Credit for Alchemy

In the seventeenth century, there was a shortage of circulating money. One solution was to debase one’s coin, an infamous incident in the prior century being Henry VIII’s replacing the amount of gold and silver with cheaper metals. (Henry had an extravagant lifestyle and also needed to funds his wars.) A decreased influx of precious metals from the Americas and other parts of the world exacerbated the situation. One solution to the problem was to make more gold those cheaper metals via transmutation – the promise of alchemy! Thus, European courts and kings retained the services of alchemists in the hope of improving the state’s financial situation and turn the economy around.

 

I’m learning about this history after stumbling on an article with an intriguing title: “Credit-Money as the Philosopher’s Stone: Alchemy and the Coinage Problem in Seventeenth-Century England.” The author is Carl Wennelind and the citation is History of Political Economy 2003, 35, 234-261. As a chemist who’s interested in history, I’ve read a fair bit about alchemy and the philosopher’s stone. I also discuss the role of the alchemists as forerunners to the chemists and how we define chemical elements, on the first day of my introductory chemistry classes. I had never previously considered the influence it might have had on political economy.

 

Wennelind briefly describes historical landmarks in the alchemical tradition, leading to Francis Bacon and subsequently the Hartlib Circle. I’d never heard of Samuel Hartlib, but apparently his group “served as a link between Gresham College – the first systematic effort in England to apply scientific lessons to the practical affairs of the state and the demands of commercial expansion – and the Royal Society.” Robert Boyle and Benjamin Worsley were members; and the group was known as the “invisible college”, a precursor to the Royal Society’s formation.

 

The alchemists did not succeed in turning cheap metals into gold, despite the efforts of Worsley. Thus, the Hartlib circle turned to the idea of “setting up a land bank that would issue credit-money on the security of the land.” The idea was that “land is the most concrete and stable of commodities” and while you’d think “the banking sector was the most appropriate institution for the development of this kind of credit-money scheme”, Hartlib argued that such “deposit banks” were essentially pawn shops and thus limited in increasing the circulation of money. One member of the Hartlib Circle “advocated for the creation of a merchant bank that would issue promissory notes for domestic circulation” (i.e., essentially paper money in function) by making an analogy to alchemy, even referring to such credit-money as the philosopher’s stone.

 

Another reason why the land bank may be preferable to alchemy was that the money would not be debased if the alchemy was successful and large quantities of gold flooded the market. Land, in this sense, was more concrete than gold at least as a measure of security. Hartlib’s specific idea did not ultimately come to fruition, but by the end of the seventeenth century, the Bank of England was founded to pay for (via credit-money) the building of the British naval fleet. (The close ties between monetary-debt systems and war has been amply argued by David Graeber in his masterful treatise.) Alchemy on the other hand fell further by the wayside, no longer needed by monarchs and business titans. And with the rise of science as a distinct methodological suite, the death knell of alchemy was assured. I give alchemy credit for staying alive as long as it did.

Tallies and Ratios

Where does money come from? The familiar story is that barter comes first. I’m a fisherman. You’re a farmer. We swap some fish for some potatoes. But what if you don’t want fish or I’m tired of potatoes? How do we find the people who have what we want but who also want what we have? And when we do find them, how do you set the exchange rate? One fish for two potatoes? How big are the potatoes? How bony is the fish? There is no end to such questions.

 

The familiar story is mostly bunk, according to David Graeber in his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It’s a sweeping history of debt, money, credit arrangements; but it’s also an evolutionary history of trade, war, slavery, government, banking, and more. (Graeber is an anthropologist; I previously blogged about his latest book here.) Chapter Two of Debt is titled “The Myth of Barter” but it opens with a superb quote by H. L. Mencken that I’ve now memorized because we humans, so-called rational beings, prefer to be lazy and take heuristic shortcuts. Anyway, here’s the quote:

 

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.

 

The familiar (yet wrong) story imagines a stone-age village where individuals who find mutually desirable exchanges resort to barter. This proves unwieldy and so money is introduced with metal coins (for a variety of reasons), and eventually they become cumbersome to carry so we proceeded to paper money and then to credit arrangements which works especially well in our digital age. There’s little evidence for this linear story and most of it is backwards. Credit arrangements, debts, and IOUs show up first. And if some sort of monetary object shows up as a medium of exchange, it’s inevitably between strangers (for one-off transcations) and not among your fellow villagers. Then some sort of government (or tyranny) comes along and tries to capitalize on this by introducing money (coins, salt, or grain) for taxation or other purposes. This is often backed up with the threat of violence. Wars and the breakdown of society lead to urban flight, and it’s then that barter does show up in limited circumstances, but there is a reversion to credit-style arrangements. I’m not doing justice to this panoramic sweep and I highly recommend reading Debt for yourself. (Yes, it’s some 400 pages not counting the notes and index, but it’s an insightful and engaging book.)

 

Graeber divides his historical sweep into several ages, each with their dominant characteristics: “the First Agrarian Empires (3500–800 BC), dominated by virtual credit money… the Axial Age (800 BC – 600 AD) which saw the rise of coinage and a general shift to metal bullion… the Middle Ages (600–1450 AD), which saw a return to virtual credit money… the Age of Capitalist Empires, which began around 1450 with a massive planetary switch back to gold and silver bullion… ended in 1971 when Richard Nixon announced that the U.S. dollar would no longer be redeemable in gold… marked the beginning of a yet another phase of virtual money…” One thing Graeber does well is bring together insights from all over the globe. There are many similarities, but there are also significant differences between different regions.

 

So what is money? Essentially, it’s an abstraction that measures a ratio. The collective “we” (or a tyrant who rules with “might makes right”) agrees on a reference state: let’s say gold. Why gold? From my chemist point of view, it’s quite easy to purify, unlike many other metals that exist as ores (mostly oxides). It’s a relatively soft metal and it’s not hard to melt and reshape it, or even stamp a number or a symbol. You can divide it into small bits such as coins. The Islamic philosopher Ghazali would say that it’s ideal because gold (or silver) is of no use for anything else: “A thing can only be exactly linked to other things if it has no particular special form or feature of its own – for example, a mirror that has no color can reflect all colors. The same is the case with money – it has no purpose of its own, but it serves as medium for the purpose of exchanging goods.”

 

Graeber follows up with the following insight: “Money is thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods, but also one that operates as such only if it stays in constant motion.” It reminds me of another abstraction that we can measure but fluidly exchanges: Energy. Hard to define, but we can keep track of it. A tally of sorts. The Greek word for tally is symbolon. Graeber describes Aristotle using the same word to argue that “coins are merely social conventions”. A tally is symbolic. An abstraction that represents a ratio of exchange. (Interestingly, the Chinese word has a similar origin, which Graeber also ties to the “agreement between Heaven’s appointment and human affairs”.)

 

How does the tally work? You take the object and break it into two pieces. Each person in the agreement takes one piece. These objects could be notched sticks, rings, crockery, clay (“friendship”) tablets, or even a sheet of paper with a written agreement. Doesn’t matter what the object is because it now functions as a symbol of an agreement. These agreements were often IOUs of a sort, i.e., one person is in debt to another and one could call in that debt by presenting your piece to the holder of the other piece. It didn’t even have to be the original holder because the IOUs could move with credit swaps. Graeber, the anthropologist, argues that debt underlies social relationships. What is debt? “[The] peculiar agreement between two equals that they shall no longer be equals, until such time as they become equals once again.” But the impact takes on global and existential significance: “Inevitably, arguments about wealth and markets became arguments about debt and morality, and arguments about debt and morality became arguments about the nature of our place in the universe.”

 

As a chemist who studies the origin of life, I find an uncanny resemblance between Graeber’s evolutionary approach to debt and the chemical evolution of energy transduction. Let me be clear that there are also many differences between humans making agreements about ratios via tallies, and molecules making energy exchanges akin to a circulating currency. Today, the molecular analogy to money is ATP (adenosine triphosphate). It “releases” energy by hydrolyzing ATP (a “downhill” reaction), and this energy can be utilized by other “uphill” biochemical reactions. ATP is regenerated at a cost via other “downhill” biochemical reactions such as when molecular fuels are “burned” for energy.

 

We can keep a tally of this energy quantitatively. That’s what the science of thermodynamics is all about. But that energy is constantly moving around. ATP is not the only molecule that “stores” this energy currency. All molecules do that. Whenever there is a chemical reaction involving making and breaking bonds, there is almost inevitably a difference in energy between the reactants and the products. (One might say that debts are created or repaid in this process.) Tallies (broken objects to be rejoined) invokes the same process at the molecular level. That being said, a subset of molecules have been evolutionarily selected to act as a common currency of sorts, shuttling around and making their exchanges. Besides ATP, you may have encountered NAD, FAD, and other such acronyms, in a biology or biochemistry course.

 

ATP is a particularly interesting case because it plays double duty as a substrate in nucleic acids which function prominently for information storage and retrieval. Are nucleic acid polymers like banks or government-controlled banks? NAD is closely related to ATP in structure. So is the ubiquitous signaling molecule cAMP. But before the establishment of ATP and its close cousins as the de facto currency shuffler (among disparate parts of the cell which were previously strangers to each other), was there something akin to stone age virtual credit and IOUs among related (familial) molecules? Here’s where I think Christian De Duve’s thioester world is attractive. The core of metabolism involving a small subset of molecules containing just carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, has closely related cousins that substitute sulfur for oxygen. Not a lot of sulfur, mind you. And since sulfur is just below oxygen in the same column of the periodic table, you might expect similar molecular structure and chemistry. The origins of metabolism could be envisioned as family and neighbors exchanging energy to do what they want to do (chemically speaking). But how did that evolve into today’s metabolism and molecular currency? Well, that’s the zillion-dollar question!

 

I’m doing my small part to figure out this conundrum, but sometimes one gets so steeped in the minutiae and forgets to look at the big picture and find inspiration from outside sources. That may be why I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Debt. The conceptual ideas of tallies and ratios, and Graeber’s evolutionary framework in telling the story, resonate with the problems I’m working on. Debt may play a key role in the inner workings of life, governed by the rules of thermodynamics, constrained by kinetics, but with plenty of room for creative interplay as energy flows through our planet from the sun to the deepness of space. New molecular systems are created to capture and harness that energy, which led to organisms doing the same thing today on an unprecedented scale. But perhaps I’m simplifying things too much. Let’s remember Mencken’s dictum.

 

For every subtle and complicated question, there is a perfectly simple and straightforward answer, which is wrong.

Rule, Mammalia

Dinosaurs loom large in the archaeology of eons ago. But the story of mammals can be traced back to that era. A readable romp through millions of years of evolution is provided by paleontologist Steve Brusatte in his latest book, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. The story begins over 300 million years ago with a split between the ancestors of reptiles (diapsids) and mammals (synapsids). In the heyday of the dinosaurs, tiny mammals have proliferated, running around and getting their food while avoiding being stepped on or eaten by their larger reptilian cousins. They burrow, they hunt at night, and have poor color vision. But then an asteroid comes along, causes massive global environmental change, and the mammals rise to conquer the earth.

 

What makes a mammal? The name comes from the mammary glands. Nutritious food for the young. We are also characterized by fur and hair. Apparently, woolly mammoths sported many different colors, somewhat like the hairs of our human heads. And one characteristic that I hadn’t thought about much, but Brusatte goes into significant detail, are the three bones that make up the ear. You don’t find these in present-day reptiles or in birds, the descendants of the dinosaurs.

 

I had not counted on the importance of dentition in tracing the evolution of mammals, although as someone who has played Bios Megafauna, perhaps I should have paid more attention. Brusatte remedies the gaps in my knowledge with his extensive discussion of the size and shape of teeth and the diets of our many mammalian ancestors. I admit to skimming some of these parts, but otherwise I found the book to be engaging and very readable. There are creatures familiar to me, and others I had never heard of that were strange in more ways than one.

 

What stands out in the evolution of the mammals from the Eocene to the present day is the key role played by climate change. As temperature, humidity (or aridity), and oxygen levels alter the landscape and its flora, sources of sustenance change and wreak havoc on the food web. Creatures have to adapt or face extinction. Some succeed, others fail. The kings and apex predators of yesteryear have given way to the new ruler of Mammalia, us human beings. But we are now entering a season where global temperatures are changing faster than they ever have. Will we adapt? Or is this our twilight? What will a future archaeologist or perhaps an extra-terrestial have to say about our rise and reign? Will it simply be a blip in our planet’s evolutionary history? Will life retreat back to the ocean?

 

The largest creature that has ever lived on our planet is alive today. The blue whale. Greatest denizen of the oceans and a member of Mammalia. Will they survive the latest onslaught? Who will be the new ruler of the waves?

Vaporware

I’ve been thinking about the evolution of textbooks and materials, from physical materials to digital in-the-cloud. We’ve heard it said that once something is on the internet, you can’t get rid of it. Perhaps it lurks in some dark corner like a cockroach, ever-ready to be a pest when the environment is suitable. But you can’t always find what you’re looking for. And if there’s an opportunity for monetization, gatekeepers will establish themselves to collect the toll for passage.

 

A little over two decades ago, when I started my present job as a chemistry professor, teaching materials were similar to when I was in college. We had physical textbooks, and homework was done physically with pen and paper, submitted, and graded by hand. When teaching upper division courses, I could remind students to look over things they had seen in their lower division courses, and even quote chapter and verse if needed. Students who were majors did not sell their G-Chem textbooks right after finishing the course. The market for used textbooks was much smaller and typically involved the college bookstore. I didn’t sell my chemistry textbooks after the cold hard cash I had to fork out. I thought they were expensive then, but they are ridiculously priced now. (I did sell my other books as I was graduating.)

 

Today, none of my G-Chem students has a physical textbook. Publishers have figured out that what professors want is not to have to grade homework. Hence the rise of the online homework systems. If you have a system the professors like, they will go for it, and along with that the associated textbooks. The quality of the textbook has become less important than the streamlining of the homework system. No muss, no fuss, is the selling point. The pricing system is a package deal: choose the homework system, and the digital textbook is included for a small fee. It’s a rental, of course. Students only have access to the materials for one semester (typically costing $50, and most of that cost is for the homework system). And after the semester is over, access disappears. It's vaporware!

 

Now, one could purchase a physical textbook for keeps. But that’s very expensive! Even a digital textbook for keeps (and all sorts of copy-protection so you can’t distribute) is expensive. Renting the digital textbook without the homework system is almost as expensive as the aforementioned package deal. For instructors who care about price points but who also don’t want to grade homework, the vaporware package costs the least to the student. All this is positively packaged as “Inclusive Access” checking the appropriate feel-good boxes that you’re making some sort of good ethical choice.

 

I don’t deny that working on problems (via homework and problem sets) is a crucial part of learning chemistry. But the textbook has become secondary, and students no longer know how to get the most out of reading their textbook. It’s possible that the quality of textbook content is going down anyway since they’re no longer what gets scrutinized by professors. This is what vaporware has done. And we professors have bought into it because we don’t want to be writing and grading problem sets by hand. (I’ve yet to try GradeScope, which I think might cut down some of this work.) We’ve outsourced the work to the automated bot which claims to provide feedback cheerfully and repeatedly without complaint. But I’m less sanguine about the feedback quality especially when it comes to the important conceptual parts of chemistry. (A bot can easily grade for a numerical answer, but that’s not what is most important.)

 

My partial solution to this problem is to teach the students to annotate their own work. But it takes work to get there, for both me and the student. I also assign problem sets outside of the online homework system in my smaller honors G-Chem classes because the grading is much less onerous when you have a smaller class. And I can ask more interesting and more challenging questions to get the students to think a little harder and deeper about the course material. So right now I have a hodgepodge, neither-here-nor-there, system that also includes the vaporware. I haven’t yet rebelled and gone my own way because I teach one or two out of a dozen G-Chem sections offered. And if you do things very differently from other sections of the same course, that can cause its own problems.

 

But maybe vaporware is not so bad. At the lower division level, you can find what you need on the Internet to review if you needed to. Accessible and free. But possibly error-riddled. The challenge is plowing through the chaff to find the gems. And most of my G-Chem students are not going to be chemistry majors. No fuss, no muss. Just because I’ve found my chemistry textbooks useful and I’ve kept them doesn’t mean that the same is true for others. In fact it’s likely untrue for the majority of students who take G-Chem. And vaporware means not having to carry around heavy physical stuff every time you have to move. And young people will be moving a lot these days. Gone are the days where you parked yourself in one place at one job for the rest of your life. And our lives are ephemeral in the grand scheme of things. Vaporware reminds me of that fact.

Nostalgia with Nox

The last time I bought a computer game was the 1980s for the Apple II. That long spell was broken two months ago when I decided to purchase Nox Archaist, a new game released by less than two years ago, programmed so you could play it on an Apple II. The company that made the game is aptly named the 6502 Workshop.

 

One of the reasons why I haven’t played computer games in so many years is that my training (as a computational chemist) and my job (as a professor) mostly involves sitting in front of a computer. I prefer not to spend my leisure time in front of the screen, and hence for many years I have preferred physical board games and card games instead of the virtual experience. Although many of these board games have been ported so you can play them in the cloud, I have never done so. I was tempted during the pandemic to consider it, but never actually followed through.

 

Five months ago, I stumbled on A Dark Room. And I did so because I had been thinking about interactive fiction and its potential use in education and learning. I could perhaps trace this to immersing myself (three years ago) in a board game, 7th Continent, that evoked the old days of choose-your-own-adventure books. Sometime during the pandemic, I did indulge in some screen time at Project AON, going through the first five books. (I never owned physical copies of these books back in the 1980s, my brother had borrowed them from a friend back then.) Reliving the nostalgia was fun! I had forgotten most of the story so it felt fresh. The books aren’t very long, and each adventure takes less than an hour. I even went through the next seven books in the series (new to me), but then lost interest.

 

Back in the 1980s, I was enamored by computer games. The Apple II games that held my attention the most were Ultima IV and Ultima V. These were marvelous realms of story-telling, that far exceeded anything else that was out on the market at the time. I admit that I spent very little actual money on games back then since my only access was to pirated copies, which had been pre-hacked and had no accompanying manual. Eight summers ago, I indulged in my first experience of Apple II nostalgia by replaying Ultima IV, and created my first blog chronicling that adventure. (The blog is only 23 posts, one for each of the sessions I spent playing the game.)

 

With lots of hermit time during the recent pandemic, I seriously considered replaying Ultima V, but didn’t know if I was really up to slogging my way through it. I remember the overall story arc, but not much in terms of the details, and the fun part of not remembering is rediscovering the clues by talking to townsfolk in the game. But I also had a vague recollection of the tedious parts: battle was irritatingly slowed down by “aiming”, the spell system was annoying, and my Olde English Rune reading is extremely rusty. (Back in the day as a Tolkien fan, I could easily read them.) I remember the game space being larger with an Underworld as big as the surface of Britannia, but I also vaguely recall that it was a very tedious slog. But I spent some time reading about the history of the Ultima series and how the games changed over time. I was not drawn to the newer ones, nor the very old ones (although I’ve played Ultima II and III, there isn’t the remotest desire to revisit them). That’s when I stumbled across Nox Archaist.

 

Actually, that stumble happened almost a year ago over winter break. I watched some videos and found the game intriguing. It looked like the designers had thought very carefully about what worked and what didn’t from the older Ultima games, and chose the best parts to include in Nox Archaist within the limits of what the Apple II hardware could handle. I read some reviews (both positive and negative) on the internet. I was tempted. But did I want to really put down some electronic cash on this? And then I’d feel the need to spend time playing it if I made the cash investment. Would it be worth it? I dithered. The spring semester came and went. During the summer, I was finally able to visit my parents in the home I grew up. (With international travel restrictions, quarantines, and ever-changing rules, I had not made a trip home since the pandemic began.) Maybe it was the nostalgia of being home, seeing my siblings, and chatting about old times. (The old Apple II clone died a long time ago.) But when I returned, I decided to give Nox Archaist a whirl.

 

It took two months, playing mostly on the weekends and on the occasional evening before I completed the game. I estimate spending 50-60 hours of mostly enjoyable playtime (with occasional small frustrations of the good kind, mapmaking included). Even when I was not playing, I would spend time looking at the maps and my notebook and puzzling over quests I was stuck on. Did Nox Archaist deliver the nostalgic experience I was looking for? An emphatic YES is my answer! I will be careful to avoid any spoilers in the game so I will stay somewhat vague in what follows. Let me tell you what I really liked about Nox Archaist.

 

The controls are very intuitive to a former Ultima player and it captures the best features from both Ultima IV and V. First, let me say that I thought the game was very well paced. While I did read the manual beforehand (which I never had access to in the 1980s), the game starts off tutorial-like to help the newbie. There are little starter-quests that help you build experience. Nox also streamlines some of the annoying parts of Ultima. You don’t have to worry about stocking up on food. Conversations with townsfolk are significantly streamlined so you don’t waste time guessing prompt words. The automated aiming system in battle especially for ranged weapons takes away the tedium, as does a quick combat option.

 

While there are fewer townes to visit, and I think overall fewer people to talk to, there is a range of mini-quests that keep the game interesting. If you’re not powerful enough to tackle a big baddie, you can work on a mini-quest. The game even keeps track of these for you, although any experienced Ultima player would take more extensive notes keeping track of conversation details you’ve had with various NPCs. The day/night time-tracking of Ultima V gives realism to the town life (not present in Ultima IV) and since camping only restores three-quarters of your hit points and magic points, sleeping the night at inns becomes a common occurrence. Unlike Ultima where I regularly roamed around at night, in Nox I was often either camping or staying at an inn for the night. (They’re much cheaper than going to a healer.) While I had to adjust to magic points not slowly restoring themselves just by roaming around, I feel this gives a little more realism to the game.

 

Making good maps is simply part of an Ultima player’s toolkit. I actually found this aspect to be fun while playing Nox even though it slowed me down. I liked the choice not to have 3-D perspective dungeons and keep the 2-D view in the Depths of Vacuous. The network in the depths of Level 2 was particularly interesting when I discovered its vastness. A good map is very helpful! And although there were fewer townes, the castles and keeps had multiple levels including a basement giving one lots of interesting areas to explore

 

I very much enjoyed the openness of the adventure. While, there is a mainline quest to the game, there are enough side-adventures to explore and artifacts to acquire that do not prevent you from finishing the game even if you miss or skip them. This is unlike the old adventure games of the 1980s where you had to get all the special items (and sometimes in a particular order) to win. And if you missed one, you were stuck, stuck, stuck. I didn’t know the “passwords” in at least two places when exploring the depths, but this wasn’t a problem. (I assume they were to acquire some interesting artifacts that I missed.) I also found what seemed like special items that I didn’t know how to use (mostly gems), but that didn’t stop me from completing the game. And if you’re not strong enough to take on a big baddie (boss-level enemy), in some cases, you can still get what you need to proceed with your mainline quest. This was very refreshing!

 

I liked the more detailed stats on weapons, armor, and skills. It was cool that you could train in five different skills (a good way to use excess gold), but you didn’t have to do so. Much preferable to Ultima’s zap yourself with a magic ball system. I also liked that you weren’t forced to have an optimally built party of adventurers stats-wise. While I did take some time to think about which stats to focus on (or diversify), I didn’t have everything planned out from the beginning and I adapted as the game proceeded. My party ended up being relatively well-balanced overall, I think, even though they couldn't necessarily use the topmost level best weapons or magic spells. It seems there are many paths to victory, once again emphasizing the openness of the gameplay.

 

Let me close by repeating how much I enjoyed the pace of the game. I felt that the timing of encountering challenges, enemies, and big baddies fit very closely to the level of my adventurers. When I first explored a new area, the battles were tough. It seemed that I had leveled up just enough for the new exploration to be a challenge, whether it be on a new island in Wynmar or a new level in the depths, or a big baddie. In some cases, I had to live again to fight another day. In others, I prevailed but it was a close call. My party members leveled up to the penultimate stage as I journeyed my way into the depths for the second-to-last mainline quest. After finishing that, they reached their highest level just before the last big baddie. When I made what I thought was the final assault, I was completely trounced at first. But after ruminating on some prior clues, I figured out the different approach needed. Except for this, and being stuck on a much earlier quest because I had forgotten that you could modulate your voice level in conversation (crucial in just a few cases), the pace of the game was excellent. I was neither way too weak to face my enemies (although sometimes I wasn’t strong enough and had to level up and come back) or way too strong to mop up a big baddie too easily. It was as if the game was designed perfectly for a player like me moving through the game at my idiosyncratic pace! Also, there are also many humorous bits in the game including the final screen!

 

I am very much looking forward to the Nox expansion anticipated in the spring, although I probably won’t get to it until the summer. For those of you who enjoyed Ultima IV or V back in the day, I highly recommend Nox Archaist. For me, it was a blast! I’d say the pacing was better than the Ultima games, without the annoying bits, and I liked the open feel and side-quests that were optional (but fun)! I don’t know if a much younger gamer who started out with more advanced graphics and action in their games would enjoy Nox, but I hope the game does well and that the folks at 6502 Workshop are able to produce more gems like this! And maybe a decade from now, I will replay Nox for nostalgia!

Bad Old School?

If you’re a college-level chemistry instructor, the big news that has gone around in a flash stems from a New York Times article today titled: “At N.Y.U., students were failing organic chemistry. Who was to blame?” NYU dismissed professor Maitland Jones, Jr., after a student petition submitted a petition that the O-Chem class was “too hard, blaming Dr. Jones for their poor tests scores.”

 

I was surprised to see Jones’ name because I recognized it immediately reading the first sentence of the article. He’s known among other things for his organic chemistry textbook. Jones retired from Princeton over 15 years ago and has been teaching as an adjunct at NYU. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t need the money and that he’s doing it because he enjoys teaching and cares about the education of students. One doesn’t write a textbook, continue to update it, and continue to work on new teaching materials, if one doesn’t love teaching. And if your textbook has gone through multiple additions, it’s probably not bad, and likely quite good.

 

Despite the lengthiness of the article, we don’t really know what happened here. I expect more pertinent details to be revealed over time. Was Jones doing such a terrible job teaching as the dean claimed when referring to teaching evaluations? Maybe. But maybe students complained because they were getting poor grades on their exams and were very concerned that it would affect their medical school applications. Jones says that students weren’t coming to class, weren’t watching the videos he had made, and seemed ill-prepared. Were they? Maybe. But maybe Jones was a hard-ass old fogey who was doing a poor job. I don’t know – there’s not enough information to tell.

 

The Times article says the following: “The entire controversy seems to illustrate a sea of change in teaching, from an era when professors set the bar and expected the class to meet it, to the current more supportive, student-centered approach.” It then quotes some chemistry department professors, essentially saying that Dr. Jones teaches in the old-school way, and hasn’t “changed his style or methods”. That worries me. There’s an unspoken assumption that old-school is bad and that it’s a less student-centered approach (which isn’t defined clearly either). Within my own department, I suspect I would be labeled old-school, although I don’t think my department views this as a negative. But students may see this as a bad thing. I do have a reputation for being “hard” and my sections of G-Chem are less popular with students. Compared to my colleagues, my G-Chem grade distributions aren’t too different although I suspect they are marginally lower than the average. (I grade on an absolute scale; there's no curve.)

 

As to whose fault low test scores are, I think that grades are earned, but the instructor also sets the exam and the grading scale. There’s no easy absolute clear-cut way to define what counts as low or high. Perception matters a lot and colors the whole situation. In the Jones case, it is clear that a number of the students perceived the O-Chem class to be way too hard and the grades to be too low relative to “the time and effort [the students] put into the class”. John Beckman, NYU’s senior vice president for public affairs and strategic communications is quoted as saying: “Do these courses really need to be punitive to be rigorous?” I think he misuses the words punitive and rigorous here, but I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he got misquoted or some context was left out. That being said, I’m unimpressed with the university’s response both from the dean and from the senior vice president. But I should not be too quick to judge. Let’s see how the details unfold. And for the record: old-school is not necessarily bad or good. It depends on the context.