thinkfetti

The blending stump is an artist’s tool, used for blending shading lines into smooth shading, or “value.” It’s made of something like paper, sharpened into something like pencil shape, but the end of it is not perfectly sharp or defined, but rather like a small top knot.

Blending with a blending stump is hard (for me, at least). It’s easy to run over the border or contour I’m trying to blend toward, so the distinction between one, smoothly varying shape and the neighboring, also smoothly varying shape is violated, blurred.

Or, being afraid of running over the borderline, I don’t blend close enough to the border contour, and so there’s a region of blended values and then a border of unblended pencil strokes close to the border line itself.

I think of my time as department chair at my university, and of the problems I faced as ombudsman and general, all-around smoother of disagreements and angry people. It’s true: there was always either too much smoothing (real distinctions were “brushed over” in the effort to cool tempers), or not enough smoothing (sometimes, it’s just not practical or even possible to smooth and soothe to the point where everything looks balanced.)

The choice is then whether or not to keep practicing, in spite of the limitations of yourself and your materials.

The quote, “insanity : doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” has been attributed to Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, among others, but it was probably written by Rita Mae Brown (Sudden Death, Bantam Books, New York, 1983, p. 68). [1, 2]

But let’s say you’re sending out resumes, hoping to get a job. If each resume had a 1% chance of succeeding (a 1-in-100 chance), and if you managed to send out 100 resumes, you’d have about a 63% chance of landing a job. (The percentage chance of success in this idealized case is (1 - (0.99^100))*100 for reasons I won’t go into here…)

That’s a better than even chance, after doing the same, crummy thing over and over.

Or…

You decide you want to learn to draw. You sit down for an hour, try to draw a realistic picture of something on the desk in front of you, and it doesn’t come out.

(more…)

A problem that fascinates me (and occasionally infuriates me) is the one of matchmaking: party A needs something that party B can provide, party B wants to provide a service that party A happens to have need of… yet the two cannot find a way to collaborate.

It happens with people looking for personal relationships, and it happens for employers and job seekers. Somehow, a barrier of anxiety (”well, if someone wants to volunteer to help us, they must have something wrong with them, no?”) stands in the way of these otherwise promising matches.

Country A has too much corn, and country B needs corn. Still impossible to work things out.

When I was a grad student at UC Berkeley, we had a saying: “if you can’t increase your cross section, increase your flux.” Translated, that means if you are having a low success rate, do something more frequently.

Eventually, theoretically, maybe, it will pay off with the sensible match being made. Even if the hiring/meeting systems are mostly, almost entirely broken, things sometimes work.

This week, I am delighted to report that I am no longer the chair of the Humanities Department. At the end-of-year department party, I borrowed the key to the building directory from the department secretary and gleefully moved the letters C-H-A-I-R from beside my name to the name above mine.

In the process, the H split in two, but I managed to prop the pieces next to each other in the board when I set them back in. Friends of mine had suggested a chair breaking ceremony as part of the transfer of power, so I guess this H incident will fill in for that on a somewhat more abstract level.

I feel invigorated by the negative reinforcement, and I’m very much looking forward to getting to work (and to play) now that I have the time and mental space to do so.

For anyone working in academia, there is little to compare with summer break. Especially given the progressive insanity that manifests during the spring semester, the accumulation of fatigue, frustrations, and stupidities that are never quite resolved during the all-to-brief winter holiday, the ending of all the noise at the end of term is welcomed with silent fanfare.

The break is never really to be identified with “summer vacation,” which is what we enjoyed as students, particularly before we had to have our own incomes. The professional academic is generally active year-round, but the end of the spring term is when the university exhales - the students leave, and the faculty leave or at least aren’t always present. There is work to be done, yes: papers we meant to write, programs or concerts to organize, courses for the fall to plan…but there is a phase change in the daily schedule, a melting of regular deadlines into freeform.

On the downside, now we must come to terms with all of our scripted procrastination (”when the summer comes, then I’ll have time to work on that paper/presentation/course”). But if that’s a downside, I’ll happily accept downsides more frequently. Almost all of us work too hard all the time (I can think of exceptions easily, but even thinking of these people is not something I want to do during my summer), but I am happy to practice not working as hard, and this is the time of year I have given myself permission to practice.