To Dust You Shall Return

I have been under considerable stress this week, but yesterday something happened which brought me some distraction and peace. My new blackboard arrived.

I have had a problem with responsibilities slipping through the cracks. I am naturally absent-minded. I use Google Calendar to keep track of a ton of things, but the problem with Google Calendar is that it beeps and then goes away. If it beeps while I’m doing something even slightly interesting, I dismiss the alert and forget about it until I hear another beep. When I do this, I don’t realize I’ve done it. I don’t think I can change. It’s part of my nature.

It occurred to me that a blackboard would help. A blackboard will not shut up or disappear. It sits there, glaring at you, politely but firmly, until you do whatever it’s telling you to do. When you finally get it done, you don’t have to push a lot of annoying buttons on a screen. One swipe of the eraser, and it’s gone.

I also wanted a blackboard because…I wanted a blackboard.

I am a former physics instructor. As a grad student, I taught pre-meds and engineers using big dusty blackboards. Which may actually have been green. But still. I grew to like blackboards a great deal. You write whatever you want on them and as soon as you’re done with it, you make it go away. You don’t have to crumple up paper and throw it out. Another plus: no reading glasses.

I have been fooling with STEM stuff for a while, trying to dredge up, and add to, ancient memories of my forgotten studies. I’ve been learning engineering statics and strength of materials. This week, I received a new (ish) copy of a beloved math text: Redheffer’s Differential Equations. My old copy was eaten by ants many years ago. I read a little today, and I plan to keep poking around in it in the future.

I have been using a clipboard and pencils to do problems. This is not a bad way to go about it, but you get tired of throwing out sheet after sheet of paper, and I don’t enjoy all the tedious pencil erasing. I just bought a bunch of kneaded rubber erasers to make life easier, but no matter how you pretty it up, a clipboard isn’t a blackboard.

Another nice thing about a blackboard: it reminds you of your accomplishments. If you do a STEM task in chalk with some degree of intelligence, and you walk away, you will still see it smiling at you from the wall hours later while you’re watching cats or whatever on Youtube.

I thought I was going overboard when I sprang for a 4-foot blackboard, but now that I’ve used it, I wish I had gotten a bigger one. I like it as much as I thought I would, which is saying a lot, and I can see that a bigger one would be even better.

I may buy a second board and put it on the wall by the first one.

Some people like whiteboards. I prefer chalk. Markers go dry when you need them, and anyway, they’re just not as pleasant to use. Besides, chalk is much classier. It’s ancient. It’s a bona fide artistic medium. Michelangelo could walk into my den, pick up the chalk, and get straight to work. He used chalk all the time, so he would know how to make it do what he wanted. Markers? Forget it.

I’ve never understood the whiteboard concept. My first whiteboard class was ninth-grade biology. On my first day at Miami’s best prep school, I walked into the classroom in the hugely expensive, nearly new Math/Physics building, and I saw greasy-looking plastic boards in front of me. They were still considered unusual back then. We talked about them while we waited for class to start. I thought they were interesting, but I never came to like them. I didn’t understand their purpose, and I still don’t.

What is it that whiteboards do better than blackboards? Is chalk dust the problem? It never bothered me. Classrooms with chalkboards aren’t dusty unless the people in charge of mopping drop the ball. Maybe there is some sort of phobia of chalk-induced disease. Chalkitis. Suppurating Chalkosis of the Golgi apparatus.

I’ll look it up.

If the Internet is any guide, there is no reason for whiteboards to exist. I guess it’s one of those things man chose to create simply because he could and he thought it was nifty.

I’ll bet leftists like whiteboards better than chalkboards. They like changing things that don’t need to be changed. “Ban chalk! Stop whitewashing knowledge! Save the chalk deposits!”

Once I got my board screwed to the wall, I got out my chalk, wrote down some things I needed to remember, and did a quick physics problem using the Lagrangian. I chose something really simple, as a nod to my cankered, vestigial skills. I figured out the formula for the force on a pendulum bob, as a function of the angle. I really enjoyed it.

To be strictly accurate, I derived the acceleration, not the force. Sue me.

Hope I didn’t get anything wrong. The result is correct. Twenty years ago, doing this problem would have been like breathing.

I screwed it up the first time around. Skipped a step and ended up with the wrong formula for the height of the pendulum. I didn’t notice at first, because the error mostly fell out when I took the time derivative, and the final result was correct except for a sign error.

After I was done, I wondered how to get to the result everyone in physics is familiar with: the formula for the period of a pendulum. I looked it up, and I found that you have to use the expansion for the sine of an angle and settle for a first-order approximation. Otherwise, the differential equation is too hard. Wikipedia refers to the expansion as the Maclaurin series. I know the sine series by heart, and don’t recall thinking of it that way, but I suppose it must be true. I remember that a Maclaurin series is the special case of a Taylor series, centered at zero, and you can use complex variables and a contour integral to derive the general Taylor series formula. I think.

Man, I used to know some stuff. All I get now when I concentrate are bits and pieces.

I think I’ll need that second board. Might as well double down. I hope this thing is durable. I would hate to buy two boards that didn’t last.

I don’t know if blackboard paint works. If I trusted it, I could buy a 4 by 8 sheet of hardboard and paint it.

My new board has a steel back, so it accepts magnets. Not sure that will be useful, but it’s nice to know.

I hope this board will help me hold it together. I have no help whatsoever, and organization is not my thing.