technical difficulties and detours.

occasionally someone asks me if i can read and write in chinese, and then i would respond with, "no, sorry: i happen to be illiterate."

this makes for very strange timing, to anyone who hears no more than that one sentence. it startles them to no end, and i think it's because they thought i meant english.

today, however, i felt computer-illiterate.

---

despite google-searching various keywords and combinations, i tried unsuccessfully to install several LaTeX packages onto my old laptop arielle, who is running Ubuntu Linux these days.

no luck.

so much for finishing the second section [1] of the first draft of that research article, today. i was planning to do my typing in the office; because it's not as comfortable as the apartment, there was the slim chance that i could be more productive.

well, that's a lesson for another day.

---

on the other hand, i spent the day reminding myself of the mathematical arguments that i would have needed to write in LaTeX.

fortune of fate, that: i'd have typed and saved and deleted and re-typed, maybe even opened up a new document in frustration and start from scratch. that is one fault of mine: it's too easy for me to "re-invent the wheel" and not make use of things that i or smarter people have thought about and polished already.

it's also painfully comforting: i think my younger self was smarter than me, my current self.


[1] don't let that impress you. i haven't written much of the first section yet, because i don't quite know how to introduce the rest of the paper (which isn't written yet, either). likely i'll write it last.

undisciplined and unproductive.

august soon arrives.

nothing seems to be working .. research, i mean. i'm too stubborn to let it go, let the other questions go, too, and return to the writing that i've promised and promised to do but have never fully embraced and finished.

[sighs]

i wish i could say that i'm tired, but i'm not. i've had a week or two of holiday already, so it can't be fatigue.

the ideas just .. aren't working.

back to full-speed: the aftermath.

in regards to what i wrote before,

i went back to it, today. the new idea hasn't failed yet, and maybe it will. but maybe it won't, and i can fix a proof and have a few theorems again. here's to hope, anyways.

well, the new idea has mostly failed .. but in an interesting way. then again, it's not interesting enough to write about.

maybe "failed" isn't the right word, either; "remains inconclusive" (read: useless) is more appropriate.

ah, well.

at least i learned something. maybe something else will come to mind, and maybe that will work ..

in the meanwhile, this has been enough of a diversion. it's time to write up that other draft, again. \:

half-speed.

the night before last was mostly sleepless, and yesterday i felt like i was half-zombie, half-human. it's a sad state of affairs when caffeine now harms more than helps: sure, it might keep me awake, but there is an extremely unstable equilibrium for the amount of caffeine which precisely compensates for insomnia.

you see, it's too easy to slip over, to get a slight shake in your wrists. they get worse if the thoughts start racing and you want to write them all down but your hand is too damned shaky and slow. then you get frustrated and try to slow down, but slowing down when you're up on caffeine is about as hard as speeding up when you're caffeine deprived.

then you have to concentrate.

use less words, because words take time and one has to remember to spell correctly.

draw more, but draw simply and meaningfully. make sure the symbols (those arrows!) will make sense later, because everything's going to be a jumble and you'll have to sort through it again and write it well.

i don't have the willpower for that, anymore. caffeine is supposed to be the good sort of crutch: to get you started and going and on the road to thinking and writing about maths. it shouldn't be a broken crutch that you have to fix with careful rounds of glue and tape.

forget the up, which is not quite a high; at this stage of the game, what good are flurries of thoughts, if you can't write them down and check them later? after all, the human mind is imperfect and rigorous thinking is unnatural, even to civilised brutes wretches such as ourselves.

---

so i spent most of yesterday with my brain processing at half the speed that it usually runs. i felt slow, and i was cold.

the idea i had, it didn't work.

i remember opening up the pages of a paper and without ambition, began to read. this is novel for me, because too often i have no patience to read papers very carefully; i get stuck, then frustrated, then convinced that i don't know anything and that i have no future in mathematics ..

.. which may still be true, but the frustration is quite pronounced, at such moments!

but i read a little and it wasn't so bad: section one didn't make sense, but it's an introduction and a microcosm of the whole paper. (i probably won't understand the enormity of the paper anyway.) section two was basic definitions, which always relieves me: no funny, fancy business yet, just definitions.

then section three was a little harder, but then something caught my attention. wait. i could use that, i think. i mean, if this is true and if the computation balks because of that ..


i carefully stuck a post-it note on the page, under the theorem, realising humbly that my mind was too slow to be creative, that day.

i went back to it, today. the new idea hasn't failed yet, and maybe it will. but maybe it won't, and i can fix a proof and have a few theorems again. here's to hope, anyways.

i never thought insomnia could be useful, if only for zombiism!

writing & pre-writing.

it was a week or so ago when i thought to start a draft of a research paper. for those loyal readers out there, yes: it's that one -- the one that i've been delaying and feeling uneasy about. however, now is the time to write, if not sooner.

so i'm following two main principles: the first is some advice i remembered -- but i forget who told it to me; it might have even been a comment on an old blog post -- and i've decided to stick to the format of the talk i gave on that topic, one year ago. if anything, it does give me an outline to begin my writing.

i've also decided to "start from scratch," so to speak: in the first section, titled "Introduction" there is a statement of a theorem from 1966, which motivates the work. in the second section, there is a statement of a new version of that theorem, and then come the preparations and definitions, the details and techniques.

there's much to flesh out, and even when i was preparing the talk, it had been a year since i did that research. now it's coming back with a vengeful, vengeful bite.

i made it to 2 pages of AMS-style LaTeX before i realised that i couldn't remember it all, and then remembered how intricate the argument was.

(to clarify, i'm not sounding my own horn; many of the ideas can be attributed to f. gehring, a rather clever and able man. only a few results are new.)

so now i'm pre-writing: trying to make sense of my notes, remembering why something is true, detecting if what i thought, two years ago, was really a proof. you see, when you've made one error which cost you a few theorems, you begin to fear errors .. everywhere.

at some point .. maybe tomorrow, i'll return to LaTeX again. but now i have to redo the maths that i should have done well when i was first doing them!

back in the saddle.

so it's been essentially two weeks of vacation time, with sporadic, fitful math thoughts in between .. which i later thought through again, with more care.

they don't quite work.

a little something might be there, but like my usual work, it's only mildly interesting. if the metric analysts had their own bar-&-restaurant, it would be the sort of thing that i'd bring up on wednesday nights after nobody said anything for a while.

then someone would say, "oh, okay," and nobody would say anything else for a while.

---

more important, troubling news is afoot, but it is not my place (or right) to tell it here.

summer: time is cheap, and i am unproductive.

it's been unproductive lately.

i think i'm getting too comfortable working at home. during the semester my work sessions were more productive because, strangely enough, i knew that on weekdays, i'd have to leave at some point for the department. that day there would be a class i'd attend, and then a seminar, or there would be my weekly meeting with the advisor.

the days were structured, and time was more precious. i did more with a small window of time then than i do now, in a day. it's not a comforting thought.

i can't help but think that the last few days could have been done in one concentrated morning and afternoon. the results aren't even that good or conclusive. i still don't quite understand the world of metric currents .. especially after that error in proof which has thrown awry all my sense of the topic.



in the meanwhile, i should be writing. i think i owe the world an article i promised to write, and yes, i will get to it ..

.. but it's always hard to leave something alone, when you feel you can do something about it .. even if it takes an unproductively long time.