dyson speak at Cornell. He was so amazing I can't even describe it. I didn’t look at my watch once during the speech. Not long into the talk, the elderly gentleman next to me pulled a scrap of paper out of his pocket and began scribbling notes. He kept writing until the end of the speech. I glanced behind me during the question-and-answer period, and noticed that Schwartz Auditorium was so full that people were standing in the balcony and sitting on the railings just to hear Dyson.

The text of Dyson’s speech would have impressed any English teacher. He structured it as seven short stories, with each one slowly building on each other. The style of his writing––the way he chose his words and structured his sentences––would have been impressive if he had been giving a lecture in the humanities, much less a field stereotyped for less-able communicators. The way Dyson was able to convey the sheer wonder of science was an orgasmic experience equivalent to reading my first Carl Sagan book.

An 80-year-old physicist who had the energy of a young assistant professor, who delivered his speech fluidly and responded deftly to the audience’s questions––a scientist proficient in more than one science, and fluent enough in biology to give an entire lecture on biotechnology!!!! Oh wow...

True, but you can short the stock from elsewhere in your portfolio (i.e., just a standard nonretirement account), and it's economically equivalent (modulo some stuff with taxes).

You could short FB.

A thermite infested apartment would be pretty awesome, though.

It depends on the state. At least here in New York (the state, not the city), school district boundaries have nothing to do with municipal boundaries (which, yeah, adds another layer of confusion!)

I have family and friends all across the US and across the world. I like them all, and I like hearing about their lives, even in the silly little details. Social networks are the easy way to do that, and Facebook is the network everyone seems to use.

For people who are more misanthropic or introverted, or who don't value their connections as much (I mean that in a non-judgmental way), the utility of Facebook is probably a lot less. I think that's one of the big things I see on HN: a lot of people who hate Facebook partly because one of the main services it provides (maintaining long-distance social connections) isn't useful to them.

(And of course I could call/email/text/etc. many of these people one-on-one, and of course I do that, too, but Facebook is a useful supplement for major life announcements from more distant friends/acquaintances, as well as trivial little details from closer friends.)

This study doesn't show that "Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook":

Just over half of Facebook users ages 18 and older (54%) say they have adjusted their privacy settings in the past 12 months, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Around four-in-ten (42%) say they have taken a break from checking the platform for a period of several weeks or more, while around a quarter (26%) say they have deleted the Facebook app from their cellphone. All told, some 74% of Facebook users say they have taken at least one of these three actions in the past year.

Is this different from what these people have done in the past? I've changed my Facebook privacy settings in the past year––but I've also changed them on a regular basis since getting on Facebook. Likewise, I've always taken regular Facebook breaks in the 13 years I've been on it.

This study is interesting, but it doesn't prove the claim in the headline.

The ship may have sailed, but we can still turn it around! I like the idea of recapturing "vanilla" as not meaning "plain."

That blog post is really, really worth reading.

"The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. ... I don’t subscribe to this school of thought, but it seems pretty popular."

Here's from a review of it:

Now, this may sound a little silly - if someone wrote a book called "Metal: The First 5,000 Years," and then filled that book with stories of war and bloodshed, never failing to remind us after each anecdote that metal was involved in some way, we might be left scratching our heads as to why the author was so fixated on /metal/ instead of on /war itself/. And in fact, that is indeed how I felt for much of the time I was reading Graeber's book. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that Graeber continually talks /around/ the idea of debt in other ways, mentioning debt crises (without reflecting deeply on why these happen), the periodic use and disuse of coinage (which apparently is just as bad as debt in terms of enabling the capitalism monster), and any other phenomenon related to debt, without weaving these observations into a coherent whole.

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/11/book-review-debt-...

People have different opinions. There's no homogenous voice of authority that tells people what to do and what not to do.

Thanks for doing such a wonderful project with your kids, and writing it up so well! I just emailed this post a a bunch of friends who have kids, in the hopes that they'll be inspired :)

I agree 100% with your "old-fashioned blog" comment! The ability to incorporate photos and text together, in a sensible layout, with a URL that is permanent/human-readable (at least relative to social media URLs), and on a site that doesn't require log-in and doesn't throw 10,000 other distractions at you simultaneously––it's really frustrating that that's going away.