Marissa and I met twenty-one years ago tomorrow. Our first date included walking around Graceland Cemetery in Chicago. Two months later, we took our first trip together, to Brooklyn and Manhattan. We saw three plays, most memorably Side Show, a musical about Daisy and Violet, the conjoined Hilton sisters.

Last week my father’s twin brother passed away. They looked so much alike, especially when they were younger. I remember how they dressed and tried to see if we could tell the difference between them. My cousins cried because they couldn’t. I identified my father by his wedding ring. Seeing the photographs in my uncle’s online obituary, it’s like reading of my own father’s death.

I dearly wish I could have attended his service on Monday. Instead, on that day I was on a conference panel at Ole Miss. On the flights there, I watched Three Identical Strangers. Because I hadn’t heard anything at the time about these young men who discovered each other as triplets in the early 1980s, I first thought the film was a mockumentary. Instead, it turned out to be a throughly engaging movie that captures the joy of discovering long-lost siblings, explores the nature of personal identity in relation to nature vs. nurture, and interrogates ethical issues in scientific research. Yesterday, driving from Oxford to the airport, I arrived at Elvis’ Graceland too early to visit his gravesite. I took a quick photo before making my way home.

At several points yesterday afternoon, Nikki Giovanni mentioned she is not friendly. We laughed loud at the start, because she had already shared stories about her life with grace and wit. I could feel her presence close, as though she were talking to a small audience instead of a jam-packed auditorium. (Why didn’t they open up the room, taking down the wall and pulling out the seats, this is Nikki Giovanni we’re talking about.)

But each time she described herself as not friendly we laughed a little less. With the repetition it resembled a joke told too many times. I have to admit wondering whether she was aware she had used the phrase before, because she also did tell some rambling stories, with a manner that you are not surprised to hear from a grandmother (which she is).

Slowly I awoke to what she intended by not friendly. She simply meant that she does not have many friends. It’s clear that she can make friends; she befriended Rosa Parks after spotting her in an airport during a layover. It’s also clear that she can confide personal details, writing and speaking about her inability to weep until recently, about how she straightened up her father as he approached death, about how she conceptually married her mother and they lived together for decades, about how she’s going to hell but will get a day pass to heaven. So she can make friends and can share herself with strangers. But still, she doesn’t make friends easy.

She is a black woman and a public figure. She has learned to be mindful about trusting others. She knows the score, she has lived through segregation and still every day she observes the attitudes that many whites hold against blacks, that many men hold against women. She sees this with clarity and speaks it with humor. She is personable but she is not friendly.

At every single poetry reading I have attended, the backstories are more engaging than the poems themselves, because the published poems represent only the tip of the iceberg of experience. We engage and learn more as we hear about the process of development of the poem and of the poet. While her informal delivery was considerably more warm than usual, this was also true of Nikki Giovanni’s reading. It’s strange to me that this has become our convention at poetry readings. Shouldn’t poems speak for themselves? 

But poems are short (or, if they are long, our attention is short). And why go to a poetry reading when we can read the words ourselves on paper or screen? It’s because we are interested in the poet herself. The poem is the rosary bead; we want to hear the prayer. We are interested in creating a human connection with the poet and the rest of the audience. We seek the theatrical and performative.

When it comes to public presentation, novelists and short-story writers are like humanities professors. Philosophers and historians prepare their manuscripts ahead of time in order to read them verbatim at conferences. In contrast, scientists prepare slides and then refer to them while speaking off the cuff. In this way, scientists are like poets.

Nikki Giovanni is 75, which she recommends. It is better, she said, than being 50 or 25. I hope to discover what she means through direct experience. Yesterday she delivered a talk “Dying by Ignorance, Living by Words, Creating by Grace”.

Today I learned that Ivanka was here in Pittsburgh, visiting Astrobotic Technology and meeting with Girls of Steel. Astrobotic is the Carnegie Mellon robotics spinoff that I hope will send one of my artifacts to the Moon; Girls of Steel is the CMU-based all-girls robotics team co-founded by colleague Patti Rote.

Despite the well-earned praise for both operations, the university has plenty of room to improve gender equity in STEM. A fellow professor wrote me last week about the 82% male imbalance in one of this summer’s pre-college computer science classes. I share his concern and will discuss this issue, among many other diversity-related topics, with the Admission Office tomorrow, as well as with him and other colleagues in the School of Computer Science later this month.

In addition, there’s this other piece of news today, that Lenore and Manuel Blum have resigned from SCS because of “professional harassment” and “sexist management” over the past three years, which the article mentions in relation to changes under a “new entrepreneurial management structure on campus”.

This is a big deal. Both are renowned computer scientists and they are resigning, not retiring. While she and I served on a Faculty Senate committee at the beginning of the decade to prepare materials for the university’s presidential search, I really don’t know either of them well. I want to ask her about her experiences that led to this decision. Because if two of the most prominent professors at one of the world’s finest computer schools are resigning due to harassment and sexism, I want to know what I can do about that.

A group of 21 young plaintiffs has filed a lawsuit against the US government against climate change — more specifically, for “creating a national energy system that causes climate change, is depriving them of their constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property and [failing] to protect essential public trust resources.”

While their lawsuit, Juliana v. the United States, seems quixotic because the burden of proof will undoubtedly be set high, today the Supreme Court allowed the suit to proceed to the US District Court in Oregon.

I admire the plaintiffs’ audacity and only wish I had known earlier of this lawsuit, originally filed in 2015. Last year the Energy: Science, Society, and Communication Science course I taught with Götz Veser and Gordon Mitchell focused on the multigenerational impact of the energy choices that we are making as a society. Together with participants from the University of Pittsburgh’s Osher Center and students from Carnegie Mellon and Pitt, our classroom comprised three generations. As we examined these issues through multigenerational conversations, dialogues about ethical wills, and speculative fiction, the youngest people in our classroom were the college students.

The beauty of this lawsuit is how it gives voice to even younger citizens — those who would be most affected by climate change. Indeed, the argument hinges upon their very youth.

Yesterday I learned my Erdős number is 4.

-> K. Birgitta Whaley “Monte Carlo studies of grain boundary segregation and ordering”; Journal of Chemical Physics (1992)
-> Julia Kempe “Decoherence-free subspaces for multiple-qubit errors. II. Universal, fault-tolerant quantum computation”; Physical Review A (2001)
-> László Pyber “Permutation groups, minimal degrees and quantum computing”; Groups, Geometry, and Dynamics (2007)
-> Paul Erdős “Vertex coverings by monochromatic cycles and trees”; Journal of Combinatorial Theory (1991)

I’m writing this over a late lunch that is also serving as an early dinner, before teaching this spring’s first session of Energy: Science, Society, and Communication.

I sprinkle salt on my tomato. Each time I remember staying with an acquaintance in Ann Arbor nearly a quarter century ago, being introduced to the idea of salt on fresh tomato slices from a farmer’s market.

I bring the pepper shaker over to join the salt shaker. Each time I remember a friend telling me nearly a quarter century ago how the pair should always be together, passed together, like a couple.

I sign my email “Best wishes”. Each time I remember my undergraduate and graduate research advisors from over three decades ago, who initialed documents “BW” and “KBW”. Ben Widom is one of the finest human beings I have ever known, as well as a great scientist and teacher. I was Birgit Whaley’s first grad student and together we learned what that meant.

Little things.