A book rep stopping by my office last month was asking why I'm not using their textbook for my course like the other instructors at the school. I told him that I looked up what they were charging at our bookstore and decided that that was at least $100 more than the useful value to the students. Then I said I was unimpressed that a professor of the caliber that Stewart is supposed to be took upwards of 7 iterations to apparently get Calculus right, I mentioned that if anything the last four editions should have been at least half the cost of the first 3.

He asked what book I was using and I said "none". He was floored. I explained that I write detailed notes to the class and put them on a wiki page I maintain for the course. Students then go in and can even edit the notes (if they find a typo) and maintain their own pages worth of examples which they maintain in groups of four. Overall the students have a textbook that is: an ebook, covers class, freely links to other material, includes videos relevant to the class, includes program files and examples, includes links to what the other students in the class are doing. And the total cost to the students is free, the cost to the department is just the 10 year old computer I rescued from a storage closet to host the wiki on.

Best part is next time I teach the course the wiki notes will be largely done and I'll just be able to focus on adding to them. Plus I'll have all the old students pages worth of notes and examples to include as needed.

He was stunned and just quietly slipped out of my office while I was showing him all the pages I had written.

While I'm not an expert, I speculate that potential applications would include: using a similar model to study cilial action in human lungs or gut; developing of advanced fabrics which shed water more efficiently; developing algorithms for robotics (I'm thinking in particular military applications) to dry themselves in the wild. The beauty of science to me is that someone answers what appears to be a relatively innocuous and useless question and often can't tell where it might lead. We (often) can't just dive in and answer the most difficult question first, we start with a simple model of a related phenomena and then build up to the real (and useful) examples. I like this problem here, because in practice it does seem that biological systems have spent the eons developing the best solutions to complicated problems (basically through trial and error) so they have a model whose solution agrees with the one found by the biological system. I see it as a win, science has advanced, even if it was only a micro-step.

I agree. Tenure gives the freedom to take risks in both teaching and research. The net result is a higher quality of both. It is also a form of non-monetized benefit. I'm curious what the writer thinks would take its place if not tuition monies: myself, certainly with the lack of freedom to do my job as I know it should be done and despite the bitching of the lazy students that make up 80 percent of my classes would be demanding substantially more salary or finding other places to work. I can be treated like shit and make money in plenty of other professions.

Sure I have colleagues I'd love to have the ability to force to work at least half as hard as I do, but not if that means giving up the ability to place demands on my students to do work.

My wife got her teeth checked by Dr. Pane for a long time. It would have been more poetic if the hygenist was named Pane, but still gave me a giggle every time I heard it.