Doodle of the day.

Yesterday, I looked through a folder of class notes that I had kept since 1981, when I studied Federal Courts at NYU School of Law. I suppose I kept these notes (and not all my law school notes) because this was the first course I taught here at Wisconsin (where we call it "Federal Jurisdiction"). I've never referred to these notes, in my teaching preparations, but I've somehow always thought maybe I would. I still do!

There are 167 legal-pad pages of notes, written in black fountain pen. I'm shocked at how many topics we covered in that class, far more than I cover when I teach the course. How did we do it? A week of these notes is copied from someone else's: I had a baby on March 17th of that semester. That fell on spring break, luckily, but, having a C-section, it took another week to make my way back to school. Consequently, the Eleventh Amendment has always been a special mystery to me, but I have discovered over the years, that it is a bit of a mystery to everyone.

There are many marginal doodles in these 167 pages. Here's one:



UPDATE: An emailer writes:

I saw your doodle today and have to say that it looks like an individual contour from a contour map of steep terrain.

I used to be a mining engineer, and, to be more precise, would produce maps that estimate where mineral deposits would intersect the surface. Your doodle looks like a map that would be produced for such an investigation.

Its odd to see something so familiar in such an unusual venue. The unusual aspect is that the doodle looks like a mineral deposit that is dipping to the right where it intersects more surface than it does on the left. That your spacing would emulate this scenario surprised me. Of course you may have seen this type of map before.

Maybe I was a mining engineer in a previous lifetime. Spooky!

ANOTHER UPDATE: My email correspondent writes back:

Just checked your site and appreciate you including my comment. I probably didn't make myself clear but the previous doodle was the one I was referring too.

So if you get comments that my comments don't make sense, you should know that I was referring [this] doodle.

Since I work for NASA now, I'd have to say that the doodle the update is attached to looks more like a picture from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Well, that proves I didn't steal my ideas from mining engineering maps!