I mean, I know why they did it. They didn't want to let people who lacked skills, that they lacked skills.

It wasn't very nice of them. The "they" being people who wanted to feel good about themselves.

What spurred these comments from me?

29 May 2026, Inside Higher Ed: Hundreds of Math Professors Ask UC to Bring Back SAT/ACT Requirements

More than 800 professors in the University of California system, including seven of nine math department chairs, are calling on system leaders to reinstate SAT/ACT testing requirements for applicants to STEM majors, citing a “widening divergence in mathematical preparation levels within the same classroom.”

In an open letter, the faculty members pointed to a November report from the University of California San Diego Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions, which revealed that the number of first-year students with math skills below a middle school level increased nearly 30-fold since 2020, when the system first suspended its standardized testing requirements.

Obviously, I miss the conversations I had with Stu. Most of my adult conversations have to be with people I have online... and I'm actually ok with this, because I've been having online convos since the late 1980s (though, to be fair, real-time convos didn't become more real til I did IRC in mid-1990s).

But the issue is that the main person who is around me at home all the time is D. And he doesn't have a kind of conversation... but he is trying, and he is trying more.

I try to give him "hooks" he can react to. I don't try to make them "See Jane Run" type of conversations, if I can avoid it. But I don't know what D can understand. 

Example: [less charged, trying to see if he will engage] I'm watching a TV show, and I'm making remarks about what's going on in the TV show. I usually watch murder mystery shows, like MARPLE, POIROT, COLUMBO, CADFAEL, and similar shows. So I will exclaim on murders, etc., but it's too complicated for him to follow, so I don't push it.

Different example: I read social media posts of people I personally know, and remark on personal issues.

Me: OH NO!

D: What happened?

Me: My friend's mom hurt herself! Let's pray for her!

D: No! I don't want to pray! [he's in the middle of playing a game on his tablet]

Me: Hey D, when you finish your game, we can do the prayer. Let me tell you what happened. [I have no idea how much he will understand. I tell a story of what happened to my friend's mother.]

D: okay [playing his game]

I'm not going to show a video of Diarmuid; I'm just going to describe his behavior on a typical school morning.

D is 19 years old, and will be 20 in a couple months. He gets to stay in the school system til he's about 21 or 22 (I forget).

Lately, he's been coming downstairs at 6am. I don't really need hi up til 7am, but okay. I get him juice, and make sure there are "snacks" available for him: applesauce, Ritz crackers, Lorna Doone cookies. These are the only acceptable offerings, you see. He usually doesn't eat anything, but he's so skinny, I want to make sure there's something there to eat, just in case.

He usually uses the toilet, and lately, I've left him alone for awhile. I might have NHK World on the TV, or some YouTube videos on. He might play on a tablet for a while. 

Then I get his clothes and tell him what the weather will be like today. Lately, he has basketball practice after school. And now... this is when the repetitive statements begin:

D: I WANT TO GO BACK TO BED (he's still in his pajamas)

D: I WANT TO GO BACK TO BED IN TWO MINUTES (picks up the clothes, goes in the bathroom)

D: I WANT TO GO BACK TO BED AT 7AM (getting dressed) 

me: I know you want to play basketball. Can you play basketball from bed?

D: No. I WANT TO GO TO BED

me: I hear you, buddy

[D goes to his keyboard in the front parlor, plays some music]

D: I NEED TO CHECK THE SCHEDULE SO I KNOW WHEN THE SCHOOL DAY ENDS

me: You know this. What time does school end?

1. Stu is dead


2. D is cognitively disabled


3. I have chronic pain (since 2010)

There's nothing complicated about #1. Stu died 30 Sept 2024. 

D's situation can be semi-complicated. He's kinda-progressing. Kinda. But I have a difficult time getting through and understanding what he really thinks. It's best thinking he lives in a different dimension, and every so often a signal comes through.

The third is the most complicated. My chronic pain started in 2010... and its dimensions, and how bad it is changes over time. 

Every so often I think I have it under control... and then, no I don't. 

I have migraines, peripheral neuropathy (arms and legs.. completely numb), facial pain, and I just picked up tennis elbow but I call it mouse elbow. Sometimes, I get sciatica. 

I don't want to go through my latest round of medical futility, but I would rather not do this crap. But let me give you what recently happened.

I've got tinnitus. I know this is not due to anything mechanical. This is almost definitely due to my neurological problems. I didn't notice it until recently, because I have so many problems as it is. But I was sitting in a church, in complete silence, and I heard the EEEEEEEEEEEE. and yeah. 

So my neurologist told me to get screened, so I did. My hearing is just fine.

The tinnitus is a result of... all my other problems, which I already knew about.

So that's not helpful.

November are the ember days in the Church. While I pray for the souls in Purgatory every day, All Souls Day is November 2, and we dedicate this month for the dead. The readings before Advent starts are geared toward the end of days... and reminder that one's own end may be much sooner than that.

Not everybody who has been super-important in my life is dead or died young (hi ma!), but many have. My dad, Aunt Pat, Stu — all died "before their time". But we don't get to choose our time. It was their time, though we didn't like it. 

My grandparents were also important, and while they lived to be older than Stu, Grandma Cook and Grandpa Campbell had health issues that made them die before their 80s, the usual age of death nowadays.

I have carried my memories for decades for many of these people. No, I will not be commenting on the deeply evil and unwise concepts of trying to extend the existence of the dead through AI. No, do not do it. It's not the people. Let the memories be, and it's also okay to let memories fade as time goes on... in terms of it will not be as sharp, it will not be as immediate. That's fine.

Don't try to reanimate as Frankenstein's monster. It's not that the monster itself is going to pummel you so much that one looks into an abyss. It's nothingness, and it's a kind of despair and withdrawal from life. 

It reminds me of the spiritualism craze post-WWI, when so many young men of Britain were killed... and so many tried to grasp at the ghosts. It's not a good idea.

Nine years ago, I wrote the following:

Let me just extract the list:

Here's my list of one-sided vendetta targets:
- Marilyn vos Savant (for the dumbass Fermat book)
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb (for writing stuff that is true, and very unhelpful/unuseful)
- Malcolm Gladwell (for being the most credulous person ever, even if he can tell a good story)
- Carl Bialek (for just writing dumb stuff related to quantitative subjects)
- Matt Yglesias (for just being rock dumb, and the mystery is he's allowed to keep doing whatever he's doing)

Here is the update on the list:

— Marilyn vos Savant: It looks like her husband died this year, and she really doesn't seem to be doing much herself at the age of 79, so I have no further beef with her.

— NNT: he is continuing on, and he finally wrote some stuff I found somewhat useful in Antifragile. I mainly ignore him, though.

— Malcolm Gladwell: I think he changed his schtick. I haven't had to read one of his bits on an area I know in a while (thank goodness), so the only way he annoys me now is when his voice shows up on ads on the podcasts I listen to.

— Carl Bialik: (whups I mispelled his name, evidently) He moved onto 538, then went to Yelp... and I don't know where he is now. YouGov? He really annoyed me only in the Numbers Guy position at WSJ, and after he left that, I didn't really care.

A long time ago, when Stu & I were planning our wedding, I said I wanted to get married in October, and he said he hated October.

He never got specific as to why he hated the month, but evidently bad things happened to him during the month. Well, I decided that would change. It changed in 2000, and we got married on Oct 14, 2000.

But then in 2001, something else happened.

I wiped out the original post I was going to put here.

But for crying out loud.

I have been on LiveJournal since 2000. 

And yes, a lot has changed since April 2000, when I started on lj. 

I got married. I dropped out of grad school and left my original plan of an academic life. I had three kids.

I got a chronic pain condition in 2010.

One child has special needs.

My husband died in 2024.

But then, I look back, and while I think so much has changed....

essentially....

I have not.

In facebook memories, two things popped up — from 14 years ago, the truckening:

(note: I have not turned into Stu. This is a story of a diet change to fix a health problem.)

(so this is a warning of middle-aged health stuff)

Alas, this Thanksgiving, like many other people, I overindulged.

No biggie, right? Everybody does that!

Except, I have the 3Fs: female, fat, and over forty.

That's right, I had what I suspect was a gallbladder attack! And it wasn't from Thanksgiving dinner but from day-after-Thanksgiving breakfast.

You know, when you see what's leftover, and you really indulge. Especially the deep-fried mushrooms.

Then go shopping at Kohl's with your ma.

I step out of the van and immediately I feel a bad pain in my upper right abdomen.

Dr Horrible Not A Good Sound GIF - Dr Horrible Not A Good Sound Sound - Discover & Share GIFs

tenor.com

(there was no sound. I just like Dr. Horrible)

I poke at it. OW.

It wasn't great.  So Dr. Google helped me figure out some anatomy, and I remembered the 3Fs (oh wait — evidently it's 5 Fs — fair & fertile are the other two, and yeah, my hair/skin is lighter and I have three kids.) So I'm like, dammit. 

Luckily, Stu taught me a lot about nutrition... and left me a LOT of grains and all sorts of odd foods that he ate to help his health through the years, not only cancer.

Anyway, diet for gallbladder problems is simple. And I was at Kohl's to buy a rice cooker. Stu left me a huge bag of Japanese rice. and this stuff:

That stuff is pretty good, especially when cooked with the Nishiki white rice (which is what Stu left behind... all 20 or 30 pounds of it). 

You're not just supposed to eat plain rice, ya know.

In going through my facebook memories I came across this LiveJournal post from 2016:

email search — from:me dumbass

At the time, here were the results:

• stupid: 105


• idiot: 94


• dumbass:46


• bastard: 15


• jackass: 12


• asinine: 1


• knave: 1

I don't really have the time to update all these numbers, so let me find out the important "dumbass" metric update:

61

Amusingly, almost all of the 15 new emails since 2016 involve public pensions.

Such as:

Yes, let him know the POB [pension obligation bond] idea is a total dumbass idea

This refers to a ginormous $100 billion pension obligation bond to cover Illinois's unfunded pension liability (as opposed to the ~$100 billion they already have covered). 

There are other ones, but I'm naming specific people as dumbasses, so will not copy here.  But yes, it almost always involves public pensions.

So.... this is just me typing. 

Not advice, and not even a complaint. A reminder, at best (memento mori!)

(Amusingly, it takes three times for the computer to understand that YES I MEANT "mori" and not "more"... three times means I MEAN IT)

For the past several weeks/months/whatever, Stu has not been doing well. 

I am not going to get into all the details, because even the details are not going to help anybody, even if you run into this sort of thing, because it's REALLY specific. I mean, if you've had metastatic prostate cancer for 7 years, under a variety of treatments, and then had a mass grow in your bladder, which then breeds blood clots....

....this is all to say DONATE BLOOD IF YOU CAN....

but that's a digression. 

So Stu was in the hospital for 6 days a while back, and the particular emergency from the blood clots got taken care of. But that was just part of the issue. It was just to stabilize his situation.

He then was found to have pneumonia (we thought). And a UTI (again, we thought). 

Then he was having trouble breathing.  

In the meantime, there were multiple transfusions and a trip to Manhattan for stuff, and blah blah blah.

(again: DONATE BLOOD IF YOU CAN)

and I FUCKING HATE DRIVING TO/FROM/INTO/OUT OF Manhattan — IT FUCKING SUCKS. 

Because I had to take Stu to Manhattan to get fluid sucked out from around his right lung, and he still has fluid around his left lung (pleural effusion). 

And a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung)

(until I do)

(because I have to)

I will let other people's stuff go, because it's not mine and yadda yadda.

But there is a reason I like to keep some stuff of mine forever. No, I'm not a hoarder. 

Today, I got to bust out my tirade against calculators in math classes, which I wrote 24 years ago:

25 Aug 00 

Here is my tirade on calculators. Something a little more constructive shall follow soon. 

In 1988, when I took trigonometry in high school, graphing calculators were an expensive new tool and calculators hadn't really been integrated into the mathematics curriculum. We mainly used calculators to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and sometimes even take a square root. However, even these most rudimentary calculators were forbidden my first quarter in trig.

And you can read the rest there. 

Yes, I reached back to my high school years in 1988, me being a "computer consultant" at NCSU 1992-1996, and teaching my first college class in 1995 (yes, I got to teach college calculus as an undergrad, and I'm not explaining that right now. I did have training.)

I wrote this 24 years ago:

Haven't quite gotten to my lj-versary yet (that's April 26 — I started on 26 April 2000.... I was an early adopter). 

Yes, I have a substack. I'm on facebook. I'm on twitter/X. On LinkedIn.

Why am I here?

Because I've got a lot of mass.... and inertia has a power of its own.

No, mainly because I use those other places for other things. I keep using lj for a variety of personal posts. I use facebook to chat with friends and see what's going on locally. I do LinkedIn for the business-type networking thing. Twitter/X is the party line of the world, and while I'm mainly engaging with the English-language communicating world, as one of my big areas is sumo, I follow many Japanese language sumo twitterers. 

Anyway howdy, y'all! And I'm about to be 50, so I've been on here about half my life! Woo!

Socrates would say — I told ya so

Or would it be Plato?

Plato was the one who wrote stuff down, not Socrates, and I wonder if he wrote stuff down for the same reason I do (I doubt it ... for us, writing is a different process, etc etc)

But I write for myself, for my memory, because the moment I write something, and I put it out there, I can safely forget it.

And I build my brain outside my skull, and I know where I can trace the trail later if I want or need to

Many times it's just ephemera, and I ultimately won't need it

I wrote down: "We learn by forgetting"... we have to forget all the trash that ultimately was wrong or meaningless... or just filled up our skull with noise.

So I write it down so I can forget.

I probably have a post with this title already, and cannot begin to care.

I hate the spring.

Once upon a time, I hated it, because it was when I couldn't breathe.

But I left the south, the area of the hideous pine trees, and its promiscuous pollen spewing everywhere and I just itch thinking about it.  So that's not my issue — not for April, at any rate.

I picked up a nerve damage/pain issue back in 2010, some of which seems to be triggered by air pressure changes...many of which happen up here in the spring. And I hate them.

I have had problems today specifically (and the earthquake and the aftershock didn't help, but even on normal days, when I'm driving and hit a pothole, my neck can get out of whack and there goes my day.)

My hands and face and arms and legs feel like I'm wearing an armor of pain, and this isn't helpful. Argh.

As I've detailed in many posts here on livejournal, I've had a chronic pain problem since August 2010, and frankly, it's only gotten worse over time.  What once was centered in my neck with facial pain (and migraines) has become neuropathy (plus some extra pains) in my arms and legs. 

It comes and goes in waves, in amounts, and it's the situation of I don't even bother to write down to-do lists. I have a priority list and I consider what I might be able to do. It's not a matter of energy (I have plenty of energy from 3am till about 7pm) — it's a matter of being able to put up w. the pain.

Yes, I have meds, but this is nerve pain. So the usual stuff like tylenol/aspirin/advil doesn't do anything for that. The type of meds that can wipe away nerve pain effectively will also turn off my brain, and I already said no to that years ago. 

So I can usually do a thing for defined time — if short. Like, wash dishes (the hot water makes my hands/arms feel better). Many of the substack posts I do ... are written over multiple days. For work, I have tasks that I will not do more than an hour, and then there's a break. Because I know I will be able to persist.  

But also a lot of the tools I have are helping — like the AI transcription tools. So I don't have to type as much.

Siobhan just came home from college, and noticed a bunch of candles on the kitchen counter:

Indeed, one of those four candles was made by me from a kit, in my grad school days, and is of extremely low quality. I don't need any of these candles for anything, and indeed, only one of these four candles I really like — that's the one in the corrugated metal that has a "Fall Harvest" scent, which I bought within the last year... but the other three came from a stash of candles Stu just found under the bar....

....and I'm having to burn these all up before I can buy more of my favored candles, which is why a bunch of candles are getting burned by me when I do my early morning chores, like cleaning duck eggs, which you can see in the basket. 

So far, I've managed to burn up one beeswax candle. This is going to be rough going.

I like my "stinky candles" — I do like scented candles quite a bit, but also the rest of the family don't like them, so they stay out of the kitchen while I'm washing dishes, folding clothes, ripping up cardboard, and doing other stuff I like to do and don't want other people bothering me (I'm also listening to my podcasts.)

Generally, this is not an issue at 5am (especially not after the DST switch — Siobhan didn't say the above to me this morning at 7am — she told it to me yesterday afternoon, when she got home for spring break.)

But sometimes I'm pottering in the kitchen in the afternoon and I don't want to be bugged, so I light my stinky candles nobody else like.

Addendum: about that stash Stu found: I think Stu boxed up my candles when the kids were little and we were living in our apartment in Queens (2000-2007). We did use candles from time to time in power outages, but we were concerned about the kids and mainly stuck to flashlights.... so he boxed up the candles, stuck them under the bar... and we forgot them for like 15 years or so. Or longer.  

Anyway, I have a bunch of candles I need to go through, is what I'm saying.

No, not really about whether Claudine Gay "really" plagiarized or whether she should be booted from this/that/the other, but my experience w/ plagiarism over the years, as someone who has been plagiarized from and as a teacher.

Let's get the teacher bit sorted with first — I taught a writing class at UConn, to actuarial science majors. It was supposedly a technical writing class, but I turned it into something different: a business writing class. Frankly, in business writing, originality & uniqueness are not valued. That's why the corporate folks love ChatGPT. That anodyne shit is beloved in compliance departments.

However, if you taught a writing course, you were given access to plagiarism detection software, and all the students had to submit their work through the system. I told them I understood how the system worked, but that I was going to be reading their papers, and that they would be submitting drafts repeatedly, and of course I was expecting repeats, yadda yadda. Also, I kept copies of everything.  

I only had trouble with one student who was a non-native speaker of English, and who took my class twice... and didn't understand the purpose of the final project. I don't think he understood what I was saying, and never asked for help. My dude, you actually have to communicate to people, if you're going to work with people in the U.S.