Eight Facts Meme
Jul. 11th, 2007 07:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellowBrett, at English, Jack, has tagged me with the Eight Facts meme.
These are the rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.
1. When I was about five years old, "programmed learning" was all the rage. This was a self-paced learning method, involving booklets with instructions and questions on one side of the page and answers to the questions on the other. (You were expected to cover the answers with your hand until you'd tried to answer on your own.) I remember working on one such, on mathematics, and coming across the following words: a line is a curve. Which blew my five-year-old mind. I was too young to doubt what I read, but... wow. I sometimes think that the fact that I became a mathematician, and more specifically a geometer, can be traced directly to that moment.
2. I was rather slow in learning to tie my shoelaces - enough so, as I recall (but this was more than forty years ago), that my parents were a bit concerned. Showing me how to do it, telling me how to do it, nothing.... One day, apparently, I decided that it was time. I brought a shoe to my mother and had her tie it. Then I got a bit of string and a small piece of coral with a hole in it (we were living in Hawaii at the time) and went outside. For the next while, I carefully examined the knot in the shoelace, loosening and tightening it until I was clear on what went where. Then I threaded the string through the hole in the coral and, with many glances at the shoe, applied what I had seen. And that is how I learned to tie my shoes.
3. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I gave serious thought to the idea that the gods of wind and water had it in for me. Consider the following. Early '60s, Fort Lewis, Washington, near Tacoma: hurricane. Mid-'60s, Fort Shafter, Hawaii: tsunami alert and evacuation. Mid-'60s, Fort Huachuca, Arizona, near the Mexican border: snow in April, enough to make a decent snowman. Late '60s, San Diego, California: brief snow shower. Mid-'70s, Santa Barbara, California: a waterspout off the coast; numerous torrential rainstorms. Late '70s, Chicago, Illinois: the Blizzards of '79. (Note plural.) However, there were no notable incidents during my year at the University of Arizona, nor since I came here to Edwardsville, so perhaps they've taken their eye off me.
4. Along with the litany just above goes a long list of airline-related incidents. I spent more nights in airports (O'Hare most often, but also LaGuardia, Pittsburgh, Little Rock...) than the law allows. The oddest incident, though, came the day the plane I was in was hit by a truck.... This was at LAX; we were still at the gate when there came a sudden thump and the plane rocked violently. After a pause, an apologetic voice came over the intercom: "Uh, folks, I don't know how to say this, but we were just hit by a truck. There's a bit of a scrape on the fuselage, so we're going to have to move you to another plane. Sorry." That was Hughes Air West - the old Flying Crayolas....
5. During our stay at Fort Huachuca, I tried out for Little League. I was a lousy player - I didn't even know some of the rules - but the coach gave me every opportunity. Despite me, our team finished second. In the last inning of the last game, our opponent was mounting a rally - runners on first and second, nobody out. I was, for some reason, playing shortstop. The batter lofted a looper towards second, and I watched as our second baseman caught the ball while standing on the base (thereby retiring the batter and the lead runner), and then dropped his glove onto the runner sliding in from first. That's right: an unassisted triple play, and I Was There.
6. In August 1973, my Scout troop went on a Sierra Trek: sixty-plus miles in eight days, starting from Long Lake, going up over Donner Pass (still snowy in mid-August!) and down into Little Yosemite. At one point, the group I was with got a bit too far ahead of the others, so we stopped for a day to let them catch up. We stayed by the bed of a seasonal river; in high summer, it was a mass of slabs of slate interspersed with little ponds. In the ponds were a host of creatures I'd read about but never seen: water-striders, back-swimmers, and hydras, and I spent most of the day watching them. The memory of that day remains my standard for the word "idyll".
7. I have an enormous collection of movies on tape or DVD - about 1400 of them. My interest really began while I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, where there were no less than three organizations that regularly put on classic, cult, or otherwise interesting films. One of them was Law School Films, which showed classics every Wednesday night. I suffered something of a system shock in the course of one month of their movies, when the villains of the piece turned out to be Fred MacMurray (The Caine Mutiny), Charles Boyer (Gaslight), and (!) Jimmy Stewart (After the Thin Man). After that, I didn't know who to trust!
8. I managed to get through three years as an undergrad and seven as a graduate student in mathematics without ever taking a course in differential equations. After I got my doctorate, my first job was a visiting position at the University of Arizona. My first semester's assignment? A section of calculus (no problem, I'd been teaching that for several years) - and a section of DiffEq. (They did ask to make sure I was willing, but, well, would you refuse in that situation?) It was a disaster.... I never came close to the subject again until about three years ago, when I volunteered to teach it again. (The alternative was College Algebra.) That time it went rather better, and I'm now in the regular rotation for that course.
I don't go in for tagging, so I'll skip #4, but if you're reading this and want to play, feel free.
These are the rules:
1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged need to write in their own blog about their eight things and include these rules in the post.
4. At the end of your post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
5. Don't forget to leave them a comment telling them they're tagged, and to read your blog.
1. When I was about five years old, "programmed learning" was all the rage. This was a self-paced learning method, involving booklets with instructions and questions on one side of the page and answers to the questions on the other. (You were expected to cover the answers with your hand until you'd tried to answer on your own.) I remember working on one such, on mathematics, and coming across the following words: a line is a curve. Which blew my five-year-old mind. I was too young to doubt what I read, but... wow. I sometimes think that the fact that I became a mathematician, and more specifically a geometer, can be traced directly to that moment.
2. I was rather slow in learning to tie my shoelaces - enough so, as I recall (but this was more than forty years ago), that my parents were a bit concerned. Showing me how to do it, telling me how to do it, nothing.... One day, apparently, I decided that it was time. I brought a shoe to my mother and had her tie it. Then I got a bit of string and a small piece of coral with a hole in it (we were living in Hawaii at the time) and went outside. For the next while, I carefully examined the knot in the shoelace, loosening and tightening it until I was clear on what went where. Then I threaded the string through the hole in the coral and, with many glances at the shoe, applied what I had seen. And that is how I learned to tie my shoes.
3. There was a time, in my early twenties, when I gave serious thought to the idea that the gods of wind and water had it in for me. Consider the following. Early '60s, Fort Lewis, Washington, near Tacoma: hurricane. Mid-'60s, Fort Shafter, Hawaii: tsunami alert and evacuation. Mid-'60s, Fort Huachuca, Arizona, near the Mexican border: snow in April, enough to make a decent snowman. Late '60s, San Diego, California: brief snow shower. Mid-'70s, Santa Barbara, California: a waterspout off the coast; numerous torrential rainstorms. Late '70s, Chicago, Illinois: the Blizzards of '79. (Note plural.) However, there were no notable incidents during my year at the University of Arizona, nor since I came here to Edwardsville, so perhaps they've taken their eye off me.
4. Along with the litany just above goes a long list of airline-related incidents. I spent more nights in airports (O'Hare most often, but also LaGuardia, Pittsburgh, Little Rock...) than the law allows. The oddest incident, though, came the day the plane I was in was hit by a truck.... This was at LAX; we were still at the gate when there came a sudden thump and the plane rocked violently. After a pause, an apologetic voice came over the intercom: "Uh, folks, I don't know how to say this, but we were just hit by a truck. There's a bit of a scrape on the fuselage, so we're going to have to move you to another plane. Sorry." That was Hughes Air West - the old Flying Crayolas....
5. During our stay at Fort Huachuca, I tried out for Little League. I was a lousy player - I didn't even know some of the rules - but the coach gave me every opportunity. Despite me, our team finished second. In the last inning of the last game, our opponent was mounting a rally - runners on first and second, nobody out. I was, for some reason, playing shortstop. The batter lofted a looper towards second, and I watched as our second baseman caught the ball while standing on the base (thereby retiring the batter and the lead runner), and then dropped his glove onto the runner sliding in from first. That's right: an unassisted triple play, and I Was There.
6. In August 1973, my Scout troop went on a Sierra Trek: sixty-plus miles in eight days, starting from Long Lake, going up over Donner Pass (still snowy in mid-August!) and down into Little Yosemite. At one point, the group I was with got a bit too far ahead of the others, so we stopped for a day to let them catch up. We stayed by the bed of a seasonal river; in high summer, it was a mass of slabs of slate interspersed with little ponds. In the ponds were a host of creatures I'd read about but never seen: water-striders, back-swimmers, and hydras, and I spent most of the day watching them. The memory of that day remains my standard for the word "idyll".
7. I have an enormous collection of movies on tape or DVD - about 1400 of them. My interest really began while I was a grad student at the University of Chicago, where there were no less than three organizations that regularly put on classic, cult, or otherwise interesting films. One of them was Law School Films, which showed classics every Wednesday night. I suffered something of a system shock in the course of one month of their movies, when the villains of the piece turned out to be Fred MacMurray (The Caine Mutiny), Charles Boyer (Gaslight), and (!) Jimmy Stewart (After the Thin Man). After that, I didn't know who to trust!
8. I managed to get through three years as an undergrad and seven as a graduate student in mathematics without ever taking a course in differential equations. After I got my doctorate, my first job was a visiting position at the University of Arizona. My first semester's assignment? A section of calculus (no problem, I'd been teaching that for several years) - and a section of DiffEq. (They did ask to make sure I was willing, but, well, would you refuse in that situation?) It was a disaster.... I never came close to the subject again until about three years ago, when I volunteered to teach it again. (The alternative was College Algebra.) That time it went rather better, and I'm now in the regular rotation for that course.
I don't go in for tagging, so I'll skip #4, but if you're reading this and want to play, feel free.
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 02:57 am (UTC)