anxious. I had had the notion that by the end of the summer I would
have some sense of what I was doing next. It turned out that what I
had was a sense of what I had begun but not finished; those three
papers I told you about do an OK job representing this "potential".
Part of the game plan now is to work on them -- I have had some
worthwhile exchanges with Ian Eslick and others towards making Arxana
actually work the way I want it to. The "metacommons" paper seems
more mysterious to me the more I think about it -- in particular, the
notion of a "commons" seems fishy to me; I think instead we could use
a different frame for analysis and get results that were at least as
good. The other paper may not yet be convincing vis a vis FAIF
publishing, but I don't see any reason not to start some Gonzo style
dialogs about the topics it discusses with the powers that be.
Accordingly, I'd like to set up an interview with Joseph Gallian.
When you get basic PM sponsorship data to me -- I'll initiate the
rendezvous. I'm also of course quite willing to meet that other local
guy you've mentioned to me when he becomes available.
I'd really like to figure out a way to get some income, since at least
two of my three possible plans involve costly extended stays away from
home (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Bloomington, Indiana).
The idea of going back to grad school seems to me to be a bit of an
improbability, but nevertheless worth exploring; and these two places
seem to represent two different possible but improbable paths, in CS
and social science respectively. The third path is to make PlanetMath
into a viable career option. There is no real reason that there
couldn't be some overlap between these three things -- like on a
simplex, the three can be blended.
Thinking about it, two "exogenous" options present themselves to me.
(1) To sell some writing, which is another improbable thing, but given
that I've been producing some quantities of it, not impossible; (2) to
check out of the Free-o-sphere for a while and get some sort of paying
job that uses my waking energy. Of course, it can't all be expended
when everyone else is asleep or that won't work out very well.
(Maybe I'll take up actually studying math during my wakeful hours;
that would be a bit of a change of pace for me, and somewhat
productive -- I talked to a local professor here about his
mathematical logic course, which is some stuff I should really know
well, but don't at present; he loaned me a copy of the text book and
said I should visit again.)
*
On a rather different note, here is a neat example I sent to Ian
indicating why I think the scholium system is "cool":
Example: Building, maintaining, and interacting with learning
resources.
Right now PlanetMath is mainly a "reference work". I envision it in
the future being useful as a full-fledged learning resource. In other
words, if I want to learn Abstract Algebra or some other math topic, I
should be able to log into PlanetMath and reach some desired level of
proficiency using resources I find there.
In order for this to work, the system will need to know which types of
problems I've solved, which things I have "mastered", which things I
need work on. Obviously all of this can be stored as triples. The
assertions about assertions come in with things like: "if Joe knows
the First Isomorphism Theorem and the Sylow theorems, then he should
be able to solve problem A1287g." So they throw me this problem and I
can't solve it, and a new fact is added to the database: Joe bombed
another problem. The system needs some recourse: perhaps give me an
easier problem or give me a hint on how to solve the problem I was
given.)
*killer app* ;)
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