Jeff Erickson

It’s official: all funding requests made on Tuesday by postdocs for their salaries have been unilaterally rejected by NSF.

If you are a PhD student in computer science who is directly impacted by the last two weeks of orders, please know that it's ok to not be in a headspace for research

If anyone is pushing you to be productive despite it all, please reach out to me, or SIGPLAN CARES, or computingconnections.org

Perhaps it is worth saying that the difference between $5M and $500B is $500B.

Inflict ideas on the next generation. The computer science cur- riculum is far more dynamic than, say, the mathematics curriculum, and it is still feasible to include research ideas in undergraduate classes. There may not be room to go in-depth on cutting edge ideas, but including a few results from the current century may help to keep students engaged. Sketches are a good exemplar for this, since the ideas can fit well into an algorithms or database class, and illustrate some of the underlying principles and concepts. A long-term benefit of this approach is that some students may just remember these ideas after graduation, and be motivated to make use of them in whatever career they choose to go in to. Write accessible notes, and put them where people can read them. While we may think of peer-reviewed academic publications as the medium for sharing research ideas, these are unfortunately not the place where practitioners will find them. You can have more reach by writing accessible notes addressing the software engineering community. For sketches, we made web pages and wrote articles in practitioner-focused journals. Today, you should consider making more use of platforms like medium and substack, and promoting posts via social media.

Very interesting (short) paper by Graham Cormode (@grahamrc.bsky.social), "Applications of Sketching and Pathways to Impact", using sketching algos as case study to see how to go from theory to—impactful—practice, and what to keep in mind in the process. (Small) sample below
doi.org/10.1145/3584...

Greeting from the University of Illinois. Been there, done that, fired the board, fired the president, fired the provost, fired the new president two years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Illinois_clout_scandal

The Polyhedrists A history of the relationship between art and geometry in the early modern period.In The Polyhedrists, Noam Andrews unfolds a history of the relationship bet...

I already know that I’m going to LOVE reading this: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262046640/the-polyhedrists/ Expect more 16th-century citations in my next conputational geometry paper.

Yup. Unless Richard Bellman was a time lord, the dates just don’t match up. Bellman published “dynamic programming” algorithms months before “Engine Charlie” became Secretary of Defense. My theory is that it’s a riff on Charles Atlas’s “dynamic tension”.

Among the top 5% of all students you have ever rated or will ever rate, is this student in the top 1%, the top 0.1%, or the top 0.01%?

Well, you did contrast “cool math” with “tools they can *use*”, as if the former were not a subset of the latter.

YouTube video by Arlo Guthrie - Topic Alice's Restaurant Massacree

Happy Thanksgiving. Remember to pay $50 and pick up the garbage! https://youtu.be/WaKIX6oaSLs?si=O0z7aJwec1OB4dzj

All my learning objectives start with action verbs: Prove, design, analyze, build. “Understanding” is a seductive trap. And I think that trap is at the core of the false dichotomy between theory and practice.

I am deeply uncomfortable with the axiom that “theory” is the opposite of “practice”. Reasoning precisely is a practical skill. Design is a practical skill. Explaining complex ideas is a practical skill. Writing proofs is a practical skill—other people call it “programming”!

Yes, but with a lower priority than “utilize” instead of “use”, or “algorithm” for whatever AI does. I prefer “cycles” (or the corresponding imperial unit “googleweeks”).

Why not “combinator”? (Or even “combiner”?)

Optimist: The glass is half full
Pessimist: The glass is half empty
Geometer: volume(glass) = 2 volume(liquid)
Algorithmist: The glass is approximately full, but not approximately empty.
Topologist: The disk is wet.

Mr. Nixon is survived by his two-headed love child, Winona Lynn Gibson. RIP, Mojo. youtu.be/cXLuSHx1fR0?...