No more thrashing

Graph transformation-produced art: the Sierpinski fractal

This was the first day in a long, long time when I was able (and allowed myself) to work on one single topic for almost the entire day. Professoring is an amazingly diverse job; this is nice in itself, but the downside is that there are so many different tasks to carry out that the human equivalent of thrashing kicks in. This is a term from the field of operating systems, describing a state where a computer is only busy switching from one job to the next, swapping memory and other resources in and out, and not getting any actual work done. For humans (or for me at any rate), this is aggravated by stress induced by the realisation that no actual work is getting done: a very vicious vicious circle.

I think it is also one of the things that deteriorates with age: the ability to switch context quickly. At least I seem to recall I was better at this than I am now. But then, my memory is not wat it was ;-)

In any case, today I revived a project that had been abandoned along the way in the past year: a complete formal description of the graphs and rules as implemented in GROOVE, my pet graph transformationn tool. I work in a research group called Formal Methods and Tools: I like both parts of that name, but they seldom overlap. That is, we build tools to support formal methods, but we seldom or never use formal methods to support the tool building. This is especially strange when you realise that we do preach the gospel about how formal methods should be used for the purpose of constructing. It's a matter of eating your own dog food. Well, today I at least sniffed.

Framing this serene working day was the business of living abroad. Coming home (after another spinning session) I finally found one of the restaurants on campus - there are supposed to be three, but they are really hidden inside rather severe-looking departmental buildings, I found this one, The Courtyard, only by asking for directions several times. It was quite crowded when I got there: England was busy beating Poland in a football WC qualification match. I will go there for dinner some other time - maybe tomorrow. It's a bar as well as a restaurant (or maybe it's primarily a bar), so it might make a good escape for lonely nights, next of course to the warm and friendly Tam O'Shanter.

Dinner instead was Mulligatawni soup, something I had never heard of but tasted surprisingly good (better than dog food). With that, playing online Scrabble under various other names, and filling in my blog readers on today's eventualities, this day, too, has passed.