As of today, Alex oniugnip and I have completed the majority of the paperwork for the house we're renting. Living in the future is pretty cool: I had sent Alex a PDF of the ten-page lease agreement, which he printed, initialed, signed, and popped into a machine that magically turned it into a TIFF and emailed it to him. He then forwarded it to me to print, initial, sign, and hand over to our landlord and landlady feudal superiors landlords.

It's clearly going to take me a little while to get used to this "renting a house, not just a part of one, from people who do not also live in it" thing.

The house has an upstairs and a nice back yard. It's partly made of stone, but this is nothing novel in Bloomington, where limestone is so easy to come by that they build such lowly edifices as convenience stores, ATM kiosks, and the computer science building out of it.

We move in in about three weeks. Because I really, really don't want to become one of Those People who is all "house house house house house house house house house house house house house house" all the time, I've decided to get all of it out of my system right now by composing a song in honor of the occasion. It starts like this:

I've got a house (I've got a house)
I've got a house (I've got a house)
Everybody look at me 'cause I'm living in a house (living in a house)
I've got a house (I've got a house)
I've got a house
Take a good hard look at the motherfucking house (house, yeah)

It's funny how it all worked out.

When I was applying to graduate school back in the fall of 2006, I had only a vague sense of what my research interests might be. I hadn't done research as an undergraduate, which was a big strike against me in my applications. The closest thing I had was a somewhat-independent project, which I thought I could make sound kind of like research, if I spun it right in my application essays. The project had been database-related, and so I decided that I could make the best case for myself by writing about database theory as my potential research area. I could make the things I'd done in my jobs since graduation sound kind of database-related, too, and tie the essays together around that theme.

It worked reasonably well. When I go back and read what I wrote in those essays, I'm kind of surprised -- I honestly do manage to sound like I really care about database research.

What I've learned, I guess, is this: you can never assume that you know someone based on what they aren't talking about. You can't assume that they don't care about whatever it is they're not mentioning. Maybe they don't talk about it because they care so much that they can't imagine not caring.

What if this is a major source of misunderstanding in the world? What if we could all actually make the world better, just by thinking hard about ourselves and being very conscious of what it is that we care about?

Alex oniugnip and I solved scenario 2001, the first problem of the second set of ICFP contest problems! Scoreboard-wise, this puts Team K&R in 200th place of 305 registered teams, with ten hours remaining. It took us until just now to catch up with Jesse jes5199!

We're wrecked and probably going to sleep soon, but I want to show off this thing I did by accident. The black line is supposed to plot the path of a satellite that travels around the orbit shown in red, so, really, it should cover the red line instead of looping all over the map. But instead of plotting that satellite's location with respect to the center of the earth, I accidentally plotted its location with respect to another satellite, which is a moving target (in fact, it's orbiting the earth at a lower altitude). What I got was a pretty Spirograph-esque design.

Things like this are one reason why I'm envious of computer graphics people like Andrew pixelherder. Even their bugs end up looking cool!

Edited to add: Okay, maybe we're not going to sleep soon. Six problems solved, which puts us in 186th place at the moment! We came in something like 174th last year, which makes me want to do "better", even though those numbers have nothing to do with each other.

Edited again: It's now 6:06 a.m. and we're in 120th place with eight problems solved! What we have probably isn't general enough to work for the next set of problems, so, with less than eight hours to go, we might not be able to solve any more. I'm incredibly happy with where we are, though.

We've solved the first group of problems and are currently in 202nd place of 282 teams on the scoreboard!

Last year was good and all, but this year is so much better. Regardless of how we end up scoring, I'm just a better programmer than I was last year, and we're working better as a team, too. We're just happier.

And Hohmann transfer orbits are beautiful. For the most part, we're only making our simulations run as long as they have to, but I made this one run especially long to show off the pretty.

Made just for you with an unholy combination of Python, Scheme, and R!

Man, you know you've got a sophisticated visualization system when the earth is represented by a big green circle.

We have a virtual machine! 116 lines of Scheme!¹ We also have 154 lines of Python to help with the crazy binary I/O. It's a good day when you can use both bit-shifting operators and cdadr. Alex was writing C, but stopped as soon as he realized that there was struct.unpack.

Time for bed. Tomorrow: physics, and more bit-bashing!

Wooooo! This is going really well!

value at 0x63 is 6.67428e-11

Awww yeah. It's the gravitational constant!

This is gonna be our most extreme hack of all time. Are y'all ready?

Tonight I gave a talk at my friend Christine's fledgling Beer and Algorithms Club about oracle Turing machines and relativization. This is not my area¹, so to feel more confident, I wrote down pretty much every word in advance.² Let me know if you notice any glaring errors!

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about Beer and Algorithms. The "get together every week and discuss a paper we've all read in advance" idea had been tried in the past, but it didn't work very well because nobody would ever get through more than, like, half of the paper. But "trade off teaching a topic to the rest of the group, making liberal use of Christine's whiteboard" seems to be working much better. Hooray!

I just had a great phone conversation with my parents. I had called my dad in honor of Father's Day, but my mom got on the phone and started asking questions about my research this summer, during which my dad was bored out of his mind. Eventually, I start to sense that this is the case.

Lindsey: You know, over the phone it's not always easy to tell if you guys are bored out of your minds or not.
Mom: Well, we need to develop some sort of signal.
Lindsey: *laughing* Yeah. When you give the signal, I can stop talking about most general unifiers or whatever and start talking about, I don't know, the weather.
Mom: I think the signal needs to evoke eye-rolling.
Lindsey: *laughs harder*
Dad: Here's the 'signal': 'Shut the fuck up!'
Lindsey: *laughs uproariously*
Mom: *makes noises of mock exasperation*
Lindsey: Okay, that was awesome.

I love my parents so much. I'm so much their kid.

I'm in a huge, dark concert hall that is somehow also the IU computer science department. You can tell that it's the CS department because Dirk Van Gucht is walking around and people are talking about Doug Hofstadter. I go outside and am in downtown Bloomington, except featuring the St. Louis Gateway Arch. I walk toward a downtown building where exam grades are being posted for many courses. I'm not in any of those courses, but that building still seems like a reasonable place to go. When I arrive, I see that the grades have been printed on huge sheets of paper or painted on big white fabric sheets and hung up in the glass windows of a store. In one course, everyone has evidently gotten the same grade, "600", on an exam. I don't know what that means, but it is apparently a worrisome grade, because under that, the words "DON'T WORRY, YOU'RE FINE" have been painted.

Some of the sheets are up at yet another store that's even further away, but it's easy for me to get there because I have super-powerful vision and can move with enormous, superhuman strides. However, when I get there, I realize that the faraway store is a bad place to be because only sorority girls go there. Furthermore, it is closed, which makes it an even worse place to be. I have to turn around and go back the way I came, which is nervewracking because a lot of people are watching, but then I see that there's a beautiful rainbow in the sky which exactly follows the contours of the arch. I try to get out my phone to take a picture of it, but instead of a phone I only have a half-used disposable camera. I am very hesitant to take a picture on film. Instead, I keep walking toward the rainbow. I get to an outdoor concert venue where some musicians are playing to a very sparse crowd. The singer says, "Okay, now we're going to play --" but I don't hear him finish the sentence. Then I realize simultaneously that the reason for the poor attendance is that this is just a sound check, and that the singer is Trent Reznor, wearing a green bathrobe.

Ooh, ooh! It's almost time for the ICFP Programming Contest!

Alex oniugnip and I are once again competing as Team K&R¹. I'm excited to find out if our showing in the contest this year will reflect the experience we've gained over the past twelve months, both as programmers and as, you know, human beings in a communicative and nurturing partnership and all that. Plus, we have a mandate from Shriram Krishnamurthi to "kick some serious butt".

Who else is playing this year? There are no rules regarding team size or choice of language -- it's up to you! You can be a lone wolf or a team of twenty, and you can write, I don't know, whatever people like to write. Objective Visual Famous Mathematician of Some Kind. ...-script. ...-plus-plus. ...of New Jersey.

So, there's this guy who was my classmate this year in both B521 and B621. He seems to spend a lot of time at the IU library, just like I do. In fact, on any given trip to the library, it's even odds I'll see him there -- often enough that I've come to expect it, anyway. Every time this happens, we end up getting into a conversation, which is quite nice.

The last time it happened, which was two days ago, it occurred to me that every time, the core of our conversation has been some variation on "What's so great about Scheme?"

This isn't apropos of nothing. We've been taking Scheme courses together for a year, so it's reasonable that we might talk about it at least some of the time. But it surprises me that he keeps asking me what's so great about Scheme, because I don't know.

What's so great about Scheme? Well, there are a lot of things I could name: it gives you a handle on the continuation, it's extensible with macros, it optimizes tail calls, there's hardly any syntax to learn, and so on. And I dutifully list them off for him. But I feel a little deceitful doing it, because none of those things are why I like Scheme -- at least, not in a conscious way. My tastes are unsophisticated: I like Scheme because it feels good. Maybe it feels good because it's a great programming language, but how would I know? It's entirely possible that it just feels good because it's familiar.

To me, the thing that's especially mind-blowing about this person is that he's spending all these nights in the library trying to like Scheme. It's not just homework he's doing -- he's working on his own projects, experimenting, trying to figure out what the secret sauce is that makes other people so excited about Scheme. This amazes me. If I had to work that hard at liking something, I think I'd probably just give up and not like it.

An acquaintance writes regarding his recent back surgery:

In the recovery room, I ended up having enough Dilaudid for three people, according to the nurse. I think she said something like, "OK, you can have another dose, but you have to keep breathing -- that's the deal." She might have had to hit me once to remind me about that deal.

I imagine that anyone who has ever tried to publish something significant, for some values of "significant" and "publish" -- a record, a book, a piece of software, whatever -- knows how it must feel to have to decide, "Okay, now it's ready," and package it up and stick a bow on it and present it to the world under shrinkwrap. What makes that particular moment any better than any of the infinite number of other now-it's-ready moments that could have been chosen? My suspicion is that often, the answer is "not much." Maybe the chosen moment is just the most convenient, or the one that some external force, like "legally binding agreement" or "desire to graduate" or "six-month release cycle", mandates.

So there isn't necessarily anything sacred, then, about the version of a creative work that happens to be published. For me, that knowledge is both liberating and sobering. On the one hand, if I want to make something, it's liberating to know that I don't have to achieve perfection on the first or second or seventeenth try -- I can have as many tries as I want. As a songwriter, I've often thought of a song as a living, breathing beast, which means that any particular recording I might try to make of it isn't actually it, any more than a photograph of me is me. I can try for a good, evocative likeness, but that's the best I can do, and today's best might be better or worse than next year's or last year's, and that's okay.

On the other hand, part of me still wants sacred versions, or at least reified versions, of things I create. But what would I do with them if I had them? What would they prove, and to whom? I sit here and look at this seven-month-old snapshot of the as-yet-unpublished second edition of The Reasoned Schemer, which I just finally finished reading a few days ago, and I see that even it, which is probably the least out-of-date thing on my bookshelf, has gone somewhat stale in the last seven months. Well, that's great! It's a sign of progress! But what about all my other books? What stale bread have I been eating without realizing it? Do authors, especially the well-known ones who enjoy wide distribution, ever feel ashamed of the obsolete or just not-quite-perfect versions of their work that are out there on so many shelves? Is it better for an author to just pre-declare everything a work in progress and avoid such embarrassment?

As advised by Peter pmb, I spent the first two weeks of my summer break in Atlanta with Alex oniugnip and didn't do any computer science at all. Instead, I slept late, baked cookies, and went running almost every day. By day three, I was feeling pretty good. I felt so good, in fact, that I ran in a track meet!

All right, so it was an all-comers track meet, and I was competing against middle-school kids and senior citizens, but you have to understand that the last time I was in a track meet, it was ten years ago. I was seventeen and in high school. I did it then because it was the only sport I was halfway okay at, and I wanted badly enough to be the kind of person who was halfway okay at some sport that I kept doing it even though I really wasn't having a very good time. I never imagined I'd do it again voluntarily. There's a reason why almost all the races I've been in for the last several years have been marathons -- it's that anything shorter is too hard. I'm slow, but in a marathon you can be slow and still feel accomplished. If you run a marathon, your friends think you're cool just for finishing.

At a track meet, it doesn't work that way. I was going to have my ass kicked in the 1600 meters, and I wasn't particularly looking forward to it. But I did it anyway, and you know, it was actually kind of fun. Alex was there in two, three, four places each time I came around the track, dashing from corner to corner of the infield, cheering me on with seemingly boundless energy. I wouldn't be surprised if, between cheering for me and cheering for Mark markluffel during his heat of the mile (which, unlike mine, was one of the fast heats), Alex actually covered a mile on foot himself. He yelled lots of encouraging things, but -- and I'm not particularly proud of this -- I felt most encouraged when, during the third lap, he nodded toward the guy running ahead of me and quietly said, "You can pass him." And I did. I finished in 7:45, not in last place, and only a minute or so slower than my best time in high school. Not bad.

I resumed being slothful for the rest of my two weeks in Atlanta, at the end of which we packed up some of Alex's belongings, mostly books, and drove from Georgia to Indiana in a mostly leisurely fashion. Naturally, the trip entailed a stop at Waffle House. We had hash browns and coffee and the waitress asked Alex to explain what was on his shirt, which he sincerely tried to do.

When we arrived in Bloomington, we moved Alex's boxes into my apartment and then spent a few days shopping for a house. (There -- the secret is out!) Nothing's certain yet, but one way or another, we have to move out of my apartment by the end of July. There are a lot of nice things about my place, but it's a little small for us both, and anyway, we can't stay there because his cats aren't allowed.

Now my summer research gig has gotten underway, and it's only a matter of weeks before Alex comes here to go to grad school with me, which will mark the end of twenty months of Dating Remotely. I can deal with being in Bloomington when he's in Atlanta, which is how it usually is, these days. At the moment, though, I'm in Bloomington and he's in Mountain View, and somehow the three-hour time distance feels lonelier from the later side. Like I'm always waiting for him at some point in time which I can't leave and at which he can never arrive. Ahem. Or, um, it's possible that I may have just read Speaker for the Dead and it's making me ridiculously oversentimental. Damn it, this is not the kind of person I want to be -- I mean the oversentimental kind of person as well as the kind of person who stays up all night reading Orson Scott Card novels instead of doing research or, you know, sleeping. Curse these eight boxes of Alex's books that have taken up residence in my living room, and the plane ticket stubs with his name on them that fall out from between the pages and make me miss him so fiercely.

I got my first laptop in November 2005. I like to joke that mine was, in fact, the last 15-inch PowerBook G4 that came off the assembly line before Apple stopped producing them and switched to Intel chips -- the last gasp of a nearly-extinct species. But while it's fun to make fun of my own bad timing with regard to technology, I don't really think I was all that unlucky. By November 2005, it seems to me that Apple had more or less perfected the craft of making PowerBooks. It was a really, really nice computer.

"What are you reading about?"
"Nominal unification."
"What's nominal unification?"
"Okay, so, in regular first-order logic, you have logic variables, right? In nominal logic, you have those, but you also have these things called noms."
"..."
"...I know what you're think--"
"BEST LOGIC SYSTEM EVER."

We screwed up. We thought that Nine Inch Nails was headlining and that Jane's Addiction was playing second of three. That's what one would expect, right? But no. So we show up late, and then as we're arriving we hear Trent singing and we dash inside, and luckily everyone's very polite and doesn't cavity-search us, and we get to our seats (which we find to be occupied by other people, but we find empty ones close by) in time to catch the last part of their set. Saul Williams comes out for a couple of songs, and it's great, and we scream and jump up and down during "Head Like a Hole" and I take terrible photos, and finally they go off and we apologize to each other for not showing up sooner, and I go use the restroom along with several thousand other white girls in their 20s who have facial piercings.

Before too long, Jane's Addiction comes on. I've never been especially into this band. But it occurs to me that the last time I went to a Big Arena Rock Concert™ was almost nine years ago, and I realize with a start that it is possible, and probably ultimately more fulfilling, to just be an ordinary person who goes to big arena rock concerts in search of entertainment or maybe of art, as opposed to a fanatic who goes in search of a religious experience. Besides, it's just fun to watch grown men running around and jumping off of drum risers like they're rock stars or something. And I had no idea Perry Farrell was so sassy, especially by contrast with his Traditionally Masculine bandmates. And, as Alex points out, Dave Navarro is more or less the Prince of Persia.¹ And we escape without buying any black T-shirts at all!

Four days ago, I sat in a room with several of my favorite people and watched my colleague and mentor, Will Byrd, defend his thesis ("Relational Programming in miniKanren: Techniques, Applications, and Implementations"). I had never been to a thesis defense before, and I thought that the whole thing might be over my head. But after a year of B521 and B621 and helping teach C311 and writing some miniKanren programs and spending an inordinate amount of time hanging around Dan's office, I found that I actually understood most of it! To my surprise and delight, Will even mentioned my name near the end, when he was listing a few of his many ideas for future work and a few of the people who would be getting under way with that work soon.

When I took B521 last year, I was amazed by how, when we worked on miniKanren stuff, Will or Dan or Ramana showed up every day with some new bug fix, some new insight. This was no boring, freeze-dried curriculum they were feeding us. We were actually watching them do research...but wait! That's no way to teach a course, right? They'd come in and say, "Forget what we said last time. Pay attention to this, instead!" They'd find bugs in code they'd just spent the previous day convincing us of the correctness of. Each class period might make the previous one obsolete. It was exciting, but it was also unsettling. So, when Dan asked me to teach C311 this spring, I remember secretly thinking, "I'm glad that we're getting all of these miniKanren issues out of the way now, so that I'll have a nice, stable, certain curriculum to teach next year."

Of course, it didn't happen that way at all. Will continued work on his dissertation, ramping up the pace; Ramana went back to Australia, where he was still completing his undergraduate (!) degree, but he continued to contribute as actively as he had been doing before. (I'm not sure Ramana ever sleeps.) And Dan and our B621 class continued to put miniKanren through its paces. Sure enough, when April arrived and it was time to start teaching miniKanren to C311, there was a whole crop of new stuff to teach. I tried to insulate the students from the fact that miniKanren was in flux -- just because I was standing on shaky ground didn't mean the students had to be -- but our students aren't dumb. We did give them code that we later found to be incorrect, and we had to 'fess up and revise it. We discovered numerous holes in our test coverage thanks to buggy programs they wrote that still snuck past the tests. And on and on.

And what I began to realize was that this was how it was going to be. It was not going to be nice and stable and certain for a long time. And I realized that this was good for me, because every uncertain moment was a chance for me to do something -- a chance for me to contribute. And I had somehow managed to show up at just the perfect moment for this. What luck!

So here I am, at the end of my second semester of grad school -- but I don't feel "done" as I did at the end of my first. Of course, that's partly because I'm not done -- I got an incomplete in B621, along with most of my classmates, and in the next four weeks I need to complete a project in order to receive a grade for the course. But in a larger sense, it's beginning to sink in that there is no "done" in the way it used to be defined. My first semester was a lot like undergrad: it was self-contained, with sharply delineated edges; it wasn't overwhelmingly hard; and I got to feel smart when it was over and I had done well. This semester has none of those qualities. It's hard, and it's messy, and it's spilling out all over the place, and I'm still waiting for most of my grades, and even if they're good, it won't matter very much. But I have something precious that I didn't have before: things that I couldn't imagine being able to do before seem possible now. Becoming a good teacher, becoming a good researcher -- I can actually see a path to get to those things now.