Today was the first day of classes and Convocation at the College. It was great to see all our students back. I saw a couple of our Helpdesk students working hard to clear the tickets even after we closed! I wanted to write about a few things with no particular connections to each other…

Social Media Problems

A student applied and was admitted to Univ of Rochester. Then, like all teenagers, she wrote about it in Facebook! It turns out that someone from the private high school she attended who saw this information on Facebook found this to be a little disconcerting, because the administrators do not remember the student asking for grades or recommendations be sent to Univ of Rochester. Anyways, upon further investigation, the University Admissions officers revealed that she claimed that she was home schooled and used a transcript service that helps home schooled children to send transcripts and sent in recommendation letters too. Once they found the real scoop, they rescinded her admission!

Along the same lines, in June, Harvard rescinded admissions to 10 students for a “a group exchange of racist and sexually offensive Facebook messages”.

One way to look at it is that Social Media brought out the true colors of people that are otherwise hard to gauge! Tough luck for those students whose admissions were rescinded!

Eclipse Problems

Despite the fact that there was ample warning and advice to not look at the sun directly without the certified Eclipse glasses, apparently some folks looked directly at the sun during partial eclipse (including our president!) and needed to be treated for possible damage to the eyes. One of them was a rapper. And then some others used suntan lotion in their eyes and were treated for it. With so much publicity on TV, social media and other channels on the precautions to take and how to properly watch the eclipse,  I just can’t believe that people will do this. I thought the lotion was more expensive than the Eclipse glasses! On the other hand, may be they couldn’t get their hands on a pair of eclipse glasses or they wanted to finish the last bits of the lotion 🙂

I was fortunate to be able to view the partial Eclipse at Wellesley thanks to some of our colleagues willing to share their eclipse glasses. It was such an awesome sight. The precision of prediction was remarkable, though the motions of these celestial bodies are very well understood now. There were so many learning opportunities – like… the sun moving from east to west while the eclipse was moving from west coast to east coast!

Water problems

Hurricane Harvey was such a powerful hurricane that has caused unbelievable damage to Houston and surrounding areas. It is so scary that life can take such a sudden turn in a few hours – people losing everything they have and having to start over is such a scary thought. And now we await Irma to see what devastation it is going to cause. The technologies again are being extremely useful in predicting their various possible paths and probabilities. Unfortunately if you are the affected party, the probability doesn’t help you much.

Obviously many places still do not have access to internet. However, local institutions have moved their essential services to the cloud will thank their stars because local data centers and damages associated with them are either eliminated or minimized. We still don’t have a clear picture of the damages to know whether some of the local healthcare providers lost any valuable information (they are notorious for running everything locally).

There have been heavy rains and flooding in India, Nepal and Bangladesh that is creating havoc and millions are affected there too. For those of us who believe in global warming, some of these occurrences seem to be the result of it and one would think that there is an urgency to do something about it. Of course, with the current administration appointing global warming deniers in powerful positions, we seem to have gone backwards or stalled, like Hurricane Harvey, which, as a result of slow movement or stalling, dumped as much as 36 inches of rain in a short span in some places causing more destruction. There may be a lesson in all of this!

Nuclear Problem

On Sunday night, I was not able to sleep well because I had eaten way too much during the dinner with friends. I picked up my phone to check if there is any email or worthwhile tweets, but was startled to see six breaking news items about North Korea detonating a hydrogen bomb and associated stories. As many others stated, I did feel a moment of panic about the response from the US, especially our president. I am glad that it did not escalate immediately to something that is not good.

When I was a grad student, I remember engaging in a heated conversation with another grad student who was lecturing me on how it was a bad idea for India to have nuclear capabilities, while arguing that it was OK for US to build its capacity. Good old days! Such a complicated subject, which seems to have gotten out of hand.

Well, I know what you are thinking. How can it be random thoughts if they all are “problems”? Right, so I went back and added (not so) to my title.