13 thoughts on “Mother’s Day at Harvard”

  1. @phil after you moved to FL , you have been writing and pointing out how bad MA is. But you spend most of your life and had a very successful career there. Why didn’t you move to a better place long time back and could have even more successful career. What made you stick around in that place.

    Reply

    • Hi Redneck,

      (Are you related to Neo? I find myself liking the fusion culture around here.)

      Good question, will be interesting to hear back. Could it be something to do with the fuel/air ratio of the Mask. Righteous?

      Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.
      — Matthew 5:6

    • @Ordinary Average Guy . I am not related Neo. I am from Phil’s neck of woods(Tampa). Based on Phil’s writings it looks like FL is a near utopia compared to MA. Never been to MA, so i am curious.

    • RNH: Nice name! Miami, FL, does have great weather while being on the EST time zone. I went to Miami for new year’s and it was very nice compared to the cold in Cambridge.

    • RH: With the benefit of hindsight, of course, almost any of us would be better off having moved to Santa Clara to sweep floors at NVIDIA when the Boston software/hardware industry fizzled in 2000. But how was a Boston-based EECS nerd supposed to know that everywhere other than Silicon Valley/San Francisco would become irrelevant?

      Inertia, such as a circle of friends, is powerful. Humans have a tough time noticing gradual degradation. The average house in Maskachusetts looks like a teardown from the perspective of a Texan or Floridian, but the owner who has been there for 20 years doesn’t notice the accumulated wear and tear until the roof starts to leak. A friend who moved to The Woodlands (north of Houston) characterizes Massachusetts as “dilapidated”, but he didn’t notice that until he came back.

      A conservative in a liberal-run state might not notice that his or her rulers have moved to the left because it happened gradually (“the US left was 31.5% more socially liberal in 2024 compared to 1988, while the US right was only 2.8% more conservative.” — https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/political-division-united-states ). The righteous sign forests and bumper sticker mosaics that are now common all over Massachusetts were things that only crazy people did until 2016. Even then, it was one sign per year that people added to their yard until 2020 when the trend accelerated and people would add two or three per year (Black Lives Matter, No Human is Illegal, Stay Home Save Lives). “Gay rights” became “LGBTQ allyship” and then “2SLGBTQQIA+”. People who said “I think it is okay if two guys who met in the bathhouse later go to Family Court for a divorce lawsuit regarding who gets the Barbra Streisand albums” eventually had to sign up to support taxpayer-funded life-changing hormones and surgery on teenagers. Those surgeries weren’t foreseeable to someone who lived in Massachusetts in 2004 when same-sex marriage began. Someone who agreed that marijuana possession shouldn’t be a criminal offense probably didn’t foresee that one day half of the billboards and in-city advertising would be for recreational marijuana.

      The native-born didn’t notice that they had been replaced until they’d already been replaced. (In Maskachusetts, the percentage of foreign-born residents was steady at 9% from 1970-1990. It rose to 12% in 2000, then 15% in 2010, then 19% in 2024.)

      On the flip side, it is tough to appreciate the magic of Florida until it has been experienced. I almost never touch anything that is more than 30 years old (house, sidewalk, street, store). The neighbors all wave if they’re driving or say hello if they’re walking. Everyone loves dogs (about one third of people in Massachusetts, and not just the Muslims, would get angry if approached by our golden retriever; in Florida you never have to warn an appliance delivery guy about a dog being in the house because they’re always happy to interact with one). I can almost always drive where I want to drive without getting stuck in traffic. When there is traffic, people gracious take turns and let others go (I noticed the absence of this courtesy while driving my neighbor’s Mini around Cambridge and the nearby suburbs a couple of weeks ago).

    • RH: There are plenty of people far smarter and far richer than I who took longer than they should have to move. Ken Griffin paid taxes to Chicago and Illinois to help the politicians there achieve all of the progressive dreams with which he disagreed right up until March 2022. It was clear what the majority of Chicagoans wanted in 2019 when they elected Lori Lightfoot. What was unclear to him about “The Progressive Black Lesbian Who Could Be Chicago’s Mayor” — https://www.advocate.com/politics/2019/2/20/progressive-black-lesbian-who-could-be-chicagos-mayor ?

      I don’t think that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_M._Ross is aligned with the plain-for-all-to-see progressive trend that has been going on in NYC for a long time. Yet the billionaire didn’t move to Palm Beach until coronapanic, which has resulted in about $10 billion in new investment in West Palm Beach.

      I actually have quite a few friends who are “Vote Blue No Matter Who” Democrats in Maskachusetts who say that they want to move to New Hampshire (not Florida, God forbid!) because they don’t agree with the spending priorities of Maura Healey, Michelle Wu, et al. They are opposed to government-sponsored racism (DEI), taxpayer-funded everything for migrants, gender surgeries for teenagers, etc. But they stay and pay for all of that every day. One guy is imprisoned there by his wife, who works as a doctor at a Harvard-affiliated hospital. One is stuck because he wants his youngest child to finish high school (not sure why; his older kid was rejected almost everywhere that he applied, most likely due to the Boston suburbs mailing address).

    • RH: You could flip this around and ask why there is even a single Democrat left in Florida. The state doesn’t provide any of the things that Democrats say are essential to life, e.g., abortion care at all stages of pregnancy and for any reason, gender surgeries on teenagers, a warm welcome for the undocumented (instead: Alligator Alcatraz!), refusal of cooperation with ICE, etc. Because of the Republicans who rushed in during and after coronapanic, Florida is no longer a swing state and there is no realistic hope of a Democrat come-back. (see https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/30/upshot/voters-moving-polarization.html for how people moving to Florida are almost all Republicans).

      Donald Trump, whom we are informed is a convicted rapist, a murderer of a 12-year-old girl (with his friend Emmanuel Goldstein), a dictator who would end democracy, and 100% corrupt, was selected by a majority of Floridians in 2020 (“the largest margin for any presidential election in Florida since 2004”). If humans have agency, shouldn’t we have expected all Democrats to be gone from Florida within 3 months after this event? It was very easy to sell a house in Florida in 2021. Why didn’t Democrats sell?

      (The answer can’t be because Democrats had no money and were on welfare; welfare in Florida pays only about 40% as well as working a median-wage job, compared to over 100% in a lot of Democrat-run states, such as easily-accessible MA and NY. See Table 4 in https://www.cato.org/white-paper/work-versus-welfare-trade-2013 )

    • Steve: Thanks for this. So beautiful! I love the doublespeak, e.g., “two years after her resignation”. In what other world can a person “resign” and also get a weekly paycheck?

  3. I had to look:

    > Cultural fusion theory (CFT) describes the process that people, typically immigrants, undergo when they come in contact with a new environment and culture…The newcomer continuously learns and integrates new cultural knowledge into their pre-existing culture, thus adapting to a new culture but not abandoning their previous culture.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Fusion_Theory

    Was thinking they should rename Mass Ave. to Mask Ave. as a nod to Phil, his contributions were so important. I’m also liking the refreshingly brief post today. I suppose I’m making up for that vacuum.

    Not much else need be said about having two mommies on mommie’s day, that picture says it all. So charming and quaint, Norman Rockwell stuff. Short too. My wife noted she thought it was currently impossible to have two biological mommies. I think I have seen a donor egg with DNA replaced with another man and woman’s combined DNA for a three-way. Don’t know if that counts as “two mommies”. Maybe someday they’ll just eliminate men (like we used to read about in science fiction.) Don’t we need a Gamete Donor Day? Make a little shrine of flowers and cards at the IVF clinic.

    Reply

  4. C’mon man…Wellfleet’s nice.
    Just out of town on Chequesset Neck Road there was this shed whose owner had plastered it with all these hand drawn bumper sticker-type signs & manifestos, We Believe blah blaah blah. Pretty funny actually, sort of the signage equivalent of ‘old man yelling at clouds’.
    I think the township got on him for unpermitted billboard violation or somesuch.

    “when the Boston software/hardware industry fizzled in 2000. But how was a Boston-based EECS nerd supposed to know that everywhere other than Silicon Valley/San Francisco would become irrelevant?”

    When Sun Micro/Oracle clobbered Symbolics/BBN?
    OT whatever happened to Japan’s FifthGen project?

    Reply

    • > OT whatever happened to Japan’s FifthGen project?

      Off topic, my favorite topic.

      > The FGCS Project did not meet with commercial success for reasons similar to the Lisp machine companies and Thinking Machines. The highly parallel computer architecture was eventually surpassed in speed by less specialized hardware (for example, Sun Microsystems workstations and Intel x86 machines).

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Generation_Computer_Systems

      It only had a ten year time frame, starting in 1982.

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