Tag: community discussion

Last time I displayed some photos from the Haupt Conservatory at the New York Botanical Garden, which Debbie and I visited on January 8 in order to see the Holiday Train Show.

The Train Show photos will be shown in the future, but that will take awhile since I have 79 of them to pour through…and then there are the ones Debbie took with her camera.

But that’s not all we did while we were there.  There was an exhibit called Kiku:  The Art of the Japanese Chrysanthemum at the LuEsther T. Mertz Library which I wanted to see very much, to add to the knowledge of the Edo Period I gained in my visit to LACMA last summer.

They didn’t allow photos in the museum, so I made do with photos of some public art out in front of the library.

Debbie and I took a field trip on Thursday to the New York Botanical Garden to see the Holiday Train Show.  Photos of that show will come later.

Our first order of business after arrival at the Haupt Conservatory which housed the show was to locate the restroom.  While ding so we had the opportunity to tour several of the other exhibits.  In today’s edition are photos from the desert plants exhibit, with a few from the tropical rain forest and aquatic plants exhibits.

Most of the photos are thumbnails.  Clicking on them will reveal larger versions.

Once upon a time, in a land far away, I participated in a writer’s workshop at a Women’s Project Retreat.  A large part of my reason for being there was the attempt to become an accepted member of the Arkansas women’s community.  Many of the attendees wished I were not there.

We were given the first phrase of the beginning of a story and asked to finish that beginning.  You are invited to do the same.

The first story:  

The second story:  

The following are my efforts, the first one in prose, while the second one became a poem.

And there is a story that goes with them, a story which has never actually appeared in anything but a comment before.  I’m appending it to the end to make it easier to find in the future.

I was in ninth grade at Lake Oswego Junior High for the first half of 1963 and a sophomore at Lake Oswego High at the end of it.  

And music ranged from the Beatles at the beginning of the year…to the Beatles at the end of the year.  The meaningful music was in between.

I pulled the news from 1963 out of wiki, every fifth story, chosen in order to hit my birthday.  I’ve added some content and some memories and followed a few threads forward.

I found it an interesting study.  I hope you do, too.

I was in eighth grade for the first half of 1962 and a freshman, but still at Lake Oswego Junior High at the end of it.  I had my first girlfriend, Bonnie, who became too much of an obsession in my life for quite a few years.  I played a football game in the middle of Typhoon Frieda on October 12.

And music ranged from Nat King Cole to the Beatles.

My back is killing me today, so in lieu of actual writing, I pulled the news from 1962 out of wiki:  every fifth story.  In some cases, I added some comments.

I found it an interesting study.  Maybe you will, too.

There have always been problems with trying to share my experience as a transwoman.  I can only speak my experience.  And I can only speak my experience from the point of view of now.  I mean, I have taken great care to preserve my writings in the 90s as they were written, because they portray how I felt then, but often I have difficulty even remembering the frame of mind I was in when I wrote them.

I am not a transman.  I cannot speak for any of them, though I can feel a sense of kinship.  And I can try to speak in favor of the rights we should have in common.  Our common experience, however, may be too ephemeral to grasp.

I am not pre-operative.  That was left far in the past.  And I forget.  I’m sure some of that forgetting has been intentional.  There are pains I would prefer were left behind.

I’m also not black.

But how can anyone understand the whole without understanding some of the parts?

We have a new blog on our Blog Roll.  I stumbled across Monica Roberts’ TransGriot when I was looking to increase diversity in my essay for Friday.

One of the discussions I stumbled on was about that fact that black transwomen are almost universally assumed to be prostitutes, in life and especially in death.  I was looking for that today when I decided to take a look at something else.

Perspective can stand to be expanded.  Besides, I’m tired and can handle a discussion much easier than a lengthy psychological analysis.

Previous episodes:

250 years of history

mathematics and science, philosophy and religion

Dutch history

to the heavens and back

imitating christ

Last time we had gotten back as far as Thomas à Kempis.  Thomas was educated as a copyist by the newly formed Brethren for the Common Life.

Previous episodes:

250 years of history

mathematics and science, philosophy and religion

Dutch history

to the heavens and back

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus received his baccalaureate degree in theology in 1497 at the Collège de Montaigu in Paris, where he studied under the mentorship of Jan Standonck, after being mentored at Deventer by the German humanist Alexander Hegius.  It seems we have strayed far from mathematics, but we shall return.  This was the time of “men for all seasons.”

Previous episodes:

250 years of history

mathematics and science, philosophy and religion

Dutch history

We left off at Erasmus Reinhold, creator of the Prutenic Tables, based on the work of Nicolaus Copernicus, which were used to create the Gregorian calendar.

Reinhold’s Master of Arts degree in astronomy and astrophysics was earned at Wittenberg in 1535, as a student of Jacob Milich.

Not much is known of Milich.  Plenty is known about his academic supervisors.

The previous parts:

250 years of history

mathematics and science, philosophy and religion

Frank Anderson, Malcolm Smiley, William Reid, Hyman Ettlinger, George Birkhoff, E. H. Moore, H. A. Newton, Michel Chasles, Simeon Poisson, Joseph Lagrange, Leonhard Euler, Johan Bernoulli, Jacob Bernoulli, Gottfried Lebniz, Christiaan Huygens.  Fifteen generations of my mathematical ancestors.

Yes, there was a side trip to Pierre-Simon La Place and Jean d’Alembert that ended in a dead end.  And it is true that the leap from Lagrange to Euler is tenuous, what with Lagrange being pretty much self-educated in mathematics.  And it is also true that Huygens was more of an inventor, a maker of clocks and telescopes…and hence an astronomer.

Christiaan received a Master of the Liberal Arts degree from the University of Leiden in 1647 and a Doctor of Canon and Civil Law from Université d’Angers in 1655.  His advisors were Frans van Schooten and Jan Stampioen.

Where were we?

(Part I:  250 years of history)

Oh, yes.  Poisson, purportedly the most prolific mathematicians in terms as the number of publications, was a student of LaGrange and La Place at École Polytechnique in Paris.

LaPlace was a student of d’Alembert, but there we lose track of the lineage, since d’Alembert attended one of the colleges in the University Paris…which was decommissioned and dispersed during the French Revolution, so records are lost.  Or because I am not a historian and I am not planning a trip to Paris to search for said records.

LaGrange, on the other hand, was a self-taught mathematician, mostly, whom Leonhard Euler chose to nurture to be his heir as Director of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.  Euler even left Berlin for St. Petersburg in 1766, happy to return now that Catherine was on the path to becoming the Great, so that LaGrange could begin his tenure.  For that reason Euler is generally agreed to hold the position of LaGrange’s academic supervisor.

I identify with what LaGrange accomplished by teaching himself mathematics.  While I had some wonderful teachers during my years as a student, the thing that they accomplished the most was to help me learn how to teach myself.    I’ve always tried to remember that in my own teaching.

You’re wondering about the image to the left?  Read on.

Being rather bored Thursday, while proctoring a midterm exam in Computer Literacy, a couple of my former professors came up in conversation, including my adviser, Frank Anderson.  Frank studied the lattice characterization of C-Spaces, which won’t mean much to many, but the thing is that he studied in a field of mathematics called analysis.  By the time I met him, he was an algebraist.

So I’m an algebraist as well, having studied the homology of torsion theories.  My degree was awarded in 1981 at Oregon.  Frank got his in 1954 at Iowa.

And there was time to keep going.  Frank studied under Malcolm Smiley, who received his degree from Chicago in 1937, having studied Discontinuous Solutions for the Problem of Bolza in Parametric Form.  Smiley studied under William Reid, who received his degree in 1929 from Texas, having studied the properties of solutions to infinite systems of ordinary differential equations with boundary conditions.  His adviser at Texas was Hyman Ettlinger, who received his degree from Harvard in 1920, where he studied self-adjoint, second order linear systems of differential equations under George Birkhoff.

I perked up a bit, remembering that when I took my Russian exam in grad school, I had been given the task of translating a Russian version of Witt’s Theorem and having more than a cursory interest in the Birkhoff-Witt Theorem.  So I plowed onward.