Andrew MacLaren-Scott's Blog, page 42

It's December

Nicknames

Reflecting on yesterday's sorrowful post about my stupidity reminded me of the first of three nicknames used by colleagues for me that I have become aware of. I suspect there may be others, and probably not favourable ones, but the first I became aware of was "Captain Sensible". This was revealed when I was being asked in a rather accusatory manner, "Why do you always have to be so damn sensible?" This revealed that my colleagues knew less about me than they thought.

Recently, a young lady lecturer has taken to calling me "Android", but when she confessed that it was a mere linguistic play on my name and that she did not really know what an Android is I offered her an explanation by saying, "An Android is a robot of eerily lifelike human appearance but actually just a machine that has no real emotions, no empathy, no feelings and no spark of humanity in it whatsoever." In response to this summary she remarked, "Wow! I didn't realise how appropriate it is!"

The third nickname I have become aware of happens to be identical to one that was used for my father when he had risen to the heights of being a police Chief Superintendent, and which he learned about via a careless radio call made by a junior officer. A few people have referred to myself, and earlier to him, as "The wise old owl". It is strange we both earned the same nickname at different points in our lives. In my father's case he heard it over the radio of a patrol car he had taken use of in the early hours when the junior officer broadcast, "Careful guys, the wise old owl is out tonight." In my case I know that while referring to me a woman declared, rather scornfully and probably sarcastically, "I doubt if the wise old owl will agree to that."

While on the topic of seeing ourselves as other see us, however, I should report that when a new student was looking for me in the early days of one academic year, and having forgotten my name, she was asked to describe me. The phrase she came up with was, "A big old bald guy who will probably be in a bad mood." Ah... that lass had me figured out fast. She is a newly qualified doctor of medicine now, making further accurate diagnoses, no doubt. The troubling thing is that the person who had asked for the description knew instantly that the student was looking for me.

Stupid

Whenever I am tempted to do something stupid I generally proceed to do it. I have just done so again, today. Not really something very, very stupid, or even very stupid, but still something stupid nonetheless. Then having done something stupid, despite having thought about it being stupid prior to doing it, and despite having told myself that it would be stupid to do it while there was still time to decide not to do it, I tell myself that it was stupid to have gone ahead and done it, and I ponder why I did it. The answer to that conundrum may possibly be that I am stupid. This sequence of events will doubtless happen again, in some stupid form or another. The simplest way to deal with it may be to conclude that it clearly demonstrates that the notion of free will is an illusion, for were I truly free I would clearly not choose to do something stupid in the full and prior knowledge that it would be a stupid thing to do... unless I am stupid. I hope to be more sensible tomorrow, trusting that past events are not necessarily a reliable indication of likely future events in similar situations, even though they generally have been through all the many years of serial stupidity leading up to now.

Abstractions and practicalities

I was lecturing about the hybridisation of electron orbitals, a rather abstract and technical concept, and the young woman - just 18 - was confused, asking, "but what is an orbital?" Shortly after I had tried to explain, and while she remained somewhat puzzled but was clearly drawing closer to understanding, she pulled her vibrating phone from her pocket, examined it, and said "sorry, I have to go to calf a cow." I did not quite pick up what she had said though, and did not understand, so I asked her to repeat. "To calf a cow," she repeated, adding, "my granny is alone on the farm and a cow has started calving and she doesn't know what to do." As she got up and rushed away I told her that I was impressed, which I was. Then I went back to talking about the hybridisation of electron orbitals around atomic nuclei. I hope to see a photo of the calf tomorrow, and will show her some images depicting electron orbitals in return.

I suppose it is December

Old stone in Edinburgh

The accidental learner

Students have a knack of always having an answer that turns the tables on you, even when they don't have the answer they actually need. I present in evidence of this generality the specific instance of the lad who had performed his calculations in a practical report all wrong today, but when I presented the meaningless disaster to him he wailed that he just did not understand how to do these things. And when I reminded him that I had lectured on how to do these things and that the explanation was also available on my online site he said, "but I just don't understand it." So, leaving him for a while, I went to retrieve a previous report of his, took it back to him, laid it out before him, jabbed my finger at the relevant place on the page and said, "Look, here, a few weeks ago, you did exactly the same sort of calculation completely correctly."

He looked. He pondered. He shook his head a little and then declared, "Well that must have been completely accidental."

I gave up.

In perspective

Each one of these has many thousands of millions of stars, yet occupies not even a pinprick in the wide sweep of our big sky, among endless other not-even-pinpricks, and yet we think we may be important? Well, either we are astonishingly important, that is, we are alone, or we are not even a speck of dirt in the universe's eye, which leaves me not knowing (whether to laugh or cry).

Not my photograph, I admit - a passing phantom just dropped it

Good words

They don’t just come when commanded,they have to be born by themselves,but when they come good they come easy,as if created by somebody else.The flow is dictated by rhythm, the thought is dictated by mind,and once here they are often discarded,awaiting for someone to find.

Land on the horizon