Good for work, bad for fun
Anupam, Hubert, and I have made some fairly decent progress on our spanners project in the past few weeks. Now we're working on a new construction to get gracefully degrading spanners, which is much more difficult but hopefully possible by using a layering approach with our non-gracefully degrading spanners. I'm at the point where I find it hard not to think about -- even if I essentially take the day off, like I did yesterday, I find myself randomly pulling out my notebook to try to figure out a solution to one of the two problems with our current construction. And today's the Super Bowl (Here we go Steelers!), but the first thing I did when I woke up was try out something that I thought of late last night. The last time that I remember being like this was at Duluth, when pretty much whatever I did I was thinking of my problem in the back of my head. Hopefully this means that I'll figure out this construction soon.
Speaking of Duluth, I'll probably be spending part of my summer there. My main plans are just to hang out here and try to get a lot of research done, which will hopefully be possible since I won't have any classes to distract me, and Anupam won't be as busy with classes either. But I didn't want to spend the whole summer here, and Anupam is going to be traveling for a lot of it anyway, so I emailed Joe and he said that I could come up and be a visitor at Duluth for a few weeks. I'm already looking forward to it -- I have to admit that on occasion I miss pure graph theory/combinatorics, even though I find approximation algorithms way more interesting most of the time. At some point I'm going to email the other Duluth '04's to see if anyone else wants to visit with me, and I'll probably e-mail Aaron too, since if we're both there at the same time we could probably get some interesting research done.
In more important news, though, today's the SUPER BOWL!!! I'm going over to Serge's, which should be a lot of fun. He certainly knows how to throw a good party. Let's go Steelers!
Speaking of Duluth, I'll probably be spending part of my summer there. My main plans are just to hang out here and try to get a lot of research done, which will hopefully be possible since I won't have any classes to distract me, and Anupam won't be as busy with classes either. But I didn't want to spend the whole summer here, and Anupam is going to be traveling for a lot of it anyway, so I emailed Joe and he said that I could come up and be a visitor at Duluth for a few weeks. I'm already looking forward to it -- I have to admit that on occasion I miss pure graph theory/combinatorics, even though I find approximation algorithms way more interesting most of the time. At some point I'm going to email the other Duluth '04's to see if anyone else wants to visit with me, and I'll probably e-mail Aaron too, since if we're both there at the same time we could probably get some interesting research done.
In more important news, though, today's the SUPER BOWL!!! I'm going over to Serge's, which should be a lot of fun. He certainly knows how to throw a good party. Let's go Steelers!