Son of Timatollah

This is for those few who were grousing at the A.V. Club not too long ago when someone reviewed Aretha's "Live at the Fillmore West" (I still have the Record Club of America vinyl) complaining about her covering of Bread's "Make It With You," and other popular songs of the time. For those who'd complain about Sid's singing "My Way." For those who think that somehow a song can be so full of intrinsic goodness/badness that any performance of the song can bring neither disgrace nor redemption to that piece, a point of view that sometimes seems pervasive, if not perverse.

For those who think that way, here's your sign (courtesy of Matt Welch. And you really need to go there for "the rest of the story"):



Let's hear it for Patti Smith, an American original, a universal (and I don't use that word lightly) treasure.

For myself, the trick is deciding what you like on your own terms, having been open-minded enough to know that those terms are honestly yours, not someone else's or what someone else has told you to think. That trick is the trick of freedom.

Labels: music, music history, patti smith, punk

Here's an interview, from Reason and by Nick Gillespie, with Jonathon Rauch of National Journal. From the intro,

No doctrinaire libertarian, Rauch's thought nonetheless is deeply rooted in the classical liberal tradition. The particular appeal of America, he says, "has a lot to do with this being a society that's creedal rather than ethnic fundamentally and that the creed is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Some highlights:

• Everybody makes [mistakes]; it's par for the course. What I have learned is not to be too sure I'm right. The world is much more surprising than we give it credit for. That's part of my political philosophy, my philosophy of life. That's really fundamental to it: Trial and error is really the only thing in life that works ultimately over the long term. Journalism is like that, too, so we need to be honest about our mistakes. We often aren't enough. Everybody makes mistakes. And we need to be a little bit cautious about making predictions.


• We do have a problem with the political system. It's been increasingly rigged to favor extremists on both ends. So they're overrepresented and the center is underrepresented. They're not all extremists, but it is clear that the average Republican member of Congress is to the right of the average Republican partisan, who is to the right of the average American. You have the same leaning in the opposite direction in the Democratic Party. Reflect on the fact that until fairly recently, the House Majority Leader was Tom Delay (R-Texas) and the House Minority Leader was Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). Just think about how much of the country that leaves out.
  
  That is not a coincidence. The system has been rigged by partisan activists to their advantage. They participate in primaries. General elections don't matter because they've gerrymandered the congressional districts. They have the advantages of energy and being single-minded and they use these wedge issues which they're very good at and which both sides conspire in using in order to marginalize the middle. The result of that is the turnout among moderates and independents is down; turnout on the extremes is up. The parties are increasingly sorted by ideology so that all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another. That is a new development in American history.
  
  The result of that is you have two quite extreme and narrow political parties talking, for the most part, over the heads of the center.


• Why would anyone want a political identity? I understand an ethnic identity, a cultural identity, a [sexual] identity, but why would anyone want a political identity? [...] I'm completely mystified by the mindset that judges one's moral character in life by how well you fit in some political party or other. It makes no sense to me at all.


• ...I've come to have a lot of respect for institutions that have evolved in society over time. I'm well aware I may not understand why they do the things they do, and that if something's been around the way it has been for a long time, that doesn't make it immune to criticism. But I think it deserves at least a second or third look, so I'm no radical. I'm very anti-radical. It puts me in an odd position because I'm a big advocate of gay marriage, but I square that circle by saying the right way is to try it in a few states, to do it slowly. Remember, we're messing with an age-old institution. I'm very much in that square.
  
  I'm a radical incrementalist. I believe in fomenting revolutionary change on a geological timescale. Life is long. We don't have to do everything right away.


• I'm guessing that a lot of college students today would be amazed to know that in 13 states--I think--it was illegal to have gay sex three years ago. The law has been very much the lagging indicator. It's still the lagging indicator. It's still forbidding the military to hire gay people in uniform even if they want to. To me, the gay revolution--and it has been a revolution in the culture--is Exhibit A in what a good job the culture can do changing itself when people appeal to persuasion, to try to better their lives and change the world mostly from the bottom up because that's what happened there.
  
  It also helps that there were challenges to these legal [regimes]. Cops used to enforce the oppression of homosexuals in a very, very savage way. Young people today just can't understand a world where you had high school assistant principals committing suicide because they were entrapped in a bathroom sexual encounter by cops with nothing better to do. That [sort of thing] used to happen all the time. It still happens occasionally, but a lot of what's happened with gay rights has been the simple opening of the hearts and minds of the American public as they've come to understand that gay people are not really so different from them. Once you've crossed that bridge, at least in the long term, not always in the short term, the compassion and reasonableness of the American public never ceases to amaze me.


• ...John Stuart Mill had this right in the 19th century. I think capital punishment is just in principle, but I think there's a higher level of uncertainty that I'm not comfortable with. Mill had the right answer, which was we should have capital punishment and liberal commutation by governors. If there's significant doubt, then governors would commute the sentence to life in prison without parole and, in fact, that used to be what happened. It's a fairly recent and I think unfortunate turn in American life that commutation has become, in effect, politically off limits for governors. They used to do it all the time and it was not controversial. I think it was a crucial safety valve if you're going to have capital punishment.

Good stuff.

If the Bush administration wasn't prepared to hear people like Senator Reid say that Iraq is lost, maybe they should've adopted policies that wouldn't have made such a mess of things there. Starting with real security for the occupied country.

Labels: Iraq, war

I survived the PE exam. Felt about as empty afterwards as you do when you've prepped for a colonoscopy. Total reamage!

Actually, I think it went okay, but there were two particular areas I felt I should've been better prepared for. (And for the EEs out there, those were power factor and transmission lines.) Live and learn.

Mr. Iggy Pop is 60 tomorrow, SAT 21 APR 07. Send him b'day greetings here.

Labels: happy birthday, iggy pop

An update on the recent catch-up post:

• I got promoted to full professor!


• I got elected Speaker of the Faculty at ERAU-DB!


• I'm taking the PE exam tomorrow. I fully expect to get my butt kicked. Won't know the results for three months or so, so there's nothing to do now but go, do my best, and see where the results fall.

In other news, I wouldn't watch the Virginia Tech killer's video if you gave me a million zillion dollars. Ugh. I think that'll go on the list with the 9/11 videos as things I can do without seeing.

You probably know a Hoakie. Keep them in your heart.

Labels: update

Dear Readers,

I've been busy, as you might have noticed. Got back from Louisville on Tuesday a week ago. That Wednesday, we had our semi-annual Faculty Assembly (photos here). Thursday night, thanks to ERAU's Kevin Snyder, we hosted two outstanding speakers with a program about their coming out stories and LGBT+ acceptance. Spent the weekend catching up on things at home, as well as getting started on some long-overdue grading. (My weakest attribute as a college prof is how long I take to get around to grading some things, usually homework-type assignments. I'm pretty good on getting exams turned around quickly, but homeworks have been known to sit weeks waiting to be graded.)

Had a Faculty Senate meeting this past Tuesday night, where I had to present about some of our meetings last month at our Prescott campus. Wednesday, I got a Facebook group up for faculty and staff to support a new student Gay-Straight Alliance that's forming on campus. (I have been the adviser for GALBA, the campus gay student group, but student involvment there has gotten minimal. The new group has over 100 members already, which is excellent.) (Also, I have no idea how Facebook links will work externally.) Finally got finished with the grading started above on Thursday.

I've been teaching three courses this semester. One, Signals and Systems, is a revision of a class I'd taught previously. It concerns signal processing, filtering, Fourier transforms, spectral analysis, and the like—material near and dear to my heart—so it hasn't been too much trouble.

The other two are what we call "new preps." One, Computing in Aerospace and Aviation, is a new course with no text. I hope to write a text for it after it's been offered a couple of times. This is not exactly material that I'm expert with, so I have to do a lot of research and preparation for each class. I'm learning a massive amount, from how the aerospace industry was pretty much the private consumer for computers in the early days, to details of how safety-critical systems like fly-by-wire implement redundancy, to the communication, navigation, and surveillance schemes proposed to replace radiotelephony, radionavigation, and radar in the air-traffic systems. Good stuff, but, man, my brain is getting full, and the stream of constant deadlines has been challenging.

The third class, Certification of Unmanned Aviation Systems, is a grad class. I figured it'd get a few people and would be offered as a seminar. Instead, since all the grad students in our Master of Software Engineering course need electives to finish their program, I ended up with close to 20 students. We've been reading and discussing papers related to unmanned vehicles and what it'll take to get them flying in the National Air Space. My research work this past year has been looking at propulsion systems aspects of unmanned systems (go figure) for the FAA Tech Center, so my selfish motive in offering this class has been to create a stable of grad students who know something about the issues and could go to work on projects in this area. We'll see how that works out if I can get additional funding from the FAA, who've been dealing with operating under a continuing resolution instead of having a real budget. I've put a lot regarding operation of the class onto the students taking this class by assigning papers to the class, then having teams of students present summaries and commentary on those papers to the entire class, but I have to read the papers, too. The group turned out to be a little too large to have effective discussions, and the seminar style doesn't mesh well with many students' expectations to be able to sit back and have the material handed to them with little active participation on their part.

In both these new courses, I've learned a bunch. I hope the students have, and I hope they can trust that the next times these courses are offered, they'll be delivered better.

Next week, we do project review for the FAA research, and we have some other FAA people in town to talk about unmanned systems. I have my usual courses to teach. But Friday, I'm taking the PE Exam so I can be a licensed engineer in Florida. Not quite sure what bug got into me to do that, but by this time next week, I hope to have passed those eight hours of tests.

Semester ends the week after that. There's a chance I'll be working at Boeing this summer. I'm an alternate for one of their Welliver Fellowships. If someone else drops out, I get to go. Still waiting to see whether the promotion to full Professor comes through. Ought to know by the end of the semester.

At some point this semester, I joined the Board of Directors for NOGLSTP, the National Organization of Gay and Lesbian Scientific and Technical Professionals. (Just need to throw in an 'E' for "Engineers" after Technical!) I hope to advocate for LGBT+ students in engineering and the sciences, see if we can't get some scholarships set up, etc. Also working to facilitate devleopment of a social network for LGBT+ staff and faculty at ERAU. That's separate from supporting LGBT+ students. We had one get together at a colleague's place and hope to do more. I need to set up a mailing list for that using our web site.

Things are great with Mack and me. He got a chance to do a good deal of inspection work on flood-control structures in South Florida earlier in the year. He's been working for Malcom Pirnie for over two years now. We went canoeing on the Wekiva River last month: Gorgeous. Saw five alligators and beaucoup turtles.

We'll have been in this house for two years in July. We'd like to put in solar hot water and solar electric generation, but don't have the capital right now. With the housing market as cool as it is, we might not have the capital any time soon. That's kind of frustrating, but at least we can go ahead and make some plans.

Enough. Hope all is well with all you readers. Thanks for reading and for thinking about us. I appreciate it.

Labels: letter, update

My nephew Sam, who created this rotoscoped image of me, is putting together http://www.samdrawsyourmom.com/, a web site featuring his artwork. It's not really there, yet, but it's got a cool front page.

Labels: art, images

Mack's sister Tammy, jasperroz on Flickr, is having one of the photos from her Red Shoes photoset used as the cover of a book.

Congrats to Tammy!

Labels: art, Flickr, photos

Last weekend at this time, I was in Louisville, Kentucky, getting ready for the ASEE Southeast Region conference. I was presenting my paper on how the outcomes assessment process we use for our Computer Engineering and Software Engineering undergrad degrees work. Our senior design students won the poster competition for upperclass multidisciplinary design for the third year in a row!

I hadn't been to Louisville since 1982. Used to go up there as a roadie for Actuals, then Factual, (Nashville bands of the time) back then. Much like Nashville, the downtown seemed to have been revitalized by selective building and rezoning. New ballpark, new downtown entertainment zone (Hard Rock, etc.).

It had escaped me completely back then what a sin city Louisville is: You've got your tobacco, your booze (the conference reception featured a bourbon tasting—yum!), your gambling (horse racing). Told one of the conference hosts that all they needed was a "hooker hall of fame," and they'd have the sin market cornered. (His reply: "We're working on it.")

Hit one of the gay bars the Saturday night before. It was bear night. Nice crowd, nice guys.

All in all, seemed like a really nice city.

Labels: asee, asee-se, bears, bourbon, louisville