Finding the Edge

Late Arend has been lying low this week; early Arend is in full swing. Yes, the way I am spending my time has normalised: days at the department, nights at my appartment. Gone without a trace are the times when not a day went by without a festival, dinner, show or film.

Today I gave a seminar at the Plasma group (the "plas" part almost certainly stands for Programming Languages and Systems, maybe there is some inventive acronymisation to explain the remaining two letters). This is another group within Computer Science which is, topic-wise, actually closer to my own research over the past ten years than the Enterprise Systems group of Richard Paige that I'm visiting. In case you're now wondering: the reason for my choice was that I want to establish a shift in focus and learn new things. So far that's working out pretty well; but of course a request to tell something about my work up to now is not to be sneezed at.

I took the opportunity to pick a thread of investigation that has been lying around waiting to be finished for almost a year now, on so-called recipes. As we all know, a recipe is a plan telling you to carry out certain steps in a certain order: originally in cooking, but this carries over to many other fields. For me the steps scheduled in a recipe are rules that may be applied to a system, and when applied change the state of that system. After defining a recipe, it, too, should act like a rule, albeit a composite one, and can in turn appear as such in other recipes. In principle this is a very powerful concept in specifying system behaviour (or so I believe) but I have never been able to get the mathematics quite right. The last time I tried is half a year ago.

When starting preparations yesterday, I had to gather my courage to dive back into this mess, but then I finally got into a flow and many things fell into place. I wish I could convey the satisfaction that stems from this experience. It is one of the things that I think is unique to this job and really makes it worthwhile: from nothing you create, or find, a way of describing or viewing a subject, a particular perspective that simply fits and captures precisely the right features. (Is it "create" or "find"? There's a beautiful metaphor called the book of mathematics, which is supposedly there somewhere, like Plato's ideals, but which we know only a part of. Rather than developing new theory, as a researcher your aim is to uncover hitherto unread pages of the book.)

A flow eats time like nothing else, and I certainly didn't want to interrupt myself to write a blog post yesterday evening. Plus, there would have been very little to tell. Instead I went to bed early and got up at 6:00 to continue. The seminar was at 12:30; at that time I had gathered and organised so much material that after a presentation of one hour I was only halfway... No matter, there is another slot next week for part 2 (advanced recipes).

Afterwards I kind of crashed of course, and since the weather was once more sunny and looked inviting from indoors, I decided to make better use of my time than falling asleep at the desk, and go shopping with as a bonus the opportunity to drop by Halfords, as things are starting to drop off my bike. I must be boring you stiff with my bike stories, but on Sunday my saddle has come loose and since yesterday my left hand brake pretty much stopped working. This should not happen to a 5-week old bike, even if I have been using it quite intensively.

Whatever else is true of Halfords, they are certainly quick with repairs: in Hengelo I am used to being told that everything will be ready after four days or so, here they apologetically tell you that it might take all of 40 minutes. After which they had put a new saddle on, repaired the brake, lubricated all moving parts and polished up the frame. If the replacement with new parts goes on at this rate (last time I got new pedals) I only need to discover a few more flaws to have a brand new bike once more.

After some thinking I have also decided to do as the English do after all and put on a luminescent yellow vest, at least at night away from the bright lights. So I have taken one more step in the rituals of this Secret Society: I am now a Vested Cyclist! The chances of me also proceeding to become a Helmed Cyclist are still vanishingly small, though.

One direct benefit from my seminar: I have finally been explained the location of the student restaurant in Wentworth College, which, if you remember, is the college (several blocks of apartments) where I am staying. What do you know: it is next to the laundromat, not 100 meters from here. It's just not recognisable as a restaurant from the outside. For the first time since my arrival here I had proper mensa food today: mushy pasta and overcooked vetegables. The name of the place: The Edge.