Mabfan's Musings

Yesterday, my very generous wife allowed me to leave her to do a major part of the Pesach cleaning while I traipsed off to Cambridge to compete in the first ever Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament.

For the past few years, I've been serving as a "personal puzzle trainer" for saxikath (who doesn't really need my help, but we have fun when I time her on the puzzle every morning). She was one of the people scoring the puzzles at this tournament, so I knew I wasn't going to have to compete against her. I had set myself a personal goal of coming in dead last, but legitimately – meaning that I wasn't going to give up, but I was going to try to solve all the puzzles to the best of my ability. I failed in my goal, which is actually a good thing.

A lot of NPL Krewe were there, but since I'm not that active in the NPL I'm guessing most of them don't know me. I sat in the front row with 530nm330hz because it seemed like a good place to be.

There were four puzzles to solve throughout the afternoon, and New York Times crossword puzzle editor Will Shortz was a special guest, so we got some free entertainment to boot. After the competition, I took this photo of Will and Andrew, who has had one of his puzzles published by Will and collected into a recent book of Sunday puzzles.

Will Shortz, Andrew M. Greene New York Times Crossword Puzzle Editor Will Shortz and Crossword Constructor Andrew Marc Greene at the Boston Crossword Puzzle Tournament, April 5, 2009. Photo copyright ©2009 by Michael A. Burstein.

As for the competition itself, the puzzles were in order from easiest to hardest, and if you look at the standings, you'll see I came in 89th out of 122 competitors. I'm actually quite proud of how I did, though, because I was more interested in accuracy than speed. I managed to get both the first and the fourth puzzle completely right, and I knew as I was solving the other two that there were things I just didn't know, so I wasn't expecting to get high scores on them. My four scores were 1105, 845, 780, and 1110, for a total score of 3840. (And note that means that I did better on the hardest puzzle than on the easiest one. Wow.)

To give you some idea of what the total score means, the winner had a score of 5190. I would explain the rules if I remembered them, but I don't, and they don't seem to be posted on the website. Essentially, you get points for handing in the puzzle early, and you lose points for every letter wrong. There's also a point bonus for a completely accurate puzzle.

I'm particularly proud of 530nm330hz, though, for coming in at seventh place. Hey, Andrew, need a personal puzzle trainer?

By the way, Will Shortz answered questions, and I got to ask him two questions I've always wondered: first, does he regret not being able to compete in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament? (As the guy who organizes the whole thing, it would be unfair and impossible for him to compete.) It turns out he doesn't really regret it; the impression I got is that he probably thinks he'd do okay if he competed, but that's all.

My second question: isn't he glad that he didn't run the "Election Day" puzzle for the 2000 election? (He was.) Needless to say, that would have been interesting.

Yesterday, Nomi did me the favor of heading over to Lowell House for the Bell Ceremony.

Bells! Photo © 2008 by Nomi S. Burstein. All rights reserved.

As I've mentioned before, when I was in college I was one of the bellringers who rang the Lowell House bells every Sunday. The bells, which originally came from the Danilov Monastery in Moscow, are being returned, and yesterday they removed the final bell from the Lowell House bell tower.

That bell is called the Lenten Bell, and it was traditionally rung on a fasting day. Somehow, in the stories that generations told about the bells, the name became misconstrued as the Bell of Famine, Pestilence, and Despair. As the monks of the monastery explained to the current bellringers, that name really makes no sense, as no one would ring a bell that bore a name of such ill omen. (If I recall correctly, that was the bell on which we rang the loser's score whenever Harvard beat another team at football in a home game.)

Nomi took some most excellent photos of the crane removing the final bell and lowering it onto the flatbed truck next to the largest bell, which at Harvard was known as the Bell of Mother Earth. The pictures are behind the cut for those who wish to enjoy them.

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As you can see from the pictures, they swung the bell from one side to the other in the process of lowering it. If you put all seven pictures in a row, you get a cool flip-book movie.

Lenten Bell Lowered Photo © 2008 by Nomi S. Burstein. All rights reserved.

So an era is at an end. After about eighty years, the Danilov Monastery bells will go back to their rightful place, and the Lowell House bell tower will play host to a brand new set of authentic Russian bells.

Life has been busy.

Work is filling my days, and publishing classes are occupying my nights.

I spent the holiday weekend almost finishing up the book I Remember the Future. I missed a deadline for when I wanted the whole thing complete, but I was trying to get the final touches done. Fortunately, my publisher is very forgiving.

This week is Brookline Town Meeting, which fills my evenings. Last night, we approved the Brookline Library RFID program by a vote of 109-87, a lot closer than I thought it was going to be.

This weekend, I'll be returning to Lowell House at Harvard College to attend the June Bell Symposium 2008. The symposium celebrates the 78 years that the Russian Bells hung in the Lowell House Bell Tower, and it honors the return of those bells to the Danilov Monastery in Moscow. Not to worry, though, as the monks have cast a brand-new set of bells to replace the ones being returned.

Back in January 2004, the New York Times reported that the Danilov Monastery in Russia wanted Harvard to return the bells which have hung in the Lowell House bell tower for about 80 years. I was one of the bell-ringers in college, and so I wrote a letter to the Times, supporting the notion that Harvard should get to keep the bells. After all, had Harvard not bought them from Charles Crane, they would have been melted down and would no longer exist.

As it stands, though, the agreement made between Harvard and the Russian Orthodox Church was for Harvard to return the bells. However, the monastery agreed to cast a brand new set of bells for Harvard, so Lowell House could still have bells in its bell tower. I saw in today's Boston Globe website the following AP report:

July 25, 2007
MOSCOW -- Russian Orthodox Patriarch Alexy II yesterday consecrated 18 newly cast brass bells destined for Harvard University in a trade that will return the originals to Russia nearly 80 years after they were saved from Stalin's religious purges. The originals have hung for decades in the towers at Lowell House and Harvard Business School's Baker Library in Cambridge. American industrialist Charles R. Crane bought the bells from the Soviet government in 1930, saving them from being melted down in purges that left thousands of monks executed and churches and monasteries destroyed or turned into prisons and orphanages.

So how do I feel about this? Well, the old bells had character and history, but so will the new ones. As long as Lowell House has bells in its bell tower, I'm happy. I just hope I get invited back for whatever celebrations Harvard plans to inaugurate the new bells.

More information can be found at
Patriarch consecrates bells for Harvard (Boston.com)
Lowell Bells Get Russian Farewell (The Harvard Crimson)

The New York Times is reporting at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/business/08cnd-harvard.html that Harvard will name historian and Bryn Mawr graduate Drew Gilpin Faust as the new president of the university.

If true, this is a major step, and not just because Faust is a woman. Faust has been active at Harvard for the past six or so years as dean of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. When the university chose Summers as president a few years ago, many of us felt that although he was a good administrator, the university would have been better off promoting someone from within the rank and file, who knew the place much more closely.

Dr. Faust would definitely fit that profile. Best of luck to her.

Last week, Harvard University announced that it was eliminating its Early Action application program. I took a more than passing interest in this announcement, because years ago I myself applied for and was accepted under Harvard's Early Action program. And although I was glad to have that decision out of the way so early, I still recall wondering how fair the early application process was in general. Because I remember being told that applying early increased your chances of acceptance, and it seemed unfair for students who needed more time to make their final decision on colleges.

A little background. Back in the 1980s, there were two different early application programs in existence: Early Action and Early Decision. Under Early Action, students could get their application materials in by the beginning of November and have a decision from the college, usually an acceptance or a deferral, by mid-December. (In rare cases, a student might be rejected outright.) Early Decision worked almost exactly the same way, except that a student applying via Early Decision had to agree to a firm commitment to attend that school in the fall. Under Early Action, a student could send applications to other institutions, but under Early Decision, a student was expected to end the application process. In either case, though, a student could only apply to one institution via their early application program.

(Of course, any sort of early acceptance was usually predicated on the student maintaining a reasonable record throughout the rest of senior year. But most people tended not to notice that fine print in the acceptance package.)

Each college that offered an early admission program decided for itself which kind to offer. In my case, the two colleges I was most interested in were Harvard and Columbia. And Columbia only offered Early Decision, not Early Action. Had they offered Early Action, I might have applied early there instead, and perhaps my life might have taken a different turn. But that's a subject for another time.

For now, I have to say that I'm glad that Harvard has chosen to eliminate its Early Action program, and I have a feeling that this will lead to many other institutions revising their own application procedures. Because the fact is that for better or worse, Harvard University carries a tremendous amount of influence in the world of high school admissions. Let me give an example.

Back in the mid-1990s, when I was starting to work full-time as a high-school teacher, Harvard published a booklet about their admissions process. Being a science teacher, I was particularly interested in what Harvard had to say about science courses. I was gratified to see that Harvard's admissions office felt very strongly about science -- so strongly, in fact, that they expected all applicants to have at least three years of science, and those three years had to include Biology, Chemistry, and Physics.

Now, I attended an exam school, Hunter College High School in New York City, and I still remember that the only high school science course that was required was Biology in 9th grade. Chemistry was offered in 10th grade as an elective, as was Physics in 11th grade. Now, it is true that the school strongly recommended that all 10th graders take Chemistry and that most 11th graders take Physics. But not everyone did; if you could explain to your college counselor why those courses weren't necessary for what you wanted to accomplish, you could enroll in any of the other electives being offered. I knew students who chose instead to study another foreign language or to take creative writing, and none of them had difficulty getting into college with their transcript.

But in the 1990s, as soon as Harvard announced that it expected three years of science, many high schools took this as a cue to require a full course of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics for all their students. Never mind the fact that most students weren't planning on applying to Harvard College, let alone attending it; if Harvard said that three years of science were required for its applicants, then all students would be required to take three years of science, no matter what.

I had, and still have, mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, being a science booster, I feel very strongly that all students should have an excellent science education. Citizens need to understand the importance of science and technology to function productively in our modern world. But on the other hand, not everyone is interested in science, and, to be frank, not everyone can handle a Physics course. I remember one student I taught who had essentially found herself required to take Physics under "bait and switch"; the school hadn't required the course when she entered in 9th grade, and she was distraught when the rules changed on her by 11th grade and she found herself forced to study Physics. She hated the course, did badly in it, and would have been far better served by a survey course on Science and Society than on trying to solve momentum equations.

But instead, a decision by the admissions office at Harvard College -- an institution to which she never would have applied -- ended up with her being required to study Physics.

Based on this history, I reiterate my belief that Harvard's decision will lead to other institutions abandoning their Early Admission or Early Decision programs. And I think that in the end, high school seniors will be much better off for it.

Copyright © Michael Burstein

This weekend, I'll be attending my 15th anniversary college reunion, so my mind is on reunions and history. I plan to write a few posts about the reunion, and what people are up to.

But for the moment, I'm looking not at my class, but an earlier one. Today is Harvard's Commencement, and as usual, the Harvard Crimson has put together an issue that looks at the current group of graduates and the milestone reunion classes. The Class of 1981 is celebrating their 25th reunion this weekend, and at The Harvard Crimson :: Special Packages :: Class of 1981 you can find the whole section devoted to the class.

The section is divided into two general sections. The first section is devoted to news stories that were taking place at Harvard 25 years ago. In some ways, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

The second section is devoted to a few members of the Class of 1981 that they chose to feature. The members of the class they profile include journalist Susan Faludi, Lost co-executive producer (and creator of The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. ) A. Carlton Cuse...and science-fiction writer Melissa Scott, which I suspect might be of more than passing interest to some of you.

Folks who are reading my blog for discussions of writing probably noticed that I finally started up again with the Robert's Rules of Writing commentary. Things have become a little more relaxed now on the writing front, so I'm able to get back to those essays. This is not to say that I still don't have a deadline or two out there, plus some ongoing "on spec" projects, as always. But I'm feeling a little more able to tackle those writing essays yet again. So what's been going on in my life besides the usual?

Well, some of it I've already noted. Last month Nomi and I celebrated Passover with her family, and then we went to Ravencon and caught up with some of my family. Last week I was re-elected to Brookline Town Meeting, and I'm looking forward to our May session, which starts on Tuesday May 23rd. On Saturday, Analog announced that "Sanctuary" had won the AnLab in Novella.

But in other news: Next month I have a college reunion, and over the weekend I received the Class Anniversary Report, about which I'll have more to say later. By the end of summer, the book Boarding the Enterprise will be published, including my essay "We Find the One Quite Adequate: Religious Attitudes in Star Trek." Finally, thanks to the kindness of friends, Nomi and I are now plowing through the second season of Stargate SG-1. At this rate, we'll be caught up with current episodes in a few months. (I doubt we'll keep watching at this rate, though.)

Last night, gnomi, farwing, and I had dinner with mystful at our local kosher Chinese restaurant, Taam China. (Tonight, gnomi and I are having dinner there again, this time with my former student moneypenny.) mystful was one of the students in the writing workshop we facilitated at Harvard last month, and since she was kind enough to get in touch before the workshop, we wanted to spend some time with her.

She's a fascinating person, who has accomplished a lot for someone so young. It turned out that as a high school student she had spent a year in Beijing. She speaks Mandarin Chinese, so we introduced her to the owner of the restaurant, and the two of them had an extended conversation in Mandarin. I have no idea what they talked about, but from context it was probably about her experiences in China.

We also talked about writing, of course, and why one shouldn't use too many adverbs as dialogue tags. (See gnomi's post here for a link to Tom Swifties.) But on a personal note, what got me was how much Harvard has changed since I've been there. I knew that they had wired the dorms for the Internet, but starting next year all the dorms are going wireless! < old man grumpy voice >In my day, we didn't have this "wireless" Internet in our dorms! If we wanted to check our e-mail, we had to shlep all the way to the Science Center, through the snow, uphill, both ways! And we didn't have any of these sissy front-end programs! We had to know how to use Unix or VMS!< /old man grumpy voice >.

Okay, I'm done now. :-)