It suddenly occurred to me during an exercise session today that it’s been 45 years since I graduated from Boston College. I’ve managed to elude the Alumni Association (and their pleas for donations) for a while, so it slipped under my radar (I never have been one for reunions, and wasn’t particularly close to any of my classmates, so there’s no one I particularly want to see.)

For me, Boston College is one of my biggest regrets. My parents wanted me to go, because of the prestige, and I acquiesced. I also wanted to commute to school, and that turned out to be a big mistake, on three counts. First of all, in general terms, it meant that I didn’t get the “college experience” most folks have. Secondly, while BC was a big commuter school in the 40’s and 50’s, by the time the 70’s rolled around, it was mostly a residential school, with commuters definitely second class citizens. Finally, I had no car, and was reliant on the MBTA to get there, which meant a hard stop of around 5 PM if I wanted to get home that day, and earlier, if I needed to work. I still remember my first trip over there on an old decrepit PCC trolley, taking forever because it stopped every block. Eventually, I learned to walk down Hammond Street to Chestnut Hill Station on the Riverside Line, which was much faster. I remember one day pouring a whole roll of pennies into the fare box because I was paid monthly, and it was all I had.

I never did get to use my degree, either. My major was elementary education, which I knew was going to be a tough sell to begin with, due to demographics (I was at the tail end of the baby boom, and the boomers weren’t having their kids yet), but then Proposition 2 1/2 was passed, and suddenly school systems were laying off teachers.

There were several classes that made a difference, though. My freshman English professor, Margaret Ferrari, was superb. In order to ensure that the reading assignments were read, you had to pass 10 out of 11 factual quizzes, but your grade was based on several short essays. My first couple of essays were not great, but she worked with me during office hours, teaching me that a report was more than a recitation of facts; it needed organization and a point, and a voice. By the time I finished her class, I was writing very well, and I’ve been grateful to her ever since.

I remember my very first education class, which drove home through a simple exercise how important clear and understandable explanations were. The class was divided into groups; each group sent a rep out into the hall, where the decided on a design for a Tinkertoy contraption. Then all the reps came back into the room, and had to describe how to build what they’d designed. It did not turn out well, but it did drive home the point about learning how to provide clear instructions, and I’ve taken that with me whenever I’ve had to write documentation or present a demo.

I remember my Methods classes. These were not classes about the subject matter; they were about how to teach the subject matter. My Math Methods classes were a revelation. I’d been taught math by rote to a large degree; to see it taught via concrete methods so that the student could see in concrete fashion how mathematical concepts work was completely new to me. My teachers had often growled at us to “show me the work” during math tests; now I could see why. By looking at the student’s progress through a problem, you could essentially debug it, and see where they’d gone wrong.

My Language Arts professor was a funny and facile guy. I remember the discussion of English dialects, and he said something to the effect that “Differences in pronunciation are amusing; differences in spelling are interesting, and differences in grammar are a mark of stupidity.”

I remember being fascinated by the Education Measurement class. Once you’ve taught something, you need to find out how well the students have learned it. The class discussed both standardized tests, and how a teacher can better design his own tests, went over pros and cons of various types of tests — multiple choice, true/false, completion, essay tests. It was really interesting to learn that there’s a whole science to “distractors” — the incorrect responses to multiple choice questions. Ideally, you want them all to be plausible — no joke responses — while unambiguously wrong. Fun fact: not all the questions on the SAT tests count towards the student’s grade. In some cases, the question itself is being evaluated. If everyone gets it right, or everyone gets it wrong, it’s not a good candidate for the test.

I’ve seldom been back to BC since I’ve left. I wasn’t actively unhappy while I was there, but didn’t really appreciate what I was missing until several years later. I was never into sports, so going to college games had no appeal to me, and it’s out of my way.

I can’t say I miss it.

Several years back I read Andy Ihnatko’s account of the MIT Flea, and stuck it in the back of my head as something that could be interesting to check out. It’s held every third Sunday April through October, in the Albany Street garage. It’s  “a place to buy, sell, and swap amateur radio, electronic, and computer equipment”. I first went a few years ago, but went relatively late in the day and was pretty underwhelmed. I got there around 11 this morning, and found three floors of stuff to look at:

• Old videogame cartridges
• LPs
• Oscilloscopes
• stepper motors
• Knives
• Old Macs, some dating back to the 80’s and 90’s
• Some old Apple IIs
• Old laptops
• Microscopes
• Electronics parts of all kinds
• Memorabilia
• A couple of old globes
• All sorts of other old stuff that I had no idea what it was.

Some of it was interesting to look at, but there was nothing there that I found particularly tempting, though if I’d seen a laser I might have grabbed it. The older Macs were interesting — I’ve always wished I’d had a compact Mac, but none of them came with mice or software so they weren’t usable. I did see an Apple IIc and a couple of Apple IIGSes there — my first and second computers, but neither had a monitor, so they weren’t really usable. I already do have a working PowerMac G4 and an Apple IIGS emulator on this machine.

Overall, though, I’m finding window shopping in general to be a less satisfying pastime than it used to. After having to clean out the old house, I’m finding I’m less interested in taking on new clutter, unless it’s usable, and I want it. And nearly anything I picked up there would have been A Project to get cleaned up and usable. Thank you no.

So, we’ve just switched to Daylight Savings Time, and I have a few thoughts.

First of all, despite the complaints about losing an hour of sleep, I think the current system of switching seasonally is sound. We tried year round DST during my freshman year in high school, and in January, it was awful. We were waiting for the bus in complete darknesst, with sunrise coming only as the first classes were getting underway.

Secondly, during the winter, the gain in the afternoon wouldn’t be all that great. Sunset at 5:15 isn’t much better than sunset at 4:15 — sunset is still too early to be useful. I really don’t care about it being light at the end of the day, while I really hate getting up in the dark.

Third, I definitely like DST in the summer. Then, the days are long enough that you can actually do something after supper. And in June and July, the sun is coming up around 4 AM DST; I’d hate to see it coming up around 3.

But I actually prefer Standard time as the days start getting shorter. By the time October rolls around, I’m ready for it to end. I’m switching to more indoor pursuits, and am not looking for extra daylight after supper, and I absolutely despise getting up in the dark — though it does make it easier to be up for sunrise.

If I had my druthers, I’d go back to the old schedule of a couple of decades back, where we switched to DST in mid-April, when the days are long enough to have useful daylight after supper, and switch back last weekend of October, rather than the beginning of November. I’d hate like hell to go back to year round DST — proponents forget that no matter how you slice and dice it, you only have around 9 hours of daylight near the winter solstice.

It’s hard to believe we’re already over a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century. We’re not even in a transitional period anymore.

My cousin Susan was the first grandchild in the family; the daughter of my Uncle Billy and my Aunt Dot. Billy died young, leaving Dot a widow with three young daughters.

It seemed for a while like the three of them were around a lot; my Dad became a surrogate father for them before he married, and even afterwards, we saw a lot of them when we visited my grandmother, and they came fairly often to the house. I remember her staying over one summer evening and sleeping out on the cot on the porch, and distantly remember, perhaps aided by photographs, of being with them on the Cape, and seeing a shipwreck buried in the sand.

All three girls were older than me, with Susan being very much older, there being about eight years between us, which is an eternity when you’re six.

This Christmastime marks the 60th anniversary of her death. All three girls were fond of horses, but in December of 1965, Susan was either thrown from or fell off her horse. At first she shrugged it off, but after a few hours, her mother noticed was something seriously wrong, and got her to the hospital.

I don’t know the exact details of her injury, whether it was a bad concussion or whether a skull fracture was involved. I do know she lingered, I believe in a coma, over the Christmas holiday while the whole family held its breath and prayed for her.

My mother often told us the story at Christmas of how she went to Midnight Mass that year, and started sobbing uncontrollably when the children’s choir started singing, to the extent that her father had to hold her tight.

Susan finally died December 28, The Feast of the Holy Innocents in the Catholic calendar. She was just 14, Dot was devastated of course, and her death created an additional hole in the extended O’Hara family; what once had been a threesome was now two, with one member always missing. And of the over two dozen cousins of my generation, only a few of us are old enough to remember her; I’m the only one of my own siblings old enough to remember her, and most of my cousins are younger, But those of us who do, remember her fondly.

I’ve been enjoying Adam Ragusea‘s videos on YouTube for a couple of years, now, and recently saw his two part video, Growing Bread (Part I, Planting to Harvest, and Part II, Harvest to Oven), wherein he grew a small plot of wheat in his garden, then harvested it, threshed it, winnowed it, ground it into flour and baked it.

Along the way, he discussed the history of wheat, much of which was drawn from Dr. Catherine Zabinski’s Amber Waves, The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat, and included clips of an interview with Dr. Zabinski. It was fascinating, and interesting enough that I decided to buy the book. I just finished the book, and I’m glad I read it.

In the book, which she bills as a “biography” of wheat, Dr. Zabinski covers the history of the plant, starting way way back with the start of photosynthesis, to the development of cell walls, which allowed plants to have structure, to how our ancestors found a particular grass growing in the Middle East, and realized that its seeds were edible. From there she talks about the numerous “environmental sieves” — natural and human selection — that shaped wheat into the megacrop it is today.

For example, the earliest wild wheats, called einkorn, had seed tassles that tended to shatter when ripe, scattering the seeds on the ground where they would plant themselves. Along the way, there was a mutation that caused the seed heads not to shatter. This is not so good for the plant, as the seeds don’t hit the ground, but it also made the seeds easier to harvest, so the humans of that era tended to pick those seeds, and replant them, propagating that trait.

She also gets into the genetics of wheat. The bread wheat we grow today is the result of two natural hybridization events. In the first, wild einkorn hybridized with goatgrass, creating a variety of wheat called emmer. And then later, emmer hybridized again with goatgrass, creating a plant that produced seeds that were bigger and had softer husks, which were more easily removed — essentially, easier to prepare as food. From this natural hybridization, humans selected again and again — picking varieties that grew better under cultivation, or produced bigger fruit, or, as humans carried it all over the world, selected varieties that grew better under local conditions.

Dr. Zabinski discusses all of this, both from a cultural standpoint of how humans spread the crop and domesticated it, and from a biochemical standpoint, explaining in fairly easy to understand language how DNA works, how genetics work, how mutations occur, and how mutations and having a large genome to draw on, courtesy of the extra chromosomes the hybridization events that created bread wheat, allows for the necessary genetic variety that allows evolution to refashion the plant in ways that make it a viable crop in a variety of different environments.

From there she discusses how agriculture shaped human civilization — up until recently, it took a lot of work to harvest a crop, and governments and social structures grew up to mediate that need for labor and the distribution of food, and winds up with the developments of the twentieth century: mechanized agriculture, and the rise of plant breeders specifically trying to develop varieties with specific features, such as disease resistance, or shorter stems to reduce the risk of the plants flopping over, making them harder to harvest. This was the so-called Green Revolution, and she makes the point that part of the impetus for the Green Revolution was to combat the Red Revolution of Communism. She does discuss some of the downsides of the Green Revolution — the dangers of a plant monoculture lacking the genetic variety to cope with changes in the environment, and the ecological damage that agricultural practice can inflict, but she’s an optimist, and ends the book with a description of efforts to create a perennial variety of wheat by crossing it with wheatgrass; the advantage of a perennial vs an annual crop is that it’s less environmentally damaging.

Through it all, the book is clear, engaging, and easy to understand. I was a little concerned that it would be a dry, academic text, but it isn’t. She steers clear of jargon, and when she does introduce specialized terms, explains them well, and keeps her story moving. I read it on my iPhone and it’s the first book I’ve read start to finish in months.