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Various things I once believed, and (approximately) how old I was at the time:
age belief
  6If I were at a beach on the west coast, I could wade or swim out to Hawaii.
  8If I were a schoolteacher, I'd deal with instances of bad behavior by playing guitar and singing to the class. This would charm students into coöperating.
 11An IBM 360 is fast enough to play perfect chess (exhaustive tree search by minimax).
 13Adults who get health problems (e.g., indigestion) from job‑related stress have their priorities all wrong and I'll know better than to ever let that happen to me.
 17Unattractive people need not lament being unable to get the sex partners they'd like, because an unassuming, dispassionate, zen‑like life is available to everyone and is wholly satisfying.
 20New York City is so great that I'll never move away.
 23AIDS is probably about as dangerous as hepatitis B; most people can shrug it off.
150 or so migrating pelicans at around 5000' AGL this morning. click for closer view In 1997, when I first started getting the idea to live in the Owens Valley, a friend of a friend told me about Deep Springs, the all-male college-cum-cattle-ranch in the next valley over. I decided that my first trip to Lone Pine should include a visit to Deep Springs, and the Deep Springers agreed‑‑which is to say they accepted my offer to give a talk (I spoke about magazine publishing, which I was involved in at the time).

Deep Springs College, founded 1917, is an experiment in a type of higher education that emphasizes labor and self-governance in addition to academic studies. To the extent possible, the students‑‑all 25 of them‑‑run the place. They decide who to admit, what professors to hire, what courses will be taught, and so on. The good news is, the college has maintained high academic standards and the students are among the most qualified of those entering any college in the USA. But precocious as they may be, they are still just out of high school, and in their hands certain aspects of the college operate at what a professor described as a "subprofessional" level. As the college's president put it, "They learn by making mistakes."

I showed up, as arranged, on a Friday evening. Upon arrival, they said they wouldn't have time for my talk until Monday night; would I like to stay until then?

I was happy to stay but I'd just heard about a bug in my code and I wanted to fix it. (I was working for a startup semiconductor company; the co-worker who told me about the problem often worked nights and weekends.) I settled into the library, where the college's Internet connection was, connected to one of my employer's machines, and debugged my code.

My program was an IC router, with graphics to show the traces it was creating‑‑but as Deep Springs had Internet by a slow radio link from OVRO, graphics were not an option. When necessary, one debugs by command line.

Students were hanging around, talking amongst themselves. At one point their conversation turned to whether the founder of Deep Springs was gay. I recall someone saying, "There's this photo of him playing chess with a student. The student is looking intently at the board, and he's looking intently at the student." With such distractions, I didn't get my bug fixed until around one in the morning. If memory serves, my co-worker wrote back when I sent email to tell him it was fixed.

Upon hearing what I did for a living, one student told me that programming was, and it took him a moment to find the word he wanted, passé. I don't think he knew it, but he made my day because he had done just what a character named Golch did in one of my favorite short stories.

nighttime photo lit solely by the torches; click to embiggen I spent the weekend getting to know people at Deep Springs and helping out with repairing furniture and mending fencing around their cattle pasture. The students were extraordinary people‑‑some of them full of themselves, but most not. One of them could juggle flaming torches with a wastebasket over his head.

Despite what I said earlier about the operation being less than professional, Deep Springs is remarkable for having endured as long as it has and for the quality of everyone involved: administration, faculty, students, staff, and even the dog I met there (who they'd adopted after he had wandered in‑‑no mean feat, considering how far away the campus is from anything else).

The college's Deed of Trust requires that it only admit male students, and so it has been‑‑but not without a lot of discussion over the years as to whether this is a good thing. People have strong views both ways. If diversity is valuable, is there not also value in diversity among types of institutions? Why should every college be co-ed? (So argued one Deep Springs student.)

Time has caught up with the will of Deep Springs' founder. Last month, the college's trustees voted 10-2 to admit women. It's not a done deal; a court might enforce the Deed of Trust as written. We'll see.

I see the points for coeducation, I understand that nothing lasts forever, not even legally binding instruments, and although I have my own opinions on the matter I must concede that I have no experience running a college, all-male or otherwise. Yet I note that even trustees who voted for coeducation recognize that something will be lost in the process. And I am struck by the means by which people get around inconvenient legalities, in this case by interpreting the Deed of Trust "broadly" along with other things the founder wrote, viewed in the context of today's society, ... .

It reminds me of the documentary The Art of the Steal, which is all about how an educational institution was wrested away from the will of its (deceased) founder. The players and their ways and means make for a good story. And in case that endorsement isn't enough to make you see the movie, I'll just add that the central figure, Dr. Albert Barnes, had his dog sign rejection letters he sent to people he didn't like. I tell you, fiction has nothing on the characters the real world serves up.

Happy nineteenth, everyone. click to embiggen click to embiggen click to embiggen If a musician is very much in show business, i.e. if they concentrate on the show and the business aspects of their work, odds are I won't be all that excited about their music. The person and the musician and the music tend to all go hand-in-hand, and the musicians that have connected the most strongly with me have generally been direct, non-flashy types.

Not that there aren't exceptions. David Bowie was as intent as it gets on show and on business, yet there's the occasional piece of his that I like quite a bit. His combination of image and substance is part of why I wanted to read the bio of him (by Paul Trynka) that was published this year.

I am struck not just by Bowie's talent at songwriting and singing, but also by how he time and time again got his players to do some of their finest work. As pianist Mike Garson said, "He might give you little guidances but never says do this or do that. Just by his space I always tend to play my best stuff, to contribute every aspect of my playing."

Anyhow, the bio is good reading. The author is neither fawning nor overly critical. I can't compare it to any of the other Bowie bios because it's the only one I've read.

And because I like posting notation:

Five Years; music and lyrics by David Bowie