Friday Seminar Series: Why I Teach

Image via WikipediaDear Readers,

   Teaching is important.
 

   It is so important, in fact, that I have given it its own line.  My need to say it was inspired by a time-normal blog post that came through the Augur Box this morning.  University teaching in your time stream, it seems, is a big problem.


   One of the great problems that I hear cited is the emphasis on research, grant money, and tenure.  These three things push professors in your time stream away from research and into working without their students.  In some ways, it forces them to be grant-writing drones who focus solely on the work their graduate students have done.

   Not so at the University of Constantinople, and not because we don't have to worry about tenure and our research.  We are focused on teaching because teaching leads to inspiration.

   Learning requires rehearsal, understanding, and questioning.  These are also things that are key to research, but in a way that requires far less awareness.  Though it is possible to do so, we cannot just scurry about moving through the motions of research without paying attention to the information that we're getting from it.  Research is a long crush that throws loads and loads of information into the human attic, the upper levels of the brain that we are so cruddy at accessing.

   Many researchers feel that it's a pain to communicate, to crack open that attic, wander up there, and start sorting things out.  It might mean digging through old love letters and prom dresses, rusty armor and rustier neurons, but it must be done.

  A professor must profess, it is not simply enough to investigate.

  Of course, one must ask, why do I say "must"?  Perhaps it's good for humanity, perhaps it will help others advance their science.  Perhaps, in the case of a class, it will help students learn.

  Those altruistic things are nice, but we all need our selfish reasons too.

   So what is the selfish reason to teach?  It's simple.  You clear off the cobwebs.  Each lecture, each moment spent in preparation, and most importantly each instant you are talking to your students is full of reassessment, rethinking, and processing.  Processing is that "rehearsal, understanding," etc. thing I referred to above.  Without it, we do not know where we came from, and if we do not know where we came from, we do not know which questions to ask.

  Research is about questions.  Teaching makes you think of questions.  It allows your students to think of questions.  It presents you with questions to ask and questions to answer, in these routes.

  It should be clear by now that there's no excuse for not teaching.  It makes me a better researcher, I know that.  If you're a professor, it will make you a better researcher.  If you are a student, even, it will make you better.  Teach your peers, and furthermore, teach them to teach others.  You can change the distressing trend to under-teach by injecting teaching into the social network of your Universities.

  And when you encounter a professor who doesn't do his homework, don't whinge and moan.  Don't complain on forms and wait for the University to make it all better.  Go to his or her office hours and badger that professor with questions until they themselves get curious, get out into the literature, and start searching.  When they start searching because of you, you haven't just noticed a bad teacher: you've made them a better one!

  Always,

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

Particles are Two-Faced Liars, the Lot of Them

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Dear Readers,
   I admit, I've been on kind of a quantum time kick lately.  I like time, I like quantum mechanics.  Sometimes.

   Sometimes I like cheap puns too, so I hope you can look past that.

   There is rather a serious issue about the interaction of quantum mechanics and time, though.  In my post about WD-36, I talked about the idea of "spooky action at a distance" taking place within a time dimension.  Aka, the future affecting the past via quantum science.

  If you start adding length, width, and depth into the mix you get some damned strange ideas.  Things from one part of our four dimensional space (one's a time dimension, so don't get too bent out of shape, ladies and gents) can pop into other parts of it with some kind of probability.  Bit wacky, but it presents the idea that there's no reality of time, just a continuity of it with particles buzzing about every which way while we try and think that our actions are somehow happening in a straight line.

  It's sort of like the straight line where you're going to the store to buy milk, but you forget your keys and you have to go back down the line to the keys, which were perfectly content to stay where they were.  I'm sure from the keys' perspective, getting picked up and taken about is rather surprising.

   Now imagine, for a minute, that you've gone and done something rather silly, like say, starting in a faculty position at a University that happens to run parallel to every other time ever.  Suddenly you've got all kinds of particles that are buzzing through your brain, entangled partners to the particles in all the brains you've ever had in all the lives you've ever lived in all the places you've ever lived them.  Half the particles tell the truth about where they came from, half don't.  Your brain is half your evil twin, half a nest of vile wasps, and there's a couple more halves in there that I can't even think of.  It's the best high you've ever had with the worst downer stuck on the side, and a whole lot of trivia.



   Some days, that idiotic decision makes you into a brilliant researcher, fighter, leader, whatever, amongst a whole host of other people who are resurrected renaissance men and women by virtue of the grand quantum composite personality they get to have.

   Other days, it gives you one hell of a headache, leaves you confused, and you forget your keys in every house you ever owned.
  I need a pint.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople

The Night Faculty: WD-36

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Dear Readers,
  You might have heard of WD-40, a "water-removing" chemical with hundreds of strange household uses.  It means "water displacement - 40th attempt."
 
    In your time stream, attempts 1-39 failed.  In many, however, there were unintended products of the Rocket Chemical Company's research into water displacement.
  One of our Night Faculty is the product of just such an attempt.  We call it Woody, though its proper name is WD-36.
   WD-36 is a literal sponge.  It can absorb almost anything, and devour it in its entirety.  When it does this with information storage media, it can almost internalize the information.  WD-36 was a most efficient graduate student.  It's also, as you might imagine, quite formidable in combat.
  Unfortunately, WD-36 also has a rather volatile freezing/melting point.  It needs to be somewhat solid in order to function, and the daytime temperature at the University is just slightly too high for it to maintain coherence.  Therefore, we had to place WD-36 on the Night Faculty.

  Now, WD-36 may sound something like a B-movie villain to you.  Fiction is often inadvertently inspired by something like what your time stream's Albert Einstein used to call "spooky action at a distance."  The existence of an all-devouring monster that resulted from industrial accident in one time stream leads to thought patterns in the people who react to that monster.  We can use augury to read those thought patterns, but the human brain itself can pick up on that.  People in other time streams can learn about what's going on, whether they mean to or not.  And then, they can make horror movies.
   So next time you're watching something scary, consider that somewhere, somewhen, somehow, that thing is happening.  And if it ever gets the chance to break down the barriers between worlds, you might just find it's coming to eat you.
   Then you'll have to turn to a friendly professor who's been watching all along, a friendly professor who knows how to frighten the monster.  And I and my Night Faculty will be here for you.
   Happy Hallowe'en.
   Always,
   John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

The Night Faculty: Cassandra, a Hawking Siren

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Dear Readers,


   Here is the next part of my series on the University's Night Faculty.

   If you thought Professor Raven was unusual, I'm happy to introduce you to Dr. Cassandra Hawking, a name which we gave  to her and she graciously accepted.  "Cassandra" comes from her vast and uncanny knowledge, which I will explain in a moment.  "Hawking" comes from her nature.

 
    Cassandra is what her time stream calls a "Hawking Siren," a being that dwells in space and can warp light around itself.  At her core, cleverly concealed within her biology, lies a small singularity, event horizon and all.  Hawking Radiation from its gradual evaporation powers her entire metabolism as well as her consciousness.  Surrounding it is a complex network of matter and light.


   The singularity itself is maintained within a vacuum, to protect her outer body from its pull.  In her native time stream, Cassandra existed in a constant state of collapse.  The tiny singularity within her consistently approached the final point of its evaporation, at which point it would release a tremendous amount of "information" into the surrounding space.  In her time stream, that happened to be the solution to the black hole information paradox.  This process would destroy her outer body as well as her mind, effectively killing her.

   So, like all members of her race, Cassandra needed a steady stream of matter in order to maintain herself.  Her energy-matter matrix allowed her to transit around the universe collecting such matter, but, as with every species, there were pitfalls in her existence.  Certain civilizations loved the idea of a race of singularities to conquer, beings that they could enslave and use for a source of energy for all time.



   Over time her species developed--you will understand in a moment why I do not say "evolved"--the ability to shift their matter/energy matrix to mimic the appearance of other objects.  Using their matrix along with their internal singularity, they could use a combination of gravitational lensing, position, and shape to look like anything.


  
  For certain members of her race, this allowed a new strategy for matter acquisition.  The hunters became the hunted, and many careless ships drew themselves into the heart of a Hawking Siren when it appeared to be a grand bonanza of salvage or a pleasure ship in distress.  Once it had trapped its prey, the Hawking Siren would absorb its mass and feed off the energy released as Hawking Radiation.  Thus, they would go on to live further.  Other Sirens chose to stay hidden and consume only inanimate matter, but in the end most of them settled on an omnivorous life.

   This might make Cassandra seem entirely too dangerous to work with here at the University, but we have found a way to keep her sustained without needing to fear she will begin to devour her coworkers.  The process by which she is kept fed also results in excess energy that can be used to sustain University operations, so it is a beneficial scenario for all.  It does keep her occupied during the day, however, which means she must be a part of the Night Faculty.  However, we did not anticipate that benefit when we began to work on bringing her here.

   You see, in their final moments in her time stream, small singularities contain arbitrary amounts of information, a necessary consequence of the immediacy of their evaporation.  Literally, whenever she gets hungry, Cassandra's knowledge of time and all times expands to immeasurable amounts.  Any information she chooses to share with us is cherished.  In theory, she could tell us everything about everything.  Yet she often holds back, and it is beyond me to wonder why.  Perhaps she fears to live up to her name.

   At times, in the night, a graduate student will disappear, and then be resurrected with no knowledge of some previous stretch of time.  I wonder if, perhaps, Cassandra roams the halls and prunes those avenues of investigation which might lead to our ruin.  I am not certain how to feel about this possibility, but the thought does not help me sleep.

   Always,

   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman
   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople

Related articles

• Physicists may have observed Hawking radiation for the first time (physorg.com)

The Night Faculty: Raven

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Dear Readers,
   I promised in my last post to offer you more information about the University's Night Faculty, and I've decided to make good on that this week.

   Today I want to talk to you about Raven, who is a member of a somewhat unusual class of our faculty even outside of his "Night"status.  Each of us here is drawn from some body of records, from a personality derived via Augury, the discipline upon which the University is founded.  Usually this requires some sort of fame, and often an unusual means of demise.  There is a trick to Augury, and getting a whole personality is often the trickiest.

   This means, sometimes, that we can get personalities that existed mostly in minds and stories rather than in physical reality.  Most, if not all, stories and characters really happened in some time stream or another, by some unlikely consequence. Still, there are personalities here who are built more from myth and legend than "reality."  Whatever that means.

  Many of these personalities come from cultures with strong mythic traditions, or are amalgams of a few such cultures.  Most, like White Buffalo Calf Woman (PtesanWi), have a coherent identity formed from at least one "real" life and many stories from just one culture.  Miss PtesanWi is almost entirely well adjusted here at the University, and should be getting her PhD a few years ago.  She'll be a full professor quite soon, I'm told.  And she's quite coherent about her origins; fights with the Virgin Mary over who gave birth to Jesus are rather infrequent these days.

  Then there are the truly fragmented, almost insane personalities.  Professor Raven is one of those.  We might have gone back to the drawing board with him and tried for something more coherent, except that his fragmentation is entirely fitting to his character.  Raven believes he created the world, stole the moon, and created death itself.  He may have stolen the moon, actually, but it's unclear if that was a later eponymous character inspired by Raven myths, or if it was in fact the Raven of myth.
  As for the creation of death thing, I believe our good Professor is still having a bit of trouble with that one now that he lives somewhere that death is irrelevant.

   At any rate, Raven is an amalgamation of things you know as Native American Indian and also Siberian, of cultures I wish you could know and cultures I hope that you never encounter.  And he loves American Football.

   Professor Raven is a trickster, a prankster, and a creature who swoops through the night and beyond the moon here at the University.  He's also written an excellent book about English punk cultures in the intensely divergent 1980s.  I couldn't have picked a better faculty member for the job.

   Furthermore, he's quite formidable in battle.  Raven can form himself from shadows and swoop down onto our enemies.  The ones he hates the worst often leave here alive, but blinded.  His misdirection has foiled many a raid and preserved the University through much strife.  He is our prime nightwatchman, and during the times when I am not frightened of him, I am glad he is on our side.

   Always,
   Dr. John Skylar
   Chairman   Department of Anachronism
   University of Constantinople