Category: Environment

It’s nice to know that someone cares

Big icicles on our house in winter
Yesterday the missive below came from our Chancellor (Sam Schuman). That’s a nice bit of pro-active thinking, getting on top of it before it’s a complete mess. Now one wonders what kinds of similar thinking is happening at the community, state, and federal levels? I can certainly imagine this being an enormous problem for people skating on the edge of homelessness or people (like many elderly) on fixed incomes.

As we all know, costs of fossil fuels of all types are going up dramatically. This is, of course, obvious at the gas pump. It is, at this point, less obvious when we think about heating our homes and offices. We are monitoring this situation carefully, in terms of UMM buildings, but we are also concerned for students (and other members of our community) living off campus.

Students living in rental housing who are responsible for their heating bills should anticipate costs that are about DOUBLE those of last year! We are worried that this may pose a very serious fiscal challenge to many of our students.

Shortly, the Financial Aid Office will be staffing a table at the student center with information about this issue, and materials for seeking supplemental funding to help with unanticipated heating costs. I’d personally encourage all students living off campus to mull this situation, and take appropriate steps deal with this new challenge. If there is any way I or any of us can help, let us know!

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Morris’ first Café Scientifique had a great turnout

Cafe Scientifique logo
As almost immediately reported in Pharyngula, the Café Scientifique concept had it’s Morris debut last night at Common Cup Coffee Shop. It was an excellent evening, and big congrats to all those that helped pull it together!

The turnout was indeed wonderfully strong. It was even a bit overwhelming for that space, but far better to have a small space packed than a big space that looks empty with the same number of people. The audience was, however, pretty university heavy, and most of that from the Division of Science and Math as well. There were exceptions, of course, but they tended to prove the rule rather than weaken it. I suspect this is at some level “the way it will be”, but it would be cool if this grew to include a broader audience.

Our speaker, Keith Brugger, did a nice job with a big subject (how we measure past global climate change), and did an excellent job of setting the stage for future Cafés. Being first is not easy, and I think he got us off to an fine start.

I’m not the best judge of how much sense “Jane and Joe Public” made of it all. Sub-Evil Boy followed much of it, and asked a question at the end that made Keith really happy, but he did find it a bit long and academic for his tastes. It will be interesting to see what WeatherGirl says about it all.

Having now seen one I have a much better sense of what the game is about and could probably make a much more focussed suggestion on a possible topic for a talk. Two things currently come to mind. First would be a talk on (modern) cryptography and how that relates to things like secure on-line communications (encryption and digital signatures) and (if I was feeling ambitious) digital voting. The second is a talk on the challenges and problems with correctness in large software systems, trying to give a sense of why engineering a major piece of software is both similar to but distinctly different from engineering a large “physical” project like a bridge or an airplane. This latter one might be nice to do with someone from physics like Len Keeler where we could do some demonstrations of things like the principle of continuous change in physical systems and constrast that to the tendency of digital systems to be wildly discontinuous. It looks like their schedule for the year is largely worked out, though, so I think I have plenty of time to think about it and get feedback on ideas.

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