Slow
It’s been slow going on the academic front lately. I spent some time designing a flyer for the Atlanta Skeptics, spend some time on MPI programming, and read a few sections of The Computational Beauty of Nature, which is an excellent book and a great introduction to complex systems.
Mostly I’ve been thinking, more philosophy than computer science. Philosophy is the pornography of the intellect, a cheap visceral thrill that ultimately doesn’t satisfy any real needs. It’s easy to think about the economy, or society, or even health care, and to come up with plans that work in your head.
But people tend to skip the step of developing realistic models that will help them understand whether those plans will work in the real world, or to at least sketch the probable points of failure.
When I was in art school, I ran into this a lot. I’d look at some completed piece and think how much better it looked in my head, before I had to work through the details.