Leuven in summary
January 20th, 2006 at 01:58 am
Posted from Ben Gurion Airport. Written in Brussels Airport, 17:40 CET.
Monday
- "Who verifies the verification tools?" Is that like who watches the watchers?
- Dinner: fondue. I opted for cheese. It was very good. I thought of the last time I had fondue, which I think was at home, with the fondue forks with the multi-colored ends. And the last time I had fondue in a restaurant, which I think was somewhere in northern New England during a skiing-related venture.
Tuesday
- Dinner: salmon with cream sauce of some sort. Tried a Belgian beer recommended by the waiter, who later revealed his bias: it was brewed in his home town. Comestibles again quite enjoyable.
Wednesday
- Final day of the conference. Although it was the Monday sessions of the meeting that were devoted to administrative business, the morning’s several hours discussion on an integration-heavy project deliverable really brought into mind-numbingly boring focus the bureaucracy that comes with being an EU ‘network of excellence.’
Thursday
- Morning pictures from Leuven and the KULeuven campus. Possible stars of David, definite Hebrew, castle, waterwheel, and some others.
- Many discussions over the past few days have been predictable: American politics, Israeli-Palestinian politics, kashrut, Judaism, intelligent design. Mostly that’s fine, but often I am tempted to speak my English with a Hebrew accent and avoid being prejudged as an American and therefore religious-conservative and therefore an idiot.
- Airport security here has the metal detector threshold set way too low. My glasses, brass rat, belt buckle, Zipcard, and the little rings around the lace holes in my shoes were enough set it off. Since setting off the detector immediately initiates a hand search, I saw at least three other people searched at the same time I was. Too many false positives!
- All in all, I’m not sure this trip has been so productive. I’m not going to make my desired paper deadline, I’m behind on grading, I’m behind on my own problem sets, and most of what I’ve seen over the past few days has been either less than relevant or less than interesting. I will admit there were some useful hours, and I do have some new ideas kicking around.
A thought that’s been on my mind lately
- When I write code, the only way I know how to do it is to start with something, and then successively extend and refactor until I’m satisfied. This works well for me. But when I write creatively, the only way I know how to do it is to think deeply about each phrase and make the first draft as perfect as possible. This, unsurprisingly, does not work well. I wonder how to take the strategy I’ve learned so well for coding and apply it to playwrighting and so forth…
maxg
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Silly Zipcard.
I also write code and English using seemingly opposite techniques.. hadn’t really thought about it like that before. However, I won’t release my code until I’m convinced it’s pretty darn good.
Jon | January 20th, 2006 at 03:42 am
Do you think the distinguishing factor is logical code vs creative writing or do you think it has to do with the size of the task? I know that when I write code I tend to write small chunks at a time but that is because I have not spent enough time with any given language recently so I have to constantly check my syntax (especially since most of what I do lately is perl).
But getting to the point I know in EE I see a distinction between small circuits where you can think about the whole circuit at once in which case I spend a long time just thinking about it and then I draw it and maybe fix it up some but have mostly designed it in my head but with larger circuits I have to put down pieces and build it up (the whole layers of abstraction and hierarchy thing).
David | January 26th, 2006 at 09:56 am
Wow - looks like a very cool town! Actually kind of reminds me of Amsterdam.
David | January 26th, 2006 at 10:00 am
I think both my code-writing and creative writing strategies are consistent regardless of size… I build small and large systems iteratively, I write one-paragraph doodles and one-act plays with painstaking painstakingness.
But the circuit design example suggested a different axis to me, which is whether the task is goal-oriented or not. What’s lacking in the creative writing that prevents revision, rather than attempted perfection, from being the strategy, is that I don’t have clear enough goals. With a goal, you can tell the difference between ‘achieved’ and ‘not achieved,’ so revision is possible. Without one, you have no choice but to try to get it right the first time, because how will you know how to improve it later?
In Leuven, when I told people I was from Boston, they would very often say something along the lines of, “is it true that Boston is a lot like a European city?” And I would have to admit that the past $n<4$ days in Leuven was my only personal point of reference to a European city, but that I could see some similarities.
maxg | January 27th, 2006 at 02:03 am