u/Roger_Freedman_Phys

Welcome to all new members of the Gaucho community! As Fall Quarter approaches, UCSB faculty here with some recommendations to make your experience here less stressful, more productive, and more fun!

1. Find your classrooms in advance — and learn where the bike paths are.

UCSB is a large campus, with an area of more than one and a half square miles. So it’s not surprising that every fall on the first day of classes, you’ll find students anxiously wandering around campus trying to locate where their class is meeting — and finally arriving ten minutes or more after the class has started, wondering what important information they’ve missed.

The way to avoid being one of those students is to find your classrooms in advance, before the first day of classes on Thursday, September 24. I recommend these steps:

(i) First consult the official interactive UCSB campus map (https://www.map.ucsb.edu/) and search for the buildings where your classes are located. The abbreviations used for building names used in your schedule on GOLD can be confusing, but you can decode them using this list provided by computer science professor Phill Conrad: https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~pconrad/cs56/11W/lectures/01.03/locationcodes.htm

(ii) Pay a visit to each building to locate your classroom. The best times to do this are on a weekday between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m., when the buildings will be open. In a multistory building, rooms with numbers beginning with “1” will be on the first floor, rooms with numbers beginning with “2” will be on the second floor, and so on.

(iii) Note how long it takes to get to each classroom from your residence, then add some extra time for the first day of classes. (It always takes longer than you think.)

(iv) As you're walking around campus in the relative calm before classes start, take note of where the bike paths are. (These are marked by yellow lines on the pavement. You'll find a complete map of campus bike paths at https://bikes.as.ucsb.edu/campus-bike-map/) Sadly, there are always injuries that occur in the first weeks of school, often because bikers don't know how to navigate roundabouts or pedestrians forget that they're wandering onto a busy bike path. Don't let these injuries happen to you!

Follow these recommendations, and you're on your way to being well prepared for the first day of classes!

More recommendations to come!

(Thanks to u/Radiant-Molasses-703 and u/ccsfaculty for great tips about the bike paths!)

‘“When young people systematically use AI to complete schoolwork or other thinking tasks, they are not offloading skills they already possess. They are shortcutting the process of developing those skills in the first place,” wrote Rebecca Winthrop, a senior fellow and director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution.’

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2026-09-14/cognitive-stunting-potential-threat-generative-ai-poses-childrens-brains

The Johnny Hazard comic strip for Sunday, September 24, 1944 served to introduce the general public to the Boeing B-29, which had begun bombing Japan from China three months earlier. (B-29 operations against Japan from new bases in the Marianas would begin in November.)

Artist and writer Frank Robbins (1917-1994) worked on comics from 1939 until 1979. In addition to creating Johnny Hazard (which ran from 1944 to 1977), he did important work for both DC and Marvel. (His work as a writer for Batman helped establish the dark, brooding character that we know today.)

From Dr. Dakotah Tyler (@dr.starkid on Instagram), who earned his Ph.D. at UCLA.

So Runway 4/22 is closed to aircraft with wingspan more than 50 feet, unless the wingspan is also less than 49 feet.

Does that mean it’s OK to land your Grumman S-2 tracker (wingspan 70+ feet) on that runway if you immediately fold the wings (which reduces the wingspan to 27 feet, http://www.grummantracker.com/wingfold.htm)?!? 🤔

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tyler Jagt (summarized at https://www.thecollegefix.com/english-professor-warns-todays-students-cannot-read-or-focus-on-lengthy-assignments/, with a link therein to the original article) describes the author’s experiences with current university students. An excerpt:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

“When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.”

Have you had similar experiences with your own students?

A lot of bad has happened to American science over the last year. But nothing comes even close to what’s about to happen if we don’t speak out in opposition to the OMB rule changes!

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (U. of New Hampshire) explains here: https://news.chanda.science/archive/its-the-end-of-american-science-as-we-know-it/

For the past several days a banner-towing Cessna 152 has been spending six to seven hours a day orbiting a golf course in Palm Desert, California (between KPSP and KTRM):

https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/N24242

There is no special event taking place at this golf course.

For those of you that tow banners, is this a normal sort of mission to be assigned to you?

Many thanks in advance for your responses.