".. but some things must be done."

in the last 24 hours i've spent my waking hours writing. rather, i've been LaTeXing.

it's a talk for an upcoming conference in two weeks; the rationale is that if i can convince myself to write a talk, then i might be further motivated to write a research article on the same subject. there are a few slides left, and i think the final form of it will be tolerable and not too boring.

i've even coded a few figures on some slides, so thanks to the graphicsx standard package, the audience will see a picture or two.

more, it will be a friendly audience and i think i will enjoy giving the talk. it's been a while since i've felt that way.

as i've told a friend of mine yesterday, i'm not looking forward to writing this paper, but some things must be done.

it feels to me like writing a eulogy, because the content will be salvage from my first thesis problem. as you may recall, that problem is dead or left for dead.

never mind the difference; the effect is the same.

to me, writing this paper is reliving that inevitable end.

very little of the inquiry is my original contribution; of a year spent on this project, there were less than two months where i was working on original ideas and not investigating the past work of others.

i explored many areas and ideas and learned a few things, but that's not the point; the point was to do or accomplish something, and specifically, something new and preferably interesting.

i can count two original "theorems" from that inquiry, and one of them is a computation anyone could do. the other is more an observation than a theorem, and there is that same "everyman" feeling to it.

i can't seem to articulate what i mean. i know that this first problem is not one of my failures, or a failure at all.

but i admit: identifying the flaw in the method seems one of the rare times when my contribution actually mattered. i did that. inherently negative as it may be, it is an accomplishment ..

.. and look what it did. now there's no more problem. lovely, wonderful, and bloody marvelous.

but no worries. there's a second problem, with mysteries at every turn.

it's all frontier land. there are few blazed trails, and i can choose not to take them. it's terra incognita, where you may define "success" in any terms you want.

but that theorem i proved .. remember that one? loosely speaking, it asserts that a subclass of concrete examples are not worth studying with this theory.

some days i feel like i inquire, if only to wait for another disaster, and for another problem to fall dead.

why do i have a bad feeling about this?
all of this ..?