Dear Friends,

206 Benjamin West Ave

Swarthmore PA 19081-1421

December 31, 2005 (postdated!)

Steve. This time of year we’re mostly all home for dinner and they are more leisurely than usual. Leon and Aaron attempt to shock Fran with what they say or their bad manners, Aaron contradicts everything I say, Fran fusses over the kids, and they tease her relentlessly about it. Somehow we all walk away happy, perhaps like Horton after hatching the egg. Hey, we’re a family and we’re communicating.

The leisurely dinners are welcome for me, because it’s been a very busy year. I thought my second year as department chair would be easier, and maybe it has, but it’s been busier. First, I’m teaching 2 courses instead of 1.5, as we eliminated half-semester courses. Sometime halfway through the semester it dawned on me that not only was I doing more courses, but they were 2 new courses, which always takes more time. Who assigned me that? Hmm, the department chair.

When I wrote last year, I was in the middle of 3 promotion cases (2 for tenure) and I had just gotten the department to agree to implement several curricular changes for the following year, along with a major renumbering. In the spring the promotions all came through and my carefully orchestrated numerology rollout worked – no massive confusion. But other things popped up to keep me busy. At Swarthmore students can’t just declare majors and minors; they have to apply (not always successfully) and have their “sophomore paper” (a useful planning document) vetted. We had the largest number of students apply to be majors and minors ever, about 30 of each from a graduating class of 350! In the past the chair has advised all majors and minors. I got the department to share the load, but still, it is a very busy time for the chair. Finally, late in the spring, one of our junior people on a 3-year appointment got an excellent tenure offer and decided to leave a year early. So I had to run a job search at the last moment. Searches are another major job for a chair here. We are proud that we have placed our temporary people into excellent tenure-track slots elsewhere, but it means you never know when you have to run a search.

So, on to this year. We’re trying to do more to get our majors out of here. I arranged meetings on jobs for math majors in the real world and on getting into grad school. I ran practice sessions for taking the math subject test GRE. I helped make more information available about the myriad things our alumni are doing. Check our pages that are part of a national AMS[i] project

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/math_stat/AMS/

and our own site

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/math_stat/people_alumni.html

What you can’t see online is the much greater number of vignettes on the bulletin board across from my office.

Another effort I’ve made is to get the maximum value from the limited number of course sections we can offer. We don’t have graduate students we can hire or drop as TAs at a moment’s notice as enrollments change. Through the goodwill of my colleagues, and various survey efforts to determine student interest in advance, I have been able on fairly short notice to cancel some small courses (3 or 4 students) and create extra sections of others (when there are more than 15 in core major courses, 25 in other courses), so that demand is best met. But it requires a lot of time and effort to keep on top of this. Fortunately, we get brownie points from the students and the Provost.

Professional activities outside Swarthmore. I didn’t go to MathPath this summer (at Colorado College) but I continued to help the Director set up the camp (placement quiz, brochure, hiring suggestions). I didn’t go because I feel I teach better with some breaks, and to give myself more time to start some other projects (see below). I have agreed to go this coming summer (all July, at UC Santa Cruz) and am again helping with setup. Those of you who are mathematical might check out MathPath and see what you think:

http://www.mathpath.org/

The director, a south Indian, is an unusual fellow; he has made this program happen (and the high school MathCamp as well) by shear will power and personal funds, and I respect him a lot. I have disagreed with some of his ideas about how to promote the camp and run it, but he always considers my ideas and I work well with him.

I continue to be an advisor to Core Plus, one of the major secondary school “reform” math curricula, run out of Western Michigan U in Kalamazoo. But now I have become a writer for another new secondary math curriculum, the CME project run out of the Educational Development Center in Newton MA. This is sometimes considered to be a counterreform program, in that some of the conservatives in the math wars are advisors. But this label is unfair. Yes, CME is much more interested in developing traditional algebraic skills than the reform curricula, but the emphasis is every bit as much on conceptual understanding as in the reform curricula, and the methods are hardly all traditional.

Anyway, I got to know the project leader, Al Cuoco, some years ago, and told him I would be interested in participating. He contacted me last spring and asked would I be willing to write a linear algebra chapter for their Algebra 2 book. (Linear algebra is not a traditional algebra 2 topic!) I said yes. There was a lot to learn about how they do things, and their deadlines do not conform to my college deadlines. Indeed, I am writing this delayed letter as a break to finishing the fieldtest version of my chapter, whose final final deadline is the beginning of January. But these are fun guys to work with.

For some years I have served on editorial boards of some book series of the MAA.[ii] After some coaxing this fall, I have agreed to be Editor Elect in 2006, and then Editor in 2007-2010, of their Notes series, one of their major efforts that publishes compendia on current issues in undergraduate mathematics education.

Nice things come in email. The Monday after one of my linear algebra students got home to North Carolina from December final exams he wrote:

I started back at the EPA today, and some of the systems biology papers that made no sense to me this summer were easily understandable with my new linear algebra vocabulary. Thanks for a productive semester!

His subject line: Can’t wait to take more math.

A few days earlier, an email arrived from a student who had been my freshman advisee when I was a graduate student resident adviser at Princeton in 1971! I only half remembered him. He wanted some advice on going back to school (he had dropped out the next year) and tracked me down on the internet, remembering me as one of the few mathematicians he had met who he thought might be sympathetic. Several emails ensued. I think I helped him.

Travels. Our only family vacation was a week in Vermont in July for Fran and me – kids were elsewhere. The trip was mostly unremarkable and, atypically, very hot muggy Pennsylvania weather came with us. I do recommend the view at dusk over lake Champlain from the terrace of the Vanderbilt mansion in Shelburne (now a hotel and restaurant). And I very much recommend the book we listened to on the way up, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Various of my mathematical friends among you have already heard from me about this book. But now all of you can read my review at

http://www.swarthmore.edu/NatSci/smaurer1/CuriousIncident.htm

The real trip for me this year was my conference trip in August to Albuquerque. I went 3 days early and did sightseeing and hiking. Part of the time I spent around Albuquerque. I highly recommend the aerial tramway to the top of the Sandias and the view from the ridge on top at nightfall. A later morning I hiked up the desert foothills at the south end of the Sandias. But the best part was the full day I spent driving into northeast New Mexico. I especially recommend

Sugarite Canyon State Park, and the hike up Little Horse Mesa
The solitary pioneer church on Johnson Mesa
The railroad station and adjoining hotel (closed) in Las Vegas (NM, not NV!)
Looking out at the town, the mountains, and the high plains, while standing next to the neon sign above Raton NM (like the Hollywood sign, but less famous)
The whole ride along I-25 in northeast NM; wonderful high prairie.

The mesas of northeast NM are unlike anything else I have visited. Flat, like the mesas in Indian country, but not dry and brown. On the other hand, not as lush and rolling as the upland meadows in Colorado or Wales.

With another day, I would have gone southwest to visit the high chaparral on the New Mexico – Arizona border that Sandra Day O’Connor wrote about in her homestead memoir Lazy B. I had read her book earlier this year and found it strangely moving – but I like desolate lands. The Day Ranch is sold and broken up now, and parts are accessible by public dirt roads; much of the ranch had actually been public land that the Bureau of Land Management had parceled out to ranchers in trust.

Children. Aaron has finally found something (other than action computer games) that he cares enough about to work on hard and regularly: body building and football. Not what I would have chosen, but it’s something. He’s 6’4” with bulging biceps – quite a hunk. Quite a change from the soft little kid of yesteryear. Indeed, when women friends of ours see him who haven’t seen him in a while, they invariably ask us “Are the girls clawing all over him?”

I was really surprised when Aaron announced last spring he wanted to try football. He’s not very coordinated or fast (when younger, he had occupational therapy for lack of motor skills), and 11^th grade is late to start football. But he said, “Dad, I want to be a lineman and bang into people.” And so he has. He worked hard, going to all the practices starting in May, and he did get to play some. Being big and strong helped. Still, next year he would have to be varsity, the varsity at the high school is very good, and he probably wouldn’t get to play at all. So he is thinking of trying out for shot put in track and field this spring.

Of course, this is the year we would like him to do well in school and start thinking about colleges. He works hard enough to do well by his standards (A– or B+) but for the most part he doesn’t seem very excited about ideas. (Two exceptions: the history channel and politics. Fran and I were touched when we learned that he had joined the ACLU on his own.) Next semester he takes honors multivariate calculus at the College with one of my colleagues, after doing linear algebra at the high school (I helped set up the course there). He has a lot of math talent, but I think his just-in-time approach to homework is finally not going to work, and I hope he has the will to figure out a better approach. In fairness, he has gotten better about planning his homework. Last year he would wait until midnight to start and sometimes be up till 4am. (Pressuring him to change his ways didn’t work; that’s been true since age 2.) This year on his own it is rare that he is up past 1am. He might just survive college!

I think Aaron is the sort of student the admissions officers at Swarthmore and similar places are talking about when they cheerfully say they turned down umpty-ump applicants with double 800s. These days, to get in at top places on smarts alone, you have to do something really amazing, like win the US Math Olympiad. Otherwise, admissions officers want to know what you have done that’s beneficial to show drive and motivation or, as they like to put it, passion. Aaron goes to Boy Scouts and Hebrew school, but somewhat lackadaisically. We and his scoutmaster are trying to get him to complete Eagle Scout, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

So to me the college question is: Where might Aaron be admitted that might bring out the best in him? But maybe this is the wrong question. I know one or two faculty at Swarthmore who say they weren’t serious as undergraduates. So there’s always hope. However Aaron turns out, he will do it his own way. He always has.

Leon. I’ll say less because Leon reports himself below. (Aaron says: why should I spend time writing to your friends that I don’t even know? Say what you want about me.)

Leon spent the summer as an intern at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) in DC. It’s a little embarrassing to his liberal parents that he would work there, but he was working in the economics department (not the political diatribe department) collecting data for the noted economist Kevin Hassett, and one of our liberal economics professor friends agreed that it was not an opportunity to turn down. So, how, as a freshman, did he get one of these very competitive positions? Answer: It was set up by John Lott. John Lott is the author of More Guns, Less Crime and other books and articles against gun control. John works at AEI but lives in Swarthmore. In fact, his sons were in Boy Scouts with Leon and Aaron, and I have had many chances to talk to John at Boy Scout dinners or while chaperoning trips. He is controversial – you can find strongly worded articles about him and his work, both for and against, on the internet – but personally I find him very friendly, I think he investigates important questions, and I’m glad he is not deterred by the flack he knows he will get, even if I hope his conclusions are wrong. Anyway, he thought very highly of Leon, knew Leon was interested in economics and government, and essentially arranged the position for Leon on his own. We are grateful.

How is Leon doing at Dartmouth? Well, in 1964 (bear with me), my Father took my Mother, my brothers and me on a car trip to Mexico. My Father’s younger brother Milton asked him to look up a boyhood friend then living in Mexico City, someone who had grown up with them in Bedford-Stuyvesant (then, in the 1920s, a Jewish neighborhood). So, a few days after reaching Mexico City, we did go visit this man and his family. He kept asking about people from the old neighborhood who had been my Father’s age. My Father didn’t know anything about what had happened to them, or even remember them very well. In some surprise and disappointment, our host finally said, I guess the people who became my closest friends for life are the friends I made as a kid.

That certainly wasn’t true of my Father. His closest friends for life were his friends from law school (the last of whom died just this year). My Mom’s closest friends came from many periods in her life, though none from before college. And my closest friends? Fran would say I have no friends, just colleagues and acquaintances, such as you, gentle reader. Her idea of a friend is someone you share your inner thoughts with up close, as well as schmooze with easily and often. I rarely do either, except sometimes with her. Of course, I think I’m perfectly happy the way I am, although maybe, when I’m an old invalid and can’t type out email or read the screen anymore, I will miss Fran’s sort of friend.

But we were speaking of Leon. He’s like this guy in Mexico City. His closest friends are the ones he made in Swarthmore, in high school and earlier. Indeed, his closest friend goes back to nursery school. He is in touch with them at Dartmouth by email and sees them as soon as they all get home for vacations. And perhaps as a consequence, he hasn’t made any close friends at Dartmouth. I think his relationship to Dartmouth is, so far, arm’s length. He finds some of the courses interesting, gets decent grades (3 A–’s this last term, his best yet) does some things with the cycling club, gets along well enough with one guy from his hall last year to room with him this year; but so far he doesn’t seem on his way to being really happy there, the way I was as a Swarthmore undergrad. I’m hoping he will get really engaged at some point, perhaps after choosing a major, but time will tell.

Fran’s diffuse thoughts on being an old woman at the synagogue. Saturday 12/31/2005: Soon after I sat down at services (late), M asked me would I read Torah (the 5 books of Moses, written in Hebrew on a parchment scroll) tomorrow (New Year’s Day, also the beginning of the Hebrew lunar month of Tevet) at morning service. I’d read the Rosh Hodesh (new moon) passage before, he said, but it was broken up differently than usual [and he’d just had me read a Hannukah passage on Wednesday, and all the Hannukah verses repeat the same offerings].

He walked slowly off to the chapel to get the daily prayer book, and launched into a long explanation that I didn’t quite attend to because I was trying to listen to the service. I took the prayerbook, found the passage, and realized, ok, I did more or less remember the New Moon text (Num 28:1-15). And you need to be sure to give Bill the third aliyah (the honor of saying the blessing before and after reading a portion of Torah) – he always gets that. Then M realized with some annoyance I was looking at the usual page for beginning-of-month, not the page showing how those verses are divided for Rosh Hodesh for the month of Tevet, when there’s an additional reading for Hannukah. Why hadn’t I listened the first time? The right hand Torah in the chapel would be rolled to the Rosh Hodesh reading, the left hand Torah to the Hannukah reading. Got that?

For 18 years, ever since he retired, M has done huge amounts of the Torah reading. He’s a bright guy with an excellent memory and a strong, traditional education. He isn’t well these days – he walks far more slowly and his eyes aren’t good. Three other women and I are doing more reading, but we struggle to keep up. Just to find the right place in a Torah scroll is an adventure – there are no pages, no page numbers, no punctuation, no chapter headings. M’s the only one besides the Rabbi who can do it. I’ve always assumed that someday when I was retired I’d go to daily services and read a lot of Torah, but that would be far, far in the future, when I was old. But maybe I’m already old.

I’m still Social Action chair at the synagogue. We add a few new activities each year. Since last spring, we’ve been reading with kids in the afterschool program in a shelter in Chester. At first, it was hard to get some of them to focus. Aaron and the 13-year-old volunteers advised candy as an incentive, but instead we started giving the kids books – if the kids either read or listen to a book, they write their name in it and take it home. It worked! Collecting books has been easy in a town like Swarthmore – a notice at the Swim Club brought us boxes and boxes. We’ve done bowling trips with the kids and Moms (a big hit), and they come up to the synagogue on Martin Luther King Day for cookie baking and crafts and games. We did a Book Binge where we gave each kid & parent gift cards & took them to Borders to spend them.

One girl turned to her sister at the end of an afternoon and said, “Now we have 19 books”. Of course, I obsessed over her all week and bought a pile more I thought she’d like, but she was gone the next week.

A volunteer came up to me in the supermarket dairy section to tell me how the first grader she was reading with was sounding out “orphanage”. She got to the “ph” sound and said – that’s an f. How did she know that? (~~this~~This is fall of first grade). Her Mom taught her. In fact, a lot of the parents clearly read with the kids – given how many kids have changed schools or missed school from housing problems, it’s amazing how well many read.

Chester schools are awful. Many of the kids get teased about living in a shelter. It’s not as if we can make much difference in an hour a week – only give them a little appreciation and reinforcement.

We (and a neighboring synagogue) got a little grant from Jewish Federation, and we did a fund-raiser brunch with a local journalist as speaker (and netted $2,500, because we made all the food ourselves from scratch). The local Federation’s community organizer helps us with logistics and publicity. But it’s still a lot of work to recruit volunteers and coordinate.

Kids: Aaron was already huge (6’4”, 210#) last year: he’s started lifting weights 3x/week and went out for JV football this fall (the first sport he’s ever done). He feels no meal is worthwhile without a pound or two of dead cow. Why bother with vegetables? The cows eat the vegetables, and he eats the cows – more efficient. His food groups are Wheaties, chunks of dead animals, and sweets.

Reading over the past year’s entries in my journal, I’m always ranting about assignments started at the last minute. There was the paper on comparing & contrasting Newton’s & Leibnitz’s contributions to the calculus that he didn’t start until after dinner on Sunday, and worked on all night.

Here’s a sample diary entry about finals:

I don’t think A did that well on his math – it was a chapter test, really, instead of a final, since they did their final shortly after the AP exam back in May, and he got A- on that, but he didn’t study a bit for this one – he seemed a bit upset Mon night. When I tried to exploit – a possible Teachable Moment – and extol the virtues of Making an Effort, he said maybe I should just relax & stop nagging him & enjoy being 54.

When I nag him, he says what’s the point? If he works on vocabulary I’ll start to nag about Eagle Scout progress. If he does vocabulary & Eagle Scout, I’ll start in on drivers’ ed. He spends hours on games:

(My Mom) hoped Aaron wasn’t playing that terrible game. What terrible game, asked I (my heart sinking; whatever it was, he was sure to be playing it). She didn’t know the name, but it involved shooting cops & civilians, and I shouldn’t ask about it or forbid it, it’d just make it more attractive. Driving A to school the next day, I asked. Oh, said he, she must mean Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas, recently out on Playstation, but not yet available f/ computers. He was scornful that I’d think it’d lead to violence; didn’t I know he distinguished between virtual & real violence? And I had to admit he’s never aggressive...

At least we talk at dinner – about days, about health class (Aaron thought the risks were systematically overstated), about English (A’s class watched a bad film adaptation of The Power of One, with weird metaphors: birds of sorrow laying stone eggs of loneliness, or was it birds of loneliness laying stone eggs of sorrow? ( he wasn’t sure), about work (when I ranted about the evil O, Aaron speculated that even as I spoke, O was ranting to his wife about me). One night (a friend’s father in law had just died) I went on about my not wanting to be kept alive by extraordinary means. Then the conversation moved to burial arrangements (if S dies first, he agreed to have a Jewish funeral & be buried at the synagogue cemetery, but if I die first, he’d rather be cremated). Aaron, with his customary tact, broke in and said “Don’t worry, Dad, we’ll send your body to the narcissists”. He meant necrophiles.

He went to Germany with his class, acquired a taste for Weissbier and occasionally wrote home:

Wensday: Went and visited two castle/palaces of king ludwig the second. The first was a very nice mansion though kinda small by king standards. He spent most of his time there. The second was the famous castle which disney used as a model. I was suprised to learn that it is only 150 or so years old. I was not to suprised to learn however that it is mostly unfinished. Most of the east side was never built, and the center keep was never started. In addition, only one third of the rooms were ever finished; king ludwig died under misterious circumstances before it was finnished. However, what was finnised is amazing. He has this huge castle, with a beautiful interior, built on a hill in the alps. There is a water fall flowing nearby, there are mountains everywhere, and there are huge emerald glimmering lakes in clear view. King Ludwig my friend, you might have been mad, but you certainly did have a good sence of where a king should live.

He and friends spent months building a trebuchet (a medieval siege weapon) and hurling weighted vegetables vast distances over the local playing fields. He plays Scrabble several days a week after school. He and his Scrabble friends trick-or-treated in suits with briefcases, dressed up as IRS auditors (what could be scarier?).

He took scuba lessons in order to qualify for the Boy Scout Sea Base this summer, and spent a weekend passing tests in a flooded quarry in the Poconos. His (mild) asthma meant that Steve spent many, many hours researching whether the diving was safe, and getting him medical permission for the training. He’s still working on permission for Sea Base itself.

Of course, we see far less of Leon. He likes being fussed over and fed at home, and says the self-stocking feature of the kitchen is useful. Over his spring break, he worked on a pocket random number generator. Why, you ask, does anyone need a random number generator? We’ve all heard about Barry Schwartz’s work on how US consumers have too much choice, right? Here’s a way to choose among all those Burger King Chicken sandwiches.

Both kids tease me on my clumsiness with electronics. When my digital camera wouldn’t upload pictures, I berated Aaron (who had used it last) until he pointed out I’d forgotten to turn it on. When I bought myself an iPod, Aaron asked what on earth did I need 4G of memory for? When I told Leon I couldn’t get the car player for my iPod to work, he asked, “Why doesn’t this surprise me?”, and reminded me of the printer memory chip that sat on my shelf for years (next to the uninstalled Quicken updates) until he dealt with them.

When Leon and I ventured into Philadelphia to buy ingredients for Chinese dishes, he criticized my driving all the way in and back. Why was I so tentative, creeping down the narrow South Philadelphia streets? Did I think a car was going to pounce out into the street & bite me? I lament the days when he was an adoring moppet and I could do no wrong.

When I drove him back to school in September, he was a martinet, getting us out the driveway at 8 sharp. We listened to Plutarch’s lives of Coriolanus & Pompey from my iPod (now that the car player worked), talked about majors (I worry there’ll be a glut of economists), lugged his worldly goods up four flights of stairs, and ate dinner at a picturesque country inn. I drove home listening raptly to Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (about two teens sent out into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution).

The first Friday night that Leon was home this break, as I was raising my hands to bless kids, Aaron said “Oh, the little Mommy’s so glad to have both kids home to bless”, and I started laughing because that’s of course exactly what I was thinking. They say I might as well have a screen on my forehead with a crawl.

At dinner, conversation got to sleep (or lack thereof) among college students, and how Leon and his roommate were rare in keeping early hours. Steve interjected that he hoped L spent at least some time in late night bull sessions – they were one of the valuable parts of The College Experience. I interjected something about who did he hang around with (since he volunteers little about groups of friends). Leon burst out that he hangs around with no one but lepers and menstruating women (Leviticus chapters 12-14). I replied, well, as long as they’re Jewish.

Work: In summer of 2004, I’d transferred from working on Japan to Central & Eastern Europe. Back last February, I was asked to review a model for some Chilean business that was losing money. (Chile privatized its pension system under Pinochet, so retirees buy an annuity from an insurance company.) Reviewing the model took a couple of months – the bonds that fund the pensions are complicated, and Chile’s accounting conventions differ from the US’s. I was asked if I’d like to change to Latin America. So now I work for Steve W, my old boss from Provident.

I started working on my Spanish, which I hadn’t used since I left Panama in 1977. It seemed to come back. (and Portuguese wasn’t too different – our next project was from Brazil). I practiced on the ladies at the salad place I went for lunch. I bought software. One of the cleaning crew spent a lot of time talking to me – she actually was going through a hard time – her mother, back in Mexico, had cancer and she missed her children and grandchildren.

I was excited to go to the regional budget meetings in Miami and Santiago (Chile), in Spanish, directed by the regional VP for Latin America. The Miami meeting started inauspiciously – I hadn’t been told that breakfast would be served in the conference room, and arrived late (and dripping with sweat, this being Miami in August and dress being business), and didn’t understand what the VP said to me (in Spanish) on being introduced. But I sat as close to said VP as I could and hung on his every word (not hard – he’s gorgeous & well-spoken) and the conversations began to make sense, once I figured out that the word that sounded like “missiones” was “milliones”.

The Santiago meetings were in a smaller room (so easier to hear), and I was thrilled to be staying at the Ritz (for $150/day, including breakfast). When I went out running the first morning, the bellhop was waiting for me on my return with a tray with water and a towel (gratis!). In the office, it was wonderful to be able to scurry off and resolve questions without needing an interpreter; even though I didn’t know the familiar plural endings, I could understand people and they could understand me.

A friend at work was born at the end of the Cultural Revolution – her grandfather was jailed and her parents spent years supporting him & her grandmother. She remembers her family spending days traveling by boat to save $0.14. Once I told her about Balzac & the Little Chinese Seamstress, she began to remind me (when I vented about this or that) about teens sent out to the countryside to carry nightsoil to the fields.

Other family: My uncle George died in the spring after a long illness. When Hitler entered Austria, George’s uncle in the US wrote “send me the children”, and they came. He’d worked as a photo-engraver until he was blinded a year or two later working on a roof, then entered Harvard as a grad student in sociology, and became a therapist. When I was a high-maintenance teen, he (and my aunt Mimi) spent many, many hours talking with me.

Andy, my brother-in-law, got a job at BU, and he & Beth & Sofia moved into a huge Victorian in Newton (MA). They had a little boy (Alexander Daniel) in October.

Mimi turned 80 in the summer. She’d not only read Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, but her book group had read most of the major Balzac novels a few years ago (and she remembered them). Her birthday gathering was filled with awesome octogenarians who’d been her classmates at Radcliffe.

We all gathered in Boston again for Thanksgiving (and to meet Alex). Sofia looked tiny, perched in L’s or A’s arms (where she often was). Alex, of course, looked even smaller. Our sons are at the end of childhood, where my sister’s little one is at the beginning. I’ve kept a diary for almost 20 years now, since before Leon was born. What will I write about when both my huge, scornful, hairy darlings are far away?

Every New Years, the local ABC House (A Better Chance – gives inner city youth a chance to attend Wallingford-Swarthmore public schools) sells luminaria to raise funds, and every year when we walk down the streets lined with lights, I’m so glad to be well and to live in this peaceful, quiet place (Yes, it’s the same closing as last year, but it still stands). Wishing you and your darlings a healthy and peaceful year.

Leon. School took up most of last year, and there are three classes that I’ll mention. First, there’s "The art of the manifesto," run by the theater department (I'm not sure why either). This class was noteworthy mostly because it was full of postmodern garbage (redundant, I know), relying heavily on critical ~~reading~~ making things up. It further reinforced my distain for much of the humanities. But I digress. On the plus side, it killed some requirements and some of the readings, taken alone, were mildly interesting. One anarchist manifesto demanded free exchange of goods – which warmed my libertarian heart – but called for the abolition of currency on the next line. This confused me until I realized that they didn’t mean free of restrictions, they meant free as in the five fingered discount and smash’n grab prices.

Then there’s “Software Design and Implementation,” which although requiring two previous CS classes, was my first CS class at Dartmouth. The prof utilized a “sink or swim” method of teaching, which necessarily didn’t involve a lot of teaching, instead relying on a group project. For me, this was a robotic arm which sorted marbles by color. By the end of the term, I was putting in 30 hours a week, but it was lots of fun.

A humanities class I did like was “Scientific Revolutions and Modern Society” by the history department. Although we read Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions -- which ventures into postmodern garbage territory and is largely responsible for the word “paradigm” being overused, most of the class was spent looking at Newton, Darwin, and Einstein. So, I finally got around to reading much of The Origin of Species, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, and Newton writing on gravity, including his famous “Hypotheses non fingo” passage from the Principia. The prof also gave great lectures and a good hand waving explanation of special relativity, so I was pleased. I also wrote a term paper on Samuel Morey – which I hope to post online sometime and integrate into his Wikipedia article, a NH inventor who, among other things, developed the first internal combustion engine in America, and went on the first car ride in America (the second in the world) across Market Street in Philadelphia. Dartmouth has many of his papers, including patents signed by the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Holding them was a nifty experience.

Also In the realm of classes I liked, I’m trying to choose my utility maximizing major. Unfortunately I’m currently oscillating between economics and physics with a time period of about a week. For the moment, I’ve got a bunch of both planned.

As for the non-academic, I did some bike racing with the Dartmouth team last spring, but I wasn’t very successful. I plan on trying again though. I’ve also been doing electronics and programming on my own. My coolest creation is a hand held random number generator using voltage fluctuations through a diode, a PIC microcontroller, and a small LCD screen. I’m now fooling with a single board computer based off the famed 6502 processor, although I’m still trying to think of a cool project for it.

Anyhow, on to my summer, where I spent 10 weeks in DC living at American University and working at The American Enterprise Institute. There were a lot of firsts for me: not spending most of the summer at home, living in a city (although the part of DC I lived in wasn't so urban), commuting to work, and dressing up for work -- granted, I wore mostly a polo shirt and khakis when the other interns were wearing suits, but over time the other interns also dress more casually.

While AEI is a "conservative" think tank, unlike Cato or Heritage, AEI doesn't have official stances on anything, and there was a good variety of opinion among the scholars there – including a particularly pronounced paleo/neo conservative split. Granted, there weren't any commies or anarchists, but I wasn't complaining.

AEI held many events on many topics, often in the form of panel discussions, and I felt that these were the most interesting part of my stay. This was where you could really see the disagreements among scholars, and guest speakers usually increased the diversity further. One particularly interesting event, titled "Uzbekistan and the Bush Doctrine", saw William Kristol team up with a liberal against a conservative in calling for a stronger reaction from the US in response to Uzbekistan’s civilian shooting spree. One of the other interns was an Uzbek, but I never got around to hearing her thoughts on the matter. The other great perk of AEI was the food. Although interns were unpaid, we got an otherwise free lunch from AEI’s kitchen, which supposedly costs them around $40. Here’s an example lunch (more are posted on my blog):

-Soup: Chilled California Black Plum with Cinnamon and Brandy

-Entree: Pan-Seared Chilean Sea Bass with Scallop Leeks Ravioli and Black Truffle Tomato Coulis

-Dessert: Lemon Tart

Yummy.

In addition to public events, everyone ate lunch together on Friday and one of the scholars gave a presentation. Two of the best were by Ben Wattenberg (a former speech writer for LBJ) and by Michael Rubin, who has spent a lot of time on the ground in Iraq and who's office is decked out in Bathist propaganda posters. Wattenberg talked about neoconservatism and Rubin showed slides and told stories about his stay in Iraq. He seemed to spend a lot of time traveling to villages and meeting with their leaders as sort of a roving comment box -- I think that he already had connections with leaders in the Kurdish part of Iraq. Some of the more interesting stories included pestering Iranian border guards and watching people (the might have been Yezidi) eat razor blades -- he wondered how much more interested he’d have been in Sunday school if they taught razor blade. However, on a few slides he'd come across a picture with someone now deceased. It was a view of Iraq that I hadn't seen.

There are a lot of influential people around AEI, but there seemed to be an inverse relation between their fame and the how much time they actually spent there. For example, I only saw Lynne Cheney once, and she wasn't around that often (you knew she was in because large men with black suits and earpieces would appear). From what I could tell, she passed her time writing patriotic books for children and young adults (to her credit, they get good reviews on amazon.com). Other notable people were equally elusive, but could sometimes be found in odd situations. Story time.

Once upon a time, nature called, and I headed to the bathroom. As I opened its door, I was greeted by what sounded like a cross between a Christmas jingle and elevator music. I'd never heard music in this -- or any -- bathroom, and yet there was someone in a stall and Greg, another intern, using a urinal like nothing unusual was going on. It was surreal. Had this music always been here? Was it in my head? I had to know. So as I approached the second urinal to do my business, I broke the unspoken urinal code of conduct, and whispered to Greg, "Hey, are you making that music?" Greg, practically shouted in reply, "That's right Leon! I make music when I take a leak!" We finished our business and walked towards the sink, with the music still playing. Suddenly, a red faced Newt Gingrich, with music blaring cell phone in hand, burst forth from the stall, hurriedly splashed some water on his hands, and was gone while Greg and I tried to hold back our laughter.

However, my stay at AEI was generally more serious. I worked in what appeared to be a hallway that some architect had neglected to open at one end. This was shared by three other interns T J, David (both at Penn), and Trent (Princeton). Trent and I both were listed as working for Kevin Hassett, head of AEI's Economics department, but we took orders mostly from Gordon Gray who was a research assistant to pretty much everyone in the department. Trent and I spent most of our time tracking down data from various databases and organizing it in Excel. I also got sent to the library of congress to track down odds and ends -- housing data from the 1970 census (available on reel to reel computer tape and dead tree, although the pages were missing from one of the library's two copies), congressional testimony on the Small Business Administration during Regen's presidency (my first experience with microfilm), etc. Lastly, we had to write up summaries for economics department events (summaries and videos of the conference are available at aei.org, search for Leon Maurer). All in all, it was a pleasant stay, and if I decide to go with economics instead of physics (which is a choice Hassett also made I believe) I’d like to go back.