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The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The dog stays blissfully asleep. :)
This time, I'm actually going to begin writing a journal. I feel like I have a lot of thoughts that I let swim around, without doing much about them. To quote the Happiness Lab episode that I listened to today:
"Good intentions mean nothing if they don't translate into actions."
So I'll take Dan's advice, and use writing to do thinking. I also think that writing this journal can improve my writing skills.
So what's going on today?
Well as I'm writing this, I'm on the 61D on my way into school listening to Spanish Pipedream by John Prine. But what I really want to tell you about is the decision I'm trying to make about whether or not to finish my PhD here at Pitt with Dan. Last Friday, I had a meeting with Dan about an idea I was interested in pursuing that at the core involved working with a real, tangible system. That idea was politely dismissed, and I was 'nudged' back towards formal methods for critical infrastructure. My immediate impression is that formal methods for our lab is a crock of shit.
Dan means well and is genuinely looking out for my best interest, but that doesn't translate into belief into his mission. Formal methods are an intense mathematical pursuit in order to prove 'correctness' of something to something else. Formal methods experts may disagree with that characterization, but ultimately that second 'something' can be a lot of things, such as a model of a plant, a written specification, or anything that can be logically defined.