Advice for first time high school students entering the Ivy League in the fall

The Ivy league can be and was very intimidating for students from small high schools, particularly if they are the first from their school or family to ever go there.  Here are a few stories about similar Freshmen entering Princeton in 1956.  We all wondered if we were smart enough.

First yours truly.  The first intimidation was the guy next door who built a tesseract, a 3 dimensional model of a 4 dimensional cube.  The second was his story about another guy in the class so smart that he looked at the Freshmen Herald with 700+ pictures and names, and knew everyone in the class by name by the next day.  He wound up in the top 7 members of the class (Junior Phi Beta Kappa).   Fortunately at an assembly during orientation, a dean told us not to worry, that they knew we would be able to do the work, and that only emotional trouble or misbehavior would get us out.  This happened to a member of the class, schizophrenia often presents in late adolescence (one name for it used to be dementia praecox), and another member was expelled for stealing stuff from other rooms.  Then there were the preppies (about 50% of the class back then) who basically had the first month of classes and appeared to know it all.   After a month or two I knew I would make it, but the first few months were scary.

Then there was the guy who was recruited because of his character.  He went to a small high school in New Jersey and played on their basketball team, which was getting creamed by an affluent suburban school.  At nearly the end of the game, they slacked off and he ran through the whole team and scored a basket.  An alum came up to him and asked him why he did it.  He said he wanted to show the other team that they beat his team, but they didn’t beat him.  The alum promptly recruited him to Princeton.  His father was a factory worker, and took him down, and my friend was impressed, saying to his father that he didn’t think he belonged there.  The father said something to the effect of give it a shot and don’t tell them.  Subsequently he got a PhD in ceramics and worked at Los Alamos.

Then there was a guy from a little town in Maine, whose school was so proud when he got in, that they announced it over the intercom (as did my high school).  Similarly intimidated at the time, he became an endocrinologist and was involved in drug development writing 45 papers in the process.

Another guy was recruited by an alum from a larger school in western New York, and went through on a ROTC scholarship, becoming a naval officer, joining the state department and becoming an ambassador to a central American country.

None of us knew any of this at the time.  It came out 50 years later as we gathered after Princeton football games.  Although we were intimidated we didn’t let on and did fine — and you will too.

Addendum 5 June:  From a classmate

Learned some good lessons about life and about myself at P.U. First, I wasn’t the science wunderkind I thought I was, but that I was a much better writer than I thought.

 

One life lesson highlights my artistic judgment shortcomings. I took a painting class with the painter in residence (Stephan Greene), held in the loft of the architecture building. On my left was a guy named Frank ‘59, and on my right xxxx ‘60, whom I was convinced would be one of the world’s great artists. He wore 3-piece suits from a thrift store, a cravat, and used a pouch rather than a wallet. He also had a very large and very illegal ’38 Buick sedan convertible. What’s not to like. So, with my meager funds I bought 2 of his paintings, one for $5 and another for $10. I still have one. Frank was painting goofy stuff of which I made fun. Stephan Greene asked me to hang the Spring student/faculty art show in the Student Center, which I did. I resisted hanging Frank’s so-called paintings.

 

As I understand it, Pete dropped out of Princeton in his senior year (? due to a paternity issue), and ended up somewhere being a librarian. Frank, whose art I made fun of……..was FRANK STELLA!!! So much for my art judgment.  

 

A Touching Mother’s day story with an untouching addeneum

Yes, a touching mother’s day story for you all. It was 56 years ago (yes over half a century ago ! ! ), and I was an intern at a big city hospital on rotation in their emergency room in a rough neighborhood. The ER entrance was half a block from an intersection with a bar on each corner. On a Saturday night, we knew better than to try to get some sleep before 2AM or until we’d put in 2 chest tubes (to drain blood from the lungs, which had been shot or stabbed). The bartenders were an intelligent lot — they had to be quick thinking to defuse situations, and we came to know them by name. So it was 3AM 51 years ago and Tyrone was trudging past on his way home, and I was just outside the ER getting some cool night air, things having quieted down.

“Happy Mother’s day, Tyrone” sayeth I

“Thanks Doc, but every day is Mother’s day with me”

“Why, Tyrone?”

“Because every day I get called a mother— “

Untouching Addendum

Well, it’s 56 years later and the terrible violence in the Black community continues unabated.  Nothing has changed from 1967.  Half the murdered people in this country are black with only 1 out of 7 being black.   My white neighbors drench themselves in holiness, displaying their virtue for all to see with signs on their lawns saying Black Lives Matter.  This neatly avoids facing the real problem — Black Lives Matter except to other Blacks. 

Addendum 14 May ’23 As if on command, today’s New York Times magazine has a story about a black woman killed by a white racist in Buffalo.  If every black killed by a nonBlack or a police officer even if black) were still alive, murdered blacks as a percentage of those murdered each year would still be close to 50%.   This sort of thing is so unhelpful, and probably harmful in taking the focus away from the all to real problem of excessive black deaths.

In fairness to my white neighbors, putting signs on their lawns is about all they can do.  Any change in the carnage must come from within the Black community itself, not from well-meaning whites.

Fortunately, there is a hopeful precedent — Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD).   When they were founded in 1980, the USA population was 220 million and there were 28,000 drunk driving fatalities. In 2021 our population had grown by 50% to 330 million, with 13,000 drunk driving fatalities.  Had nothing changed we would have experienced 42,000 fatalities in 2021 instead of 13,000.  MADD simply made drinking and driving socially unacceptable.

A neuron synapsing on an immune cell.

The immunologic synapse is well known.  It occurs between two types of immune cells (not between neurons), an antigen presenting cell and a T lymphocyte.  An effective immunologic synapse produces T cell activation and proliferation to kick off the immune response.

Neuroinflammation is equally well known.  Stimulate a neuron responding to painful stimuli and it releases inflammatory mediators locally and fires impulses back to the brain.  The best known example of a receptor for pain (nociceptor) is the TRPV1 channel, which responds to capsaicin, an active component of red hot chili peppers.  TRPV1 also responds to other obviously painful stimuli — heat, acid etc.  Neurons containing TRPV1 are called nociceptor neurons.

Activation of TRPV1 on nociceptor neurons results in the release of inflammatory mediators such as substance P, and other things (CCL2, CGRP).

Many immune cells have receptors for inflammatory mediators and direct contact with nociceptor neurons isn’t necessary.  I’ve always wondered if something like a synapse between a nerve cell and immune cell existed.

Finally a paper just cultured nociceptor neurons and a type of immune cell (the dendritic cell) together [Science vol. 379 pp. 1301 – 1302, 1315 eabm5658 pp. 1 –> 1 ’23 ].  Figure 3c on p. 4 of the paper, shows a dendritic cell plastered up along an axon, which is about as close to synapse as you are going to get.  However, the area of contact is much longer than the usual synapse.  Whether such things occur in vivo is unknown, but I’ve never seen a picture like this one.

Capsaicin was used to stimuli the neurons, and they were found to communicate wth  dendritic cells three ways

l. By producing the chemokine CCL2 which attract dendritic cells

2, By releasing Calcitonin Gene Related Peptide (CGRP) which causes dendritic cells to release another inflammatory mediator — interleukin 1 beta (IL1beta)

3. By direct electrical coupling triggering calcium flux into the dendritic cell along with membrane depolarization.  This potentiates the dendritic cell response to inflammatory stimuli.

The experimental system is far out, but anything we can learn about pain is worth having, as present therapy is far from ideal.

Impeach Earl Warren (and Clarence Thomas too) say the Democrats

It was impossible to drive anywhere in the South in the 50s and 60s without seeing “Impeach Earl Warren” billboards.  For those who weren’t even alive (or old enough to be politically conscious) back then:  Earl Warren was the Chief Justice of the Supreme court, and former Republican Governor of California under whom the landmark Brown vs. Board of Education  decision abolished segregation by race in 1954.  He was appointed by Republican president Eisenhower (Links to unfamiliar names, etc. will be provided at the end of the post)

The charge against Warren was led by a variety of Democratic Party elected officials (Governor George Wallace of Alabama, Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas, senators Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and John Stennis of Mississippi).

Here’s what it was like back then.  The wounds were still fresh when a fellow neurology resident and I drove from Philly to San Antonio in the summer of 1968 to enter the Air Force for our 2 year tour of duty under the Berry Plan during the Vietnam War.

Our first stop was in Winchester, Virginia where the owner of the motel noted the Pennsylvania plates on our car, and asked us “What do they think of Governor Wallace, up they’ah”, which creeped us out, the Cheney, Goodman Schwerner murders occurring 4 years earlier a few miles further along our planned route.  We mumbled something that to the effect that we were doctors and  Air Force officers and couldn’t discuss politics.

We actually ate lunch in Meridian Mississippi, Cheney’s home and the people were quite friendly.    We also ate in Cameron, Louisiana on the Texas border and found wop salad on the menu.

Well times have changed. Senator Thurmond of South Carolina has been replaced by Tim Scott, a Black Republican running for president.

But they haven’t.  Here is MSNBC 5 May, a site with impeccable liberal and Democratic pedigrees  ” Enough is enough. Clarence Thomas  must resign or be Impeached” written by a white man, James Downie, of similarly impeccable credentials — https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/clarence-thomas-ginni-supreme-court-ethics-rcna83062.

At least the collection of Southerners above, hideous and disgusting as they were, had the intellectual integrity to say they thought Warren should be impeached because they disagreed with what he did and stood for, and not hide behind some phony moral stance.  Another lynching of a Black man by an overprivileged White.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_Plan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murders_of_Chaney,_Goodman,_and_Schwerner

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Wallace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orval_Faubus

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Stennis

https://www.scott.senate.gov

85 tomorrow

Time to wax philosophical and even somewhat theological as I’ll  turn 85 tomorrow.  Only a  neurologist with decades of hands on clinical experience can know how fortunate an 85 year old with good health and a (semi)intact brain really is.   Add to that 60+ years in the company of a very intelligent and very beautiful woman, and I’m even more fortunate.

A lot of this has absolutely nothing to do with anything I did.  My father lived to 100 in good health, and when asked what his secret was, always said “I chose my parents very carefully.”

You’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt, but a fair amount of my time was spent with people who spindled and mutilated their cards (alcohol, smoking, harder drugs, obesity etc.).

But many of my patients (and friends and relatives) didn’t do any of those things, yet suffered terribly and died far too soon.   So I was face to face with theodicy, even as far back as in college reading Camus’ “The Plague” with the scene of a child suffering and dying as the protagonist and a priest looked on.

Certainly, clinical experience in those early years did nothing to resolve the problems of disease and suffering. Gradually, as we learned more and more molecular biology and physiology the question of illness and suffering disappeared, and was replaced by the much larger question of why we’re as healthy as we are for so long.  See the copy of an older post at the end.

A two year detour into graduate work in Chemistry right after college in the early 60s gave me the background to understand and follow molecular biology as we both grew up.

So how do you spend your time when you’re 85?  For me it’s continuing to read the scientific literature (Science, Nature, Cell, Neuron, PNAS) on molecular biology, neurology and a variety of other things as the over 1,000 posts on this blog will show.  Fortunately I have the background and the brain left to understand it.

That’s not all of course, there’s playing chamber music with friends and family.  Unfortunately our family breeds like sequoias, and although my wife and I have 4 grandchildren, their ages range from 5 to 9, and it’s unlikely that I’ll see them all at 16 when they think they’re the smartest people in the world as I did at that age when I told my grandmother (who crossed the Atlantic alone at age 13) that she was the dumbest woman in the world.

One son told me that there are only 5 (or 6 or 7) basic plots of the novel.  How  incredibly dull !  Reading the five journals always shows something new and totally unexpected.  It’s like opening presents not knowing what you’ll find.

The technological progress is immense.  We’ve gone from the decade it took to map out the first human genome, to the fact that we’ve now done it a million times and in single cells to boot.

So I’ll keep on doing what I’m doing and taking Satchel Paige’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satchel_Paige) advice “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.”

The Solace of Molecular Biology

Neurology is fascinating because it deals with illnesses affecting what makes us human. Unfortunately for nearly all of my medical career in neurology ’62 – ’00 neurologic therapy was lousy and death was no stranger. In a coverage group with 4 other neurologists taking weekend call (we covered our own practices during the week) about 1/4 of the patients seen on call weekend #1 had died by on call weekend #2 five weeks later.

Most of the deaths were in the elderly with strokes, tumors, cancer etc, but not all. I also ran a muscular dystrophy clinic and one of the hardest cases I saw was an infant with Werdnig Hoffman disease — similar to what Steven Hawking has, but much, much faster — she died at 1 year. Initially, I found the suffering of such patients and their families impossible to accept or understand, particularly when they affected the young, or even young adults in the graduate student age.

As noted earlier, I started med school in ’62, a time when the genetic code was first being cracked, and with the background then that many of you have presently understanding molecular biology as it was being unravelled wasn’t difficult. Usually when you know something you tend to regard it as simple or unimpressive. Not so the cell and life. The more you know, the more impressive it becomes.

Think of the 3.2 gigaBases of DNA in each cell. At 3 or so Angstroms aromatic ring thickness — this comes out to a meter or so stretched out — but it isn’t, rather compressed so it fits into a nucleus 5 – 10 millionths of a meter in diameter. Then since DNA is a helix with one complete turn every 10 bases, the genome in each cell contains 320,000,000 twists which must be unwound to copy it into RNA. The machinery which copies it into messenger RNA (RNA polymerase II) is huge — but the fun doesn’t stop there — in the eukaryotic cell to turn on a gene at the right time something called the mediator complex must bind to another site in the DNA and the RNA polymerase — the whole mess contains over 100 proteins and has a molecular mass of over 2 megaDaltons (with our friend carbon containing only 12 Daltons). This monster must somehow find and unwind just the right stretch of DNA in the extremely cramped confines of the nucleus. That’s just transcription of DNA into RNA. Translation of the messenger RNA (mRNA) into protein involves another monster — the ribosome. Most of our mRNA must be processed lopping out irrelevant pieces before it gets out to the cytoplasm — this calls for the spliceosome — a complex of over 100 proteins plus some RNAs — a completely different molecular machine with a mass in the megaDaltons. There’s tons more that we know now, equally complex.

So what.

Gradually I came to realize that what needs explaining is not the poor child dying of Werdnig Hoffman disease but that we exist at all and for fairly prolonged periods of time and in relatively good shape (like my father who was actively engaged in the law and a mortgage operation until 6 months before his death at age100). Such is the solace of molecular biology. It ain’t much, but it’s all I’ve got (the religious have a lot more).

Eloquence

“It was Lexi’s 16th birthday party. A Sweet 16. There’s an uncut cake and unburnt 16 candles that never got lit. Lexi’s brother is one of the victims,” District Attorney Mike Segrest said at a press conference on Wednesday. “On her 16th birthday party, she kneeled by her brother as he took his last breath. That’s what we’re dealing with.”

 

“The message that I want to send is I know some of these victims personally. Some of these kids are kids of friends of mine, people that I went to school with, people that I played ball with and against in the community back in high school. And these are my kids,” Segrest added.

Quantum Field Theory as Simply as Possible

5.0 out of 5 stars Tired of popularizations? Buy this book.

The following is my review published in Amazon — the other 25 reviews are interesting and somewhat divergent– here’s a link to them all — https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Field-Theory-Simply-Possible/dp/0691174296#customerReviews.

 

 

I’ve put in two further thoughts I left out to keep the Amazon review to a reasonable length (Addendums 1 and 2).

 

Disclaimer: I have probably spent more time with Quantum Field Theory As Simply As Possible (QFTASAP) than most as I was a lay reader providing commentary to Dr. Zee as he was writing it. I came to know Dr. Zee after he responded to some questions I had while going through another of his books, Group Theory in a Nutshell for Physicists. We’ve corresponded for years about math, physics, medicine, biology and life both turning out to be grumpy old Princeton Alums (1960 and 1966). If this makes me a friend of his despite never having met and living on opposite coasts — and if this precludes this review appearing on Amazon, so be it.

Should you buy the book? It depends on two things: (1) your ability and (2) your background. Dr. Zee spends a lot of time in the preface describing the rather diverse collection of people he is writing for. “I am particularly solicitous of the young, the future physicists of the world. .. delighted beyond words if some college students, or even a few high school students are inspired by this book .. “

Addendum 1  In retirement, I met one such high school student whil auditing an abstract algebra course at a local college.  He was simultaneously doing his German homework while listening to the lecture with one ear.  He did not go on in physics but did get a double summa in math and physics at an Ivy League university (not Princeton despite my attempts to get him to go there).

 

I fall into another class of reader for QFTASAP which the author mentions, “scientists, engineers, medical doctors, lawyers and other professionals . … Quite a few are brave enough to tackle my textbooks. I applaud these older readers, and address them as I write.”

So you need to know the background I bring to the book to put what I say in perspective. I am a retired neurologist. I did two years of graduate work in chemistry ’60 – ’62 before going to medical school. All grad students in chemistry back then took quantum mechanics, solving the Schrodinger equation to see where atomic (and molecular orbitals) come from.

At my 50th reunion, I met a classmate I didn’t know as an undergraduate, Jim Hartle, a world class relativist still writing papers with Hawking, so I decided to try and learn relativity so I’d have something intelligent to say to him if we met at another reunion. I studied his book on Gravitation (and Dr. Zee’s). Unfortunately COVID19 has stopped my attendance at reunions. To even begin to understand gravitation (which is what general relativity is about), you must first study special relativity. So my background was perfect for QFTASAP, as quantum field theory (QFT) tries to merge special (not general) relativity and quantum mechanics.

Do not despair if you have neither background as Dr. Zee starts the book explaining both in the first 99 pages or so. His style is very informal, with jokes, historical asides, and blinding clarity. As a retired MD I can’t speak to how accurate any of it is, but the publisher notes that his textbooks have been used at MIT and Cal Tech, which is good enough for me.

So quantum mechanics and special relativity gets you to base camp for the intellectual ascent to QFT — which takes the rest of the book (to page 342). If this sounds daunting, remember thAt physics majors and physics grad student’s QFT courses last a year (according to Dr. Zee). So read a little bit at a time.

The big leap (for me) was essentially abandoning the idea of force and thinking about action (which was totally unfamiliar). Much of the math, as a result is rather unfamiliar, and even if you took calculus, the integrals you will meet look like nothing you’ve ever seen.
e.g. d^4x e psibar (x) gamma^mu psi(x) A_mu(x) all under the integral sign
Fortunately, on p. 154 Dr. Zee says “I have to pause to teach you how to read this hieroglyphic.” This is very typical of his informal and friendly teaching style.

QFTASAP contains all sorts of gems which deepened my understanding of stuff I’d studied before. For example, Dr. Zee shows how special relativity demolishes the notion of simultaneity, then he goes even farther and explains how this implies the existence of antiparticles. Once you get integrals like the above under your belt, he gives a coherent explanation of where and how the idea of the expanding universe comes from and how it looks mathematically.

There is much, much more: gauge theory, Yang Mills, the standard model of particle physics etc. etc.

To a Princetonian, some of the asides are fascinating. One in particular tells you why you or your kid should want to go there (spoiler alert — not to meet the scion of a wealthy family, or an heiress, not to form connections which will help you in your career). He mentions that there was an evening seminar for physics majors given by a young faculty member (33) about recent discoveries in physics. In 1964 the same young prof (James Cronin) said that he had discovered something exiting — in 1980 he got the Nobel for it. For my part, it was John Wheeler (he of the black hole, wormholes etc) teaching premeds and engineers (not future physicists) freshman physics and bringing in Neils Bohr to talk to us. So go to Princeton for the incredible education you will get, and the way Princeton exposes their undergraduates to their very best faculty.

Addendum #2 — As a Princeton chemistry major, my undergraduate adviser was Paul  Schleyer , Princeton ’52, Harvard PhD ’56. We spent a lot of time together in his lab, and would sometimes go out for pizza after finishing up in the lab of an evening. For what working with him was like please see — https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/paul-schleyer-1930-2014-a-remembrance/ and https://luysii.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/paul-schleyer-1930-2014-r-i-p/

Contrast this with Harvard where I did chemistry graduate work from ’60 – ’62.   None of the 7 people who were in the department back then who later won the Nobel prize later (Woodward, Corey, Hoffmann, +4 more) did any undergraduate teaching.  I did most of the personal teaching the Harvard undergrads got — 6 hours a week as a teaching assistant in the organic chemistry lab.  I may have been good, but I was nowhere as good as I would be if I stayed in the field for 8 more years.   I thought the Harvard students were basically cheated. 

I guess every review should have a quibble, and I do; but it’s with the publisher, not Dr. Zee. The whole book is one mass of related concepts and is filled with forward and backward references to text, figures and diagrams. Having a page to go to instead of Chapter III, 1 or figure IV.3.2 would make reading much easier. Only the publisher could do this once the entire text has been laid out.

One further point. QFTASAP clarified for me the differences between the (substantial) difficulties of medicine and the (substantial) difficulties of theoretical physics. When learning medicine you are exposed to thousands of unrelated (because we don’t understand what lies behind them) facts. That’s OK because you don’t need to remember all of them. Ask the smartest internist you know to name the 12 cranial nerves or the 8 bones of the wrist. The facts of theoretical physics are far fewer, but you must remember, internalize and use them — that’s why QFTASAP contains all these forward and backward references.

There is a ton more to say about the book and I plan to write more as I go through the book again. If interested, just Google Chemiotics II now and then. QFTASAP is definitely worth reading more than once.

 

Helpful

How a small town dealt with a pedophile and a schizophrenic 70 – 80 years ago

“Never get in a car with Bert Sxxxxxx and never take candy from strangers” said mother.  She never said what would happen and at age 5 I had no idea about sex.  Bert Sxxxxxx was a mailman, and some family members lived on our street.  Everyone knew about him.  70 years later I mentioned him to a kid a few years older and he responded “Chester the molester”.

Why wasn’t he stopped?  For the same reason he was a postman —  political connections from what little I could understand about the adult world as a child.

Then there was my attorney father’s client Joe Lxxxxxx, a subject of much hilarity (my father having no psychiatric training).  Joe thought he was married to Queen Elizabeth, through ‘interceptor medium’.  He also said he had a room in his house with no doors or windows.   Joe was clearly crazy and everyone  knew it, but the town took care of him in its way.  People talked to him.  If he got excited, the cops would find him and take him home without a struggle.

Fast forward to Penn Med School maybe 10 – 20 years later and a trip to Norristown State hospital just outside Philly, and a tour of the wards (including the extremely creepy locked ones).  Infinitely worse for Joe Lxxxxx than the ‘social care’ our little town was able to give him.

These thoughts were brought on by the previous post about sexual predation by coaches on young female athletes.  It is reproduced below.

How did it happen? Take 2

Today’s New York Times had another long article about another long term sexual predator coach (Ted Nash) this time on female rowers.  The question always arises, how could he have gotten away with it so long with so many different victims?

So it’s worth republishing a post from January 2018 about another coach, and my own experience witnessing it as an adolescent and saying nothing nearly 70 years ago.

Regular posting should resume soon.  My time has been taken up by reading straight through a recently published book that I was a lay reader for (Quantum Field Theory as Simply as Possible), so I can publish a review on Amazon at the request of the author (Tony Zee).

Here’s the old post from January 2018

How did it happen ?

This is not a scientific post.  How in the world was “Dr” Nassar able to sexually abuse so many and for so long. In high school I saw the same thing and said nothing. But this was 60+ years ago, in a small rural high school.

By small I mean 212 kids in 4 grades.  By rural I mean it was a 16 mile ride on the school bus from my house.  This meant that away basketball games meant rides on that bus as long as 70 miles, and never shorter than 20 for me. Our school was too small  to even support 6 man football, so basketball and baseball it was.

So the sports outlet was basketball, even for a prepubertal 14 year old entering high school at 5 feet tall.  I got pretty good at playing a small man’s game (mostly positioning and being where the ball would go next) and when I’d grown a foot by my senior year, I could outmaneuver most people my size and a few taller ones.

By my senior year I was on the staring five.

On the way back from games, there would be the basketball coach sitting near the driver, necking with one of the cheerleaders.  No one ever said anything about it.  I never discussed it with my parents, or even my friends.  Initially it seemed to be one more incomprehensible thing about the adult world.  The administration of the high school consisted of the principal and his secretary.  The world back then was that teachers were to be obeyed and respected.

So I can see how someone emerging into adolescence would be totally cowed by such events, not know what to do and remain silent.

I hadn’t thought about this for years, until the scandal at Michigan State.  So I wrote the older sister of one of my teammates about it — her initial response was —  “I am inNew Orleans at a funeral so more later.  But yes we all knew about XXXXXX and his sexual predations. More on that when I get home.”

How did it happen? Take 2

Today’s New York Times had another long article about another long term sexual predator coach (Ted Nash) this time on female rowers.  The question always arises, how could he have gotten away with it so long with so many different victims?

So it’s worth republishing a post from January 2018 about another coach, and my own experience witnessing it as an adolescent and saying nothing nearly 70 years ago.

Regular posting should resume soon.  My time has been taken up by reading straight through a recently published book that I was a lay reader for (Quantum Field Theory as Simply as Possible), so I can publish a review on Amazon at the request of the author (Tony Zee).

Here’s the old post from January 2018

How did it happen ?

This is not a scientific post.  How in the world was “Dr” Nassar able to sexually abuse so many and for so long. In high school I saw the same thing and said nothing. But this was 60+ years ago, in a small rural high school.

By small I mean 212 kids in 4 grades.  By rural I mean it was a 16 mile ride on the school bus from my house.  This meant that away basketball games meant rides on that bus as long as 70 miles, and never shorter than 20 for me. Our school was too small  to even support 6 man football, so basketball and baseball it was.

So the sports outlet was basketball, even for a prepubertal 14 year old entering high school at 5 feet tall.  I got pretty good at playing a small man’s game (mostly positioning and being where the ball would go next) and when I’d grown a foot by my senior year, I could outmaneuver most people my size and a few taller ones.

By my senior year I was on the staring five.

On the way back from games, there would be the basketball coach sitting near the driver, necking with one of the cheerleaders.  No one ever said anything about it.  I never discussed it with my parents, or even my friends.  Initially it seemed to be one more incomprehensible thing about the adult world.  The administration of the high school consisted of the principal and his secretary.  The world back then was that teachers were to be obeyed and respected.

So I can see how someone emerging into adolescence would be totally cowed by such events, not know what to do and remain silent.

I hadn’t thought about this for years, until the scandal at Michigan State.  So I wrote the older sister of one of my teammates about it — her initial response was —  “I am inNew Orleans at a funeral so more later.  But yes we all knew about XXXXXX and his sexual predations. More on that when I get home.”

Of course the girls would have talked about this.  I can’t wait to hear what she has to say.

Some Valentine’s Day advice for those still single

Sometime between Valentine’s Day and the end of February it will be 60 years since I met my future wife.  It was at an event where such things weren’t supposed to happen, an ancient rite called a mixer (aka meat market) at Bryn Mawr college.  I’m not sure such things exist any more, but the principle is the same.  If you are of an intellectual bent, single and looking for someone whose brains match your own, which I assume some readers of this blog are, then your college and/or graduate training years is the time (and place) to look.  You are likely never to be in a place where so many likely candidates are to be found.  Also at this time of your life, everything is likely to be fresh and not old and warmed over.

At a mixer, you’ll have to actually talk to someone for a prolonged period face to face to see if there is anything there.   No swiping and moving on.   No controlled electronic dialog to shield you.  Surely life has more to offer the two of you than sitting at a table staring into your respective cell phones.

One mixer story.  In grad school I was friendly with a law school student who was also a Rockefeller, a very intelligent unassuming individual.  We went to a mixer together.  I left covered with bruises from being stiffarmed by aggressive females who wanted to meet him.  It was a humbling experience.