Ars poetica

The first poem of many classic volumes was an "Ars poetica", a meta-poem about the "art" that the author intended to incorporate into the rest of the poems in the book. So it seems fitting to start a blog in much the same way.

The scope of this blog was mainly decided by pondering the deep philosophical question "who the heck needs another blog?". Almost certaintly nobody in theory, and especially not me as the author.

Despite this, I constantly find myself wanting to fill a void in organizing, publicizing, emphasizing, propesizing about my corner of theory, roughly defined as data structures, nonuniform lower bounds, and interesting topics in CS. So the blog will be just that: a research blog. I hope to review the current state of the art in the understanding of fundamental problems, and review interesting research. Feel free to suggest topics and guest-blog about your favorite topic.

If you will, the model I hope to follow is Terry Tao's blog, though there is a notable difference in that I decided not to wait for my Nevanlinna / Turing / whatever award.

In particular, the blog will contain a minimal amount of meta-discussions about theory (which is perhaps a waste, as I seem to be extremely good at bringing the best/worst out of people with just a few remarks).

Despite my interest in the topics, I will also keep away from trying to find the art or philosophy hidden in life (yes, no battling vaginas here). And despite the fact that my kind of sports (like rugby or rock climbing) might make for more entertaining posts that baseball, they shall be banished from the blog.

PS: the fact that some   bloggers have been very successful in getting jobs this year, and I am graduating in 2008, has nothing to do with me starting a blog.


PS2: The title, yes... Well, I sometimes look like this, ride an ancient motorcycle, travel to a lot of cool places, and hope to start a revolution (in CS). The domain infoweekly stands for Informatics Weekly, and more accurately portrays the topic of the blog.